Reflecting on "AI" in the Himalayan foothills
By Emily
Last week, I had the immense good fortune to participate in the 39th Mind and Life Dialogue, hosted at the Dalai Lama Library and Archives in Dharamsala, India. This event is the latest in a long series of Dialogues organized around the idea that Western science and Buddhist contemplative wisdom can benefit from learning from each others' practices and viewpoints. (More on the history of the Dialogues here.)
I was among 20 faculty convened to discuss the topic of "Minds, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics". The faculty included a diverse range of disciplines, including prominently Buddhist contemplative scholarship. We met for six sessions across three days, with each of the first five sessions involving a panel of four faculty---and a final session featuring all 20 of us, plus additional commentators. You can find the recording of the full event here; I was part of the morning session on Day 2, on narratives.
I'm writing now not to summarize or somehow encapsulate the whole experience, but just offer a couple of reflections.
The first is a kind of complicated sadness: On the one hand, it was joyful beyond measure to have to the opportunity to start to learn about the scholarship of the monks and nuns, and to see something of how it is situated within a way of life (we visited both a monastery and a nunnery). Beyond that, the project of sharing knowledge and ways of knowing across traditions strikes me as enriching and generative. And in addition, I was involved in many interesting and grounded conversations, both in the official Dialogue and during the week as a whole.
On the other hand, even though it is only because the topic pertained to "AI" that I was invited, I am sad to see how the hype around "AI" and the tall tales being sold by Silicon Valley reach all the way around the world.
On top of all of the other disruptions (to the environment, to privacy, to working conditions) engendered by the race to build an imaginary "everything machine", people around the world are also finding themselves grappling with what to do with or about this promised new technology. In many cases they are worried about not only the actual technology (the things sold as "AI", some of which may or may not be useful) but also something that does not exist but if it did would change absolutely everything (the imaginary, magical "AI"). I imagine that similar conversations are happening in many, many different places and I wonder how to best counter the hype in a way that can hope to chase it down in every context.
As always, the phrase "artificial intelligence" itself is an integral part of the problem. I did my best to problematize it, as in my wont, not only in my session (on Day 2) but also through encouraging those introducing the first session to flag that the term is contested. Nonetheless, it was used without definition by many throughout the week. Some seemed to be talking about ChatGPT or similar LLM-driven tech, others to imagined future artificial minds, and others to a range of technologies, not fully specified. In fact, at the end of the first session, one of the monastics in the audience asked, "What is AI?"
At the end of the panel discussion part of my session, Molly Crockett (an extraordinary cognitive scientist and past guest on the pod) asked each of us to nominate one word or phrase we'd like to see fall out of use. My suggestion, unsurprisingly, was "artificial intelligence". I explained that I realize this is an unpopular choice, but I challenged the audience to try for a day or two, or even a week, to rephrase what they are saying whenever they use this word---and to see what they learn through that rephrasing.
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