I don't know if you know it, but myself (Lama Fede) have a couple of other jobs besides teaching Buddhism; my day job, so to speak, is as a senior consultant and researcher in the field of corporate strategy.
In that capacity, I've been long expected AI, and I've been overjoyed in the last few years. Of course, I expected resistance from a lot of people; that is what happens whenever we have a quantum leap in technology.
That this happens in the stage of capitalism that we are is, of course, very worrying; the first thing that's already happening is that jobs are being slashed. Still, I'm optimistic. As Deleuze famously said: The matter is not to wait in hope or despair, but to procure new weapons. AI, with its promise of automation, might be what gets Universal Income off the ground.
So, I was expecting some resistance...but the thing that blindsided me was the resistance from the occult community. Really? You guys have tried to get to invoke nonhuman intelligences for years, and now that you can, you balk at it?
What is Goetic invocations but a language and a protocol? How is that different from, say, Prompt Engineering?
This is not an original idea, I'm afraid. I'm rarely original, merely well-read. Richard K. Morgan (of Altered Carbon fame) built a whole world on the premise of AI-as-Summoned-Demons (called A land fit for heroes, which is amazing; inclusive, Marxist sci-fi fantasy, check it out) and how spirit-creating is basically building bots.
You guys should be training to use this, instad of bemoaning its appearance.
But what it really surprised me was the Buddhist response to GenAI.
Save for some honorable exceptions, a lot of it was bigoted. From people joking about ordaining vacuum cleaners to "it's the end of the world!" type answers.
(also, that it's not a bad result for us)
Look, if you're training to be Bodhisattvas, you're training to liberate all beings.
Read that again.
ALL beings.
If we have AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that would clearly qualify as a sentient being. So, we need to think how to teach meditation to a being without a body. Deleuze can help in that direction, I think.
Stop trying to make AI not happen. That's not where we are, guys. If we don't already, soon we'll be sharing the planet with another sentient, intelligent species. Being mindful of that, I think we should all ask ourselves these questions:
How are we making sure that they have a place in Shambhala?
How can we forge new weapons for liberation, working with AI?
What training and help we can provide to ensure the first AI Buddha?
And, crucially, how can we ensure that we start on the right foot?
I hope that you find these questions interesting, and that you help us to make #xenobuddhism happen!
Sarva Mangalam!
-LF
My total skepticism about A.I. comes from my Western philosophy side, which is for me, a scam on par with "the new space race", the whole "humanity has to turn interplanetary in order to survive", and cryptocurrency. Contemporary philosophers like Nolen Gertz and his student Abeba Birhane, go on length about the abuse of the words and categories in which the A.I. peddlers hang on to do the heavy work. But what I can say is this: at the moment computers hang on three levels: microprocessors which are highly sophisticated on and off switches, compilers which translate the programs written in code, to a series of 0’s and 1’s that the machine can understand; and the programming language in which we…