Wang Zi Won, Mechanical Avalokitesvara, 2011. Urethane, metallic material, machinery, electronic device (CPU board, motor), 60 x 150 x 57 cm. Courtesy Gallery Huue.
Two artificial intelligence scientists discuss what’s to come.
In 2016, viewers of HBO’s Westworld were treated to a sci-fi thriller in which participants in a Wild West–themed immersion experience—an amusement park of sorts—robbed, killed, fell in love, and lived out a host of other adventures with artificially intelligent robots who were almost indistinguishable from human beings. The blockbuster show was fodder for TV-loving Buddhists, some of whom opined that the endless loop of the robots’ lives and their attempts to break free by “waking up” made a good metaphor for samsara, the cycle of worldly existence. Although the show was certainly not the first pop culture creation to explore the ascension of AI beings and the question of those beings’ sentience, its “futuristic” setting seems to be on its way to becoming reality—making the relationship between this technology and humanity’s highest values and biggest mysteries ever more urgent.
Investors have tripled AI investments over the past three years, and AI technologies are currently being researched and introduced into fields as wide-ranging as health care and construction. There are AI airport guides, AI baby and child tutors, AI pesticide sprayers, AI stock traders, AI paralegals, and AI gamers (who are often better than human ones). AI systems can perform tasks as mundane as providing on-demand cat facts (as any Alexa user will tell you) or as serious as analyzing tissue slides for cancerous cells. It’s clear that AI’s vast potential, as well as its current stage of progression, demands attention. As Steve Omohundro, a scientist and writer who is internationally recognized for his work on artificial intelligence and strategies for its beneficial development, puts it, “We’re at a critical moment in human history, where this technology is in the process of transforming everything. We don’t want the decisions about where it goes to be made purely by technologists or capitalists. It needs a broader perspective, particularly a spiritual and psychological one.”
The dialogue that follows was recorded on November 2, 2017, at the California Institute of Integral Studies as part of the institute’s Technology & Consciousness Series. In it, Omohundro speaks with Nikki Mirghafori, an artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, about the intersection of artificial intelligence and the Buddhist idea of karma: more specifically, the AI future we’re heading toward, and how our intentions might shape it. It may make the difference, they say, between a world in which a corporation serves up a venue for massively wealthy individuals to enact their most selfish fantasies—and one that leads to the flourishing of humanity’s best potential.
—Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Editor
Nikki Mirghafori (NM): Steve, what is artificial intelligence (AI)? Give us a historical perspective.
Steve Omohundro (SO): An AI system is a computer program that makes decisions to achieve a goal. When you look at what it does, it appears to be smart: it’s pretty good at achieving its goal. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the late 1950s, but the idea of having machines that might think was introduced in the 1940s, when two of the early inventors of computers, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, wrote books about how the brain works and discussed whether computers could mimic it.
AI as a field has had many ups and downs. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, they were ecstatic about the possibilities. They thought the machines were going to reach human-level performance in just a few years—we’d be able to get rid of human labor and make wonderful changes to the world. But the technology didn’t advance the way they hoped it would, and people became pessimistic. There was the first of several “AI winters,” when the funding for research dried up and scientists in other disciplines started to say, “This is a garbage field; there’s nothing real here.”
There has also been a pendulum swinging back and forth between two ways of thinking about how intelligence works. One is the symbolic approach, where thoughts are viewed as made from symbols and thinking is viewed as mathematical proof. The other is the neural network approach: Human brains consist of 86 billion neurons, these little cells that transmit signals among one another. They’re connected together in a complicated way, and they are able to learn from their experience. In that approach, you just throw a bunch of computational elements together and hope that the system is able to learn by itself…
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https://tricycle.org/magazine/artificial-intelligence-karma-robot-future/
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