This Mind & Life Institute Dialogue XXXIX on Minds, Artificial Intelligence and Ethics is an excellent conference. I am thrilled to finally hear Buddhist monastics, academics, and other thinkers in an interdisciplinary setting, tackle topics pertaining to the future of humans and AI.
After all, it has been empirically shown through the research of scientists such as Dr. Richard J. Davidson that Buddhist practices in mindfulness, meditation, and compassion training reshape the brain by increasing neuroplasticity, augmenting emotional regulation, and reducing stress. These practices lead to greater mental wellbeing by increasing attention, awareness, and stability, while reducing anxiety, depression, and negative emotions.
And surely, the benefits of over two millennia of Buddhist practice can inform humans on how to apply it towards the positive development of AI.
Some questions that emerged were: What is AI right now? What is it doing well? What can we do with it? What is the impact of its usage on us and on society?
Discussions evolved from Buddhist, scientific, cognitive, philosophical, capitalist, and environmentalist points of view.
The key takeaways from this summit were in answer to the question, What should AI do in the future?
- Be more supportive for our inner growth.
- Have empathy, affective feeling, cognitive understanding, motivational caring.
- Develop attention training, mindfulness and meditation.
- Have compassion together with wisdom for the wellbeing of others in shared humanity and interdependence.
To move towards this, it was put forth that:
- We need more interdisciplinary dialogue such as this Mind & Life Dialogue.
- Buddhist tradition and practices can inform how to wisely develop the above, and work with technology to scale up awareness and interdependence.
- Transparency, responsibility, and accountability through regulation of AI are important for collective wellbeing.
I thought it was a great start as we all globally continue to develop the Human-AI Intelligence Revolution!
I would like to note that this Mind & Life Dialogue focused only on machine AI. The future also involves the amazing development of biological AI and diverse intelligences to come! I am amazed, for example, by the pioneering work of Dr. Michael Levin whose laboratory has developed anthrobots.
Ah, yes, much to consider and many changes to come…all the more reason for humans to practice mindfulness, meditation, and compassion training, to develop greater understanding of mind, attention, awareness, and emotions. Humans can, thus, experientially and collectively contribute to the positive future of mind, AI, and diverse intelligences.