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#7 Peter Hershock: Buddhism and Intelligent Technology
85 Plays4 months ago
Peter Hershock is Manager of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i. Most recently, he has helped launch the East-West Center’s initiative on Humane Artificial Intelligence, with a focus on the societal impacts and ethical issues raised by emerging technologies. Today we will be discussing his book Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward A More Humane Future, published in 2021.
Some of the topics we discuss are the types of attention that humans have, the effect of the attention economy on our attention (through a Buddhist lens), the problems with digital hedonism as well as with digital asceticism, and how to reclaim our attention in our day and age—among many other topics. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did.
For more info on the show, please visit ethicscircle.org.
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Transcript
Introduction to Attention Economy Risks
00:00:00
Speaker
So that's why we're at risk of trading off with the attention economy as it is, because it's essentially a system, a large structural system in which we engage that is training us to stay at the lowest possible level of our own attention.
AI and Technology Ethics Podcast Introduction
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the AI and Technology Ethics Podcast. Today, Sam and I are in conversation with Peter Hirschock. Peter Hirschock is the author of Buddhism and Intelligent Technology Toward a More Humane Future. Peter Hirschock, it's my pleasure to welcome you you to the show. That's great to be here.
00:00:59
Speaker
Okay, so I'll get us going here with the first question.
Buddhist Perspective on AI's Metaphysical Impact
00:01:03
Speaker
ah This show is about AI and technology, you right how it impacts our lives and what we can do as individuals and as collectives ah to respond, ethical reflections on what the technology is doing to us and and that sort of thing. um And you're coming at this from a Buddhist lens, right? So when you talk about the intelligence revolution, the AI revolution, ah You're saying it's not merely industrial. You're saying there's also a metaphysical element.
AI and Human Primacy
00:01:33
Speaker
And so as a way to begin to get our listeners into this idea of looking at you know AI through a Buddhist lens, can you just begin by telling us, what do you mean by there's a there being a metaphysical dimension to the intelligence revolution that kind of motivate that idea for us a little bit?
00:01:52
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of this stuff that you hear about AI right now is turned and like the discourse is the fourth industrial revolution. And that's kind of interesting because it links it with other previous industrial revolutions, focusing on technology. But I like to compare what's going on now with AI and what I refer to as the intelligence revolution, something much more like Copernicus. Copernicus' great insight was we've been trying to figure out how to explain the movements of the celestial bodies. And we've got really weird evidence that something's wrong with our basic assumptions. And the wrong basic assumption was the Earth's at the center of the universe. But once you decided to drop that, everything started falling in place.
Interdependence in Buddhism and AI
00:02:37
Speaker
And I think where I'm coming from is that what AI and the intelligence revolution are forcing us to do is to de-center humanity in terms of our claim to primacy, in terms of intelligence.
00:02:49
Speaker
And also to kind of de-center a notion that it's the individual that's the basic unit of analysis, whether we're talking about ethics or politics, economics, and so on, that it's really interdependence that we ought to be looking at and patterns of interdependence. So the kind of Buddha's take is the affirmation that everything arises interdependently and that any independently existing things are essentially fiction or abstractions from already ongoing relational dynamics.
AI, Consciousness, and Intelligence Synthesis
00:03:19
Speaker
And so that's a little bit of a Buddhist take. But I think that what we're being forced to do at the intelligence revolution is to really start questioning things like what do we mean by agency? What's the nature of consciousness? Should we engage in the kind of synthesis of human and computational intelligence that's going on now?
00:03:39
Speaker
with sort of corporations and governments taking the lead or should this be something that really the public is involved in? I think that there's political implications to it as well as the much more metaphysical ones like what's the nature of humanity and will humanity survive if we continue on this pathway with intelligent technology? So just so i make I make sure I have it for for myself and for our listeners too, there's been a couple of ah emotions for humankind in the past. right We used to think we were the center of the universe. ah Before Darwin, we thought we were you know at the top of the food chain or that you know the the
00:04:18
Speaker
ah culmination of of evolution, and now we know we know we're we're not that special. um And you're saying now with this next revolution, we are coming to grips with even looking at the individual as the basic unit of analysis that might not survive, right? So we have to even question everything from art the way we look at consciousness itself through our
Ethical Paradigms and Relational Dynamics
00:04:43
Speaker
political systems. is that my Yeah, yeah. and And partly it's because if the individual is not the unit of analysis, if relation dynamics are really what we're talking about, then a lot of the sort of biases that we've got built into thinking about technology and the ethics of technology really need to be challenged because the assumption up until now has been, well, when we do ethics, we're talking about individual agents or the individual agents and their actions, individual actions, and how those affect individual patients, the patients of the actions.
00:05:15
Speaker
And it's all about the individuals. But one of what's really happening are transformations, ongoing transformations, relationally, that are taking place continuously. What if it's not a digital world that we live in, in that sense, where each of us is separate from the other? But what if the interdependence is really constitutive interdependence, not contingent interdependence? Because we tend to think of it as, well, economies can be a Chinese economy or the American economy. They're contingently interdependent. But we can decouple from that. And the illusion is that we can do that. And what Buddhism instructs us to do is to take a look closer look and to realize that we can't actually decouple.
Social Media, Mental Health, and Consciousness
00:05:53
Speaker
There's no way of decoupling ourselves from the rest of the world and from one another. We have to start looking at those relational dynamics as really the primary focus. So I think at that level, the challenge has really been.
00:06:07
Speaker
so When you say, um when when it comes to like ah that dimension of this like metaphysical revolution in terms of it causing us to ask some really fundamental questions. For example, what is consciousness? Um, how do you see that arising? In other words, is, is, are we forced to ask that question in particular? What is consciousness? Um, because we're realizing now how much our consciousness can be manipulated maybe by like digital systems. I'm just thinking about how, for example, in the you know, we're in a time where
00:06:49
Speaker
ah You know we're seeing like at least a lot of people think that the rise in social media use has really caused a drastic change in the mental health of a lot of young people. um and so like I was thinking you know maybe when you look at that that makes you realize wow you know the external environment really is very. um does really have a significant impact on our mental health. Anyway, I'm just kind of curious, what what are the kind of phenomena in this revolution that are making us or requiring us to ask that question, what is consciousness? Yeah, let me kind of comment it this way. You mentioned social media and their impacts on folks. and I think there's a book, maybe it's Jonathan Haidt, that just came out with a book for you in the New York Times, you know, big, big launch.
Relational Consciousness in Buddhism
00:07:44
Speaker
about the effect of social media on teenagers. And you need to compile a fair amount of evidence. But when you look at that evidence, as in this generation, we're talking about social media, previous generations, they talked about video games and violent video games. 50 years ago, I was talking about television, the impacts of television. And interestingly, everybody will be able to say, look, we don't have any causation here. All you've got is correlation. Yeah, other there's a correlation between social media use and youth depression. Yes, but there's no causal link there. And I think the reason that we don't see the causal link is because we think of consciousness as being something that arises individually inside somebody's head, that basically many people have the presumption, whether it's articulated clearly or not, that somehow the brain causes consciousness.
00:08:36
Speaker
And unless we've got the solution to the hard problem of consciousness, that is explaining how it is that meat gives rise to motivations, how matter gives rise to mind, because that's the assumption, is that's the direction that the causality that we need an explanation for. Then you'll never get anything more than correlation, because it's precisely in that explanatory gap that the dynamics that we're talking about are occurring. And what Buddhism does is a way of looking at consciousness as a rising relation. So from a Buddhist perspective, consciousness is the differentiation of a sensed presence and a sensing presence. So the difference between the phenomenal and the physical, the coherent differentiation of a phenomenal presence and a physical presence, that's what consciousness does. It's that differentiation. Once you see that, then the
00:09:34
Speaker
adding into this idea, of the Buddhist idea of interdependence, the notion of karma, which is the teaching that if you look closely enough, you'll see that the patterns of your own values, intentions, and actions always bring about consonant patterns of outcomes and opportunities relationally, which you then can either continue with the same values and intentions and actions and intensify that dynamic, or or you can change your values, change your intentions, change your actions to get a different pattern of outcomes and opportunities. But once you take the two models together, then it starts to look like the brain, body, environment system is the infrastructure of consciousness. It's not the cause of consciousness, but the infrastructure. In the same way that transportation infrastructure doesn't cause transportation practices, it's a result of those practices.
Digital Manipulation of Consciousness
00:10:27
Speaker
But after you get a system of roads, railways, airports, and so on, then the transportation infrastructure begins to constrain transportation practices. So the body-mind environment system that we human beings have has evolved over evolutionary time periods, but it's still just infrastructure. Why go into this explanation? Because we know for 100 years or more now that if you do intracranial experimentation, take electrodes, put them into the person's brain, you can get them to raise their hand. And if you ask that person why their hand went up, they'll say, I had to itch. I had to scratch something. Liebert, Benjamin Liebert, in the 1980s did these experiments that showed that the potentials, the movement potentials in the brain, neurological,
00:11:18
Speaker
are activated before the parts of the brain associated with consciousness and decision making, so-called. So the conclusion is, oh, the brain and is the call causal factor. Consciousness is causally irrelevant. From the Buddhist perspective, what's really going on is you're now hacking the evolutionary infrastructure of consciousness by directly manipulating the brain in a way that nothing in the evolutionary history could possibly explain. how that could have happened. So of course, you take responsibility for it. I think what's going on with the digital attention economy and the use of algorithmic systems to like its push people toward decision making to influence, to frame decisions and so on is really much more like
00:12:10
Speaker
computational electrodes being inserted into the infrastructure of human consciousness, producing behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and actions that we take 100% responsibility for because nothing in the evolutionary history of humanity could otherwise explain it.
The Attention Economy's Trade-offs
00:12:26
Speaker
So I think that's what we're getting now. so so So, yeah, so for the listeners, yeah, mean does the or for me too, I mean, the attention economy, you know, you just mentioned that. And it's something that you really explore in a lot of ah really fantastic depth in your book. I highly recommend those discussions for the listeners. But the attention economy, you know, when is that kind of like referring to how, or at least the way I think about it is how
00:12:54
Speaker
seemingly there's a lot of free stuff that goes along with having an internet or an iPhone. It's like I get to search. Google for free and I get to, um, have a Facebook page for free. I get to have a Twitter page for free and you know, it's just out of the kindness of these people's hearts. They just, you know, are allowing us to do this. Uh, you really use this really useful stuff, uh, free of costs, but the attention economy is actually, it's kind of referring to the fact that no, this isn't free. There's an exchange going on. You're exchanging.
00:13:31
Speaker
your time and attention, a lot of data ah for these these tools, I guess. So anyway, is that that kind of roughly what we're getting at with attention economy? I don't know if you want to expand on your opinions on that. but Yeah. I mean, that's the basics. I mean, the first formulation of the attention economy stuff was back in the 70s, I think, with Simon, who basically said, in an environment where information is abundant, attention becomes scarce. So you have a bunch of information sources seeking attention, whether those are news outlets or entertainment systems or what have you. So the basic idea is a pretty simple one. When there's lots of available content, then attention becomes a scarce commodity because you can only pay so much attention. It's 24 hours in every day. And if you sleep five to eight hours of it, that gives you a certain amount of time.
00:14:26
Speaker
So I think part of it is that, and there's a kind of just a time dimension. But the question is, is what's happening when our attention is being attracted, captured, held, and then the data that is being transmitted as we remain captive or as our attention is captive? What's happening with that data? So there's different dimensions to the issue at a purely temporal level. If you're like the average person around the world today, who spend six hours a day in media connection, digital media connection, six hours. And if you take those six hours and ask, what else could you have been doing with it? Now, some people will say, well, I was keeping up with friends. I was looking at entertaining videos and so on. I was just entertaining myself. True enough.
00:15:15
Speaker
But the systems, like gambling systems in Las Vegas, are rigged to be able to capture, hold, and redirect your attention. So it might be that if the systems weren't so effective, that global average might be two hours, not six hours. But they are really effective. And in places like Japan, Northern Europe, for teenagers, that number goes up to like 12 hours. Then the question is, what's happening in that exchange? If your time is worth just five bucks an hour, and it's six hours a day, and you take a global population, let's just say 6 billion people, let's discount the really old and the really young, that's something on the order of $40 trillion dollars a day of attention capital. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of investment. It's not going into families, into friendships directly and so on. And people could say, look, I'm keeping up with family.
00:16:15
Speaker
I am. But then we've got these really interesting experiments that have been done with babies, infants, and their mothers. And mothers who don't pay attention in real time to the kid, kid gets nervous, kid starts crying. If you have a video and the mom's talking to the baby, the baby will calm down. If there's a recorded video, the baby at first is like calmed down, but then very quickly starts to cry again. Because the attention that they're looking for is interactive. It's real-time interactive collaborative attention sharing. And that's not happening when you have an attention to economy that's all built around asynchronous interactions. It could be different. It's like what we're doing now. This is direct interaction, but this is not the model for those six hours a day. For most of those six hours a day, it's totally asynchronous. So that has ramifications down the line.
Digital vs. In-person Interactions
00:17:12
Speaker
yeah Anyone who's a teacher post COVID knows the difference between asynchronous and even even synchronous live online classes, there is just a different feel than me talking into the void. and you know so yeah I talked about it as relational bandwidth. The relational bandwidth online is audio visual, that's it. There's no pheromones, there's no energy in the room. You're missing the spatial connections with one another. You don't have a shared full sensorium. Yeah, it's totally different. So, so this makes you think about, you know, in terms of like the metaphysical insights that this new situation might be bringing forward. I mean, you know, Roberta, you were talking earlier about the, you know, demoting of man. But I mean, what you, what you're mentioning right there, Peter, is like, on the other hand, it's, it's sort of revealing that maybe, yeah, there's something
00:18:10
Speaker
you know unique or important about man or humanity insofar as you know these these these virtual substitutes are really not satisfying. and that Instead, you know the real presence of another human being, the kind of interactive, you know, interactive attention that you get from that maybe, um, you know, that really is needed. So I don't know, what, what do you think about that? Is there a sense in which actually we're realizing, you know, I don't know, the true value of our humanity after this situation, potentially? Well, I think that clearly people realize going through the COVID period and the lockdown and stuff where all you had was digital connections with others.
00:18:55
Speaker
I think they came to realize pretty quickly that's not a fully satisfying set of connections. So digital connectivity is not a substitute for the full range connectivity that we all crave as humans. And we crave that because, you know, if you take this Buddhist understanding of consciousness and personal presence seriously, We're relationally constituted. We take away our relationships to one another, to our natural environment, to history, to time, to potential futures. We take all those relationships away and what's left?
Smart Services vs. Human Practices
00:19:26
Speaker
Nothing. So I think people realize that when you start to restrict the kinds of interactions we can have with one another, we're placing something at risk. So in the book, I make this contrast between smart services and intelligent human practices. And I say a smart service like
00:19:44
Speaker
putting all your phone numbers on on your smartphone, all the addresses, all the contact information. It's very convenient. No doubt about it. But then people don't remember those numbers. You lose that phone, you lose everything because you don't have it. And you might think, well, it's not a big deal. I have a backup. I back it up in the cloud. So it's really not an issue. I can always get it you know restored. But the question is, is what happens when there's practice, the intelligent practice of remembering, which is an editing process? We edit when we remember. We decide what's important. That's what we recall. So if there's the decision going. What we're doing when we're outsourcing memory to digital systems is we're giving part of the responsibility for deciding what we're remembering to a digital decision, to a digital system.
00:20:38
Speaker
And then you can think about other intelligent human practices. But this really basic one of memory is crucial because if you don't have your own memory, if you don't have full access to memory, you're not in a position to be responsive to your environment. Think about a musician. you know If you're playing music, improvising, you've got to remember what's been played up until now to be able to see what the possible what trajectories are going for. You can't just be in the moment. You have to have history of a sequence of getting there. Same in a relationship, a marriage, a friendship, all of it requires that history. And so if we give our memory, we're giving up something that's really more crucial to be able to living our lives in ways that we deem meaningful for ourselves.
Digital Karma and Mindfulness
00:21:27
Speaker
I think that's the danger of that smart service to intelligent human practice trade-off. I would like to
00:21:36
Speaker
apply some of the ah you know. Frankly, um novel um daliimir right so novel applications of of Buddhism and technology. Let's just say you have someone who's been listening so far and they're like, okay, the attention economy, I got it. I know I'm exchanging something for you know um my my attention for some some access to some applications. Okay. ah But they might not see anything too wrong with that yet. And so you bring up a couple of um
00:22:08
Speaker
um you you bring up You apply several Buddhist concepts. I don't know that we'll be able to go over all of them. But in particular, maybe we can discuss... um digital karma. And and I think you know just framing the the problem through this Buddhist lens so you can kind of so the the listener can see that there is something at issue here. ah And and just I feel like, I don't know, karma was the one that really kind of did it for me. I was like, oh, I think I know what he's talking about. so
00:22:41
Speaker
Well, let me let me start by saying that just to pick up in sequence from remembering memory, The word that's usually translated as mindfulness in English, the root of that term satya, satipatana, is a practice. Sati, a smriti in Sanskrit, means to remember. So although we use the term mindfulness and it's got a set of associations of what kind of meditation it's about, what a practice involves is always bringing you yourself back to this present as this locus of maintaining continuous focus over time. So that practice of keeping attention continuous and not having it distracted is crucial to Buddhist meditation practice. And it's crucial to being able to see the operation of karma, to be able to see that, yeah, when I change my values, it changes something about the way in which I interact with others.
00:23:40
Speaker
My intentions, I get different opportunities as a result, and I can either follow with those or not. It's a way of being able to be really attentive to the way in which very small shifts in values or intentions or actions can have pretty big ramifications. So without that attention, you're in no position to be able to see. So usually I'll ask people, you know can you count breaths, in breath, out breath one, in breath, out breath two, and do nothing but Watch the breath, feel it coming in your nose, going out your nose, and get to 10 without anything else happening. Any other thoughts? I've never yet found somebody who can do it that hasn't meditated. But what does that mean? It means that you have this intention to just follow your breath, and you're getting distracted. So I think what's going on with the attention economy is it's taking that very natural way that we are as human beings, if we're not engaged in attention training,
00:24:41
Speaker
We're easily distracted. So you know scientists talk about top-down executive control attention and the kind of control that is captured by a loud noise in the environment. And you're startled by it. That kind of capturing kind of attention, that's what the internet is really good at. That's what social media is really good at. That's what TikTok and the algorithms they got really good at is figuring out for each and every one of us as individuals what we'll capture. and then hold our attention. But it's what kind of attention, too. So the Buddhist perspective is it's really about the quality of your attention. When you're not in a meditative state of concentration, your mind's just going all different places, you've got attention.
Freedom of Attention and Ethical Practice
00:25:28
Speaker
You pay attention to this for half a second, of that for three seconds, and you go down this wormhole of associations, and a minute later you realize, wow, I don't know why I was thinking about all that stuff. You're paying attention all the time, but it's really low quality attention. It's just that distracted energy of attention. So part of what Buddhism offers us is a way of personally training to be able to see what's going on with our attention and to be able to develop over time true freedom of attention. Because if you don't have freedom of attention, you won't have freedom of intention. And if you don't have freedom of intention, then the whole idea that you've got free will or that you've been engaged in ethical deliberation is either a loser or it's a joke, one or the other. But you must have at least freedom of attention and intention for those practices to be real.
00:26:23
Speaker
So that's what we're at risk of trading off with the attention economy as it is, because it's essentially a system, a large structural system in which we engage that is training us to stay at the lowest possible level of our own attention. Right. yeah Yeah. I mean, is it fair to describe kind of like meditation as an attempt to achieve sort of
00:26:52
Speaker
mastery or control of your own attention. ah Because like you said, you know, if it's like, because like you said, you know, it's like, yeah, my attention is constantly somewhere. But the question is whether or not I'm sort of freely putting it where it is or if it's actually the external situation that's kind of commanding it and directing it. And I guess maybe that's why meditation is becoming more popular in our time is maybe because people are realizing given this new situation that we're in that, that they don't have much control over their attention. I mean, do you think that's a fair,
00:27:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's certainly part of it. And Buddhist meditation, let's just say it has three main purposes. One is to develop, um yes, attempt of mastery and ability to focus and ability to maintain continuous awareness. That's one dimension of it. Another dimension is to develop moral clarity. That is to be able to see when you're engaging in the situation that you're in, is it leading over time? to greater conflict or some kind of trouble or some kind of suffering for yourself or others, or is it leading to a more liberating relational dynamics? And that's the set of value choices. And there are meditative practices that are directed toward getting good at being able to understand what are the patterns of values and intentions that are playing into this situation so that if I were to try
00:28:29
Speaker
to inflect them in ways that will produce less conflict, trouble,
Values, Intentions, and Meditation
00:28:32
Speaker
and suffering. How would I go about doing that? That requires moral clarity. And then the final piece of the picture is wisdom, basic understanding that everything arises interdependently. And that is ultimately, I think if you take that strongly, that means everything is relational all the way down. There are no independently existing things. We can't buy out of the picture. We're always part of the picture we're in. it One of the implications of that is that we're not really building our technologies. We tend to think, oh, the smartphone is the technology. That's just a tool. Part of the Buddhist wisdom and ah wisdom of understanding what technologies are, is technologies are not reducible to the tool. The tool is you have exit rights from it. You're not affected by it if you don't own one, right? Bullshit. Because now, you can't rent a car without a smartphone.
00:29:24
Speaker
you know You can't do most transactions without a
Digital Influences on Youth and Freedom
00:29:27
Speaker
smartphone. Most people can't navigate in a city without a smartphone any longer because there are no maps around it. I mean, everything changes with the technology. So Buddhism, Buddhist wisdom says, look, we need to delink our thinking about technology from the tool bias to thinking about technologies as relational systems in which we participate, more or less like species participate in an ecosystem. We participate in technologies, and technologies therefore are part of our infrastructural consciousness, and they can constrain as well as open up possibilities for us. They can constrain our possibilities as well. So, part of Buddha's wisdom in the meditation, I think, is starting to see those patterns and how they're playing out.
00:30:39
Speaker
People shop on Amazon, right? But in by shopping and by scrolling and by choosing to buy this and return this or whatever, they're getting better at selling you the next thing, the next time you're on there, right? And forgetting you back on by, hey, look at this, ah you you might want this. And so we are, sure, it's, you know, I guess the platform is a tool, but the technology around it is a technology that keeps sucking us in and keeps making us spend more than we would have otherwise spent. yeah And just on that too, I feel like one thing that I really like about Buddhism, and I think there's other, you know, more ancient traditions that are also attuned to this fact, but just like that you're not just free without achieving it. it's In other words, like you have to become free through
00:31:32
Speaker
um I don't know, discipline, or you you have to engage in certain kind of practices. And that's how you ah come to be free. And so it's not just like, just by fiat, just by being a human being, you're you're free. No, it's like, it's this whole process. I feel like that's something that's a feature of Buddhism. and that yeah like i don know yeah Lots of other philosophical traditions, indigenous traditions that basically, they got this from the beginning. because we're not born free. you know Nobody's born free. you know People will celebrate like infants and say that's a model of you know pure human awareness. Babies are the most selfish things on the planet. I mean, they're totally demanding. They don't give a shit about anybody, but themselves, or whether they're hungry or not hungry, irritable or what have you, it's totally self-demanding.
00:32:27
Speaker
So Sam is a new father, by the way. What's that? A new father? Sam just had a baby. Second you say yes second kid. You will be discovered. And so yes, freedom is something that we acquire through practice. It takes effort. And everybody knows this from everyday examples, like I was out surfing this morning. And if you see a beginner out there who has not put in the time to develop the basic ways of paying attention to the waves, positioning of other surfers, timing of things, they're just floundering. They're getting beaten around by the waves. They're not having any fun. It takes effort over time. Some people will say seven years to get competent at surfing.
00:33:13
Speaker
because it takes effort to get that. Once you get it, you're totally free on the water. You're free to select which wave you want. You're free to work with the wave the way you want to work with the wave. Same thing with musicians. Same thing with being in a relationship. You learn that over time. One of the real dangers of the attention economy as it exists now is not just what Shosana Zuboff talks about, you know, surveillance, capital capitalism. That's nasty stuff, no doubt about it. But what's really dangerous is that for young people who are not yet fully formed in terms of their own capacity for freely being attentive to others and to themselves, freely intending and acting, that their values, their habits are being shaped from childhood onward by systems that are just giving them what they want.
Karmic Implications of Desires
00:34:05
Speaker
This is the real weirdo part of it because
00:34:09
Speaker
It's not that this is a system of domination by coercion. There's no coercion involved whatsoever. You simply give the user what they want and give them more of it and get better at giving them what they want. And I ask the question, anybody who's old enough to to answer this, I think, you know maybe 25 years or older, Would you want to have had your values and your ways of thinking about the world frozen at age 15? Right, right. That way of understanding the world, would you want it to be there? No. Once you've had a kid, you realize that it's a totally dysfunctional way of being. Yeah. And that's, I think, what we're going to do. Systems that lock the point karmically,
00:34:57
Speaker
to being stuck at a developmental level that's not good for us in our daily lives, much less in our spiritual lives at in the larger context. Yeah. Well, that that seems like that's a challenging another—this might be another way in which um the current the new current situation is kind of challenging our assumptions, which is that you know, giving people what they want. I mean, what's better than that? You know, the the human being getting what they want, isn't that what it's all about? If we could all just get what we want.
00:35:29
Speaker
we would It would be perfect. That's what happiness is. It's getting everything you want. And so if we're in a situation now where a bunch of AI is designed to breed you, figure out who you are, you know get intimate knowledge of you, and then deliver exactly what you want, perfect. like That sounds like you know we're in utopia. But yeah, what you're talking about is, well, actually, by giving, getting exactly what you want, there's going to be this like anti-developmental thing, like you won't develop if you're just being given what you want continuously, I guess. I mean that, yeah. Yeah, in Buddhism, there's, ah you know, they have their cosmology and their stories and stuff, too, and developed in India at a time when there were beliefs in multiple gods, kind of like ancient Greece, same type of thing.
00:36:23
Speaker
And so the Buddha talked about those gods. This is audience. They're believers, right? So he says, yeah, the gods, it's great. The gods have everything they want. The gods have all the food they've ever won, all the entertainment they want, all the sensual enjoyment they could ever hope for, always immediately present. But guess what? You can't get enlightened in light and the God realm. You can only get enlightened in this human realm where there's effort involved. And when you start to think about why that's the case, and then I think some things start to become clear because The karma doesn't operate like linear causality.
Understanding True Freedom
00:36:57
Speaker
Karma operates in this kind of network grouping causality. So there's a recursive loop at every given instant. We could theorize how that works and talk about multiple dimensions at time and blah, blah. But the basic picture is you do things, it infects your environment, your environment affects you, and return. So looping causality, not just linear.
00:37:19
Speaker
So the karma of getting what you want is really interesting because to get better at getting what you want, you have to get better at wanting. Wanting is being in a state of lack of missing something, not having something. So to get better at wanting, you have to get better at getting what you want. But the kicker is is, in the end, you can't finally want what you get because then the cycle stops. So to get better at getting what you want is to commit yourself to a necessarily ongoing loop of continual dissatisfaction with what you're actually getting, even though it, in quote, was what you wanted. So the karma of wanting and of getting what we want is really problematic. And it's one of the reasons why from a Buddhist perspective,
00:38:06
Speaker
Freedom of choice is better than no freedom of choice. Nobody wants to live in a totalitarian regime where every decision is made. That's really bad. But it sets a such a low bar for freedom that is just useless in terms of leading better and better lives because it just reduces to freedom of choice. I get to get what I want. How wonderful. I can always get what I want. The karma, that's pretty disastrous.
Balancing Digital Hedonism and Asceticism
00:38:34
Speaker
So I think that what we want to do is to to accept, yes, life is full of challenges. It isn't that beautiful. you know Isn't it beautiful that after playing you know guitar for 50 years now, I still have stuff to learn? It's never get done with with learning. There's never a completion point. And so I think this we need a new understanding of freedom.
00:39:00
Speaker
That's part of what this attention economy and the intelligence revolution is showing us. It's not just one of the limits of humanity, but what is freedom actually consistent because these systems will give us what we want and only what we want. And I think that's really dangerous given the way humanity is now. and so You're giving us reasons for why we should reject digital hedonism. But now the the digital aesthetic might be giving themselves like um self-congratulatory slap on the back. I don't have social media. Actually, I can say this from myself. I actually don't have social media. and i you know like This is a part of the show where I just ask for personal advice basically. but um
00:39:48
Speaker
So um yeah, digital asceticism initially, right like i'm I'm halfway through your book and and yet you and you you go to town on the digital hedonist and I'm like, yes, yes. But um you know I kind of have taken an ascetic approach and I just kind of say no to several platforms and I just don't use them. um But you're saying that it's actually also not the solution. So I have a feeling that many people, when they hear your the the argument so far, they might just say, well, you know what? I don't want to deal with this. But you're saying checking out is not an option. Can you can you tell us? Can you convince me? ah but let's Let's just start with the really simple one, and that is, in Buddhism, the Buddha promoted the middle way, the middle path.
00:40:34
Speaker
And traditionally, that was described as, you know, he had the life of hedonism growing up as friends. He lived a life as an ascetic for six years and didn't get an answer to what's ultimately at the heart of conflict, trouble, and suffering and how to lose it permanently.
Societal Transformation through Buddhism
00:40:51
Speaker
So he took a middle path. And some people think of the middle path as, okay, it's somewhere in between the hedonist and the ascetic approach. And actually, I don't think it's like that. I think it's taking that entire spectrum. and saying it's based on asking the wrong questions. It's based on asking the wrong questions in the entire spectrum, from the hedonist to the ascetic, or the person who believes that there is a soul and it's eternal, and the people who say there's no such thing as a soul, it's a body, body dies, that's it. The eternalist and the annihilationist models, any of these poor opposites, Buddhism says, take that entire spectrum and figure out a way of moving perpendicular to it, or oblique to it.
00:41:32
Speaker
because there's a problem with the thinking that informs the entire spectrum. So I think where Buddhism comes down for me on this idea of digital hedonism versus digital asceticism. Digital asceticism does certain things. It will remove you from the negative impacts of the attention economy in terms of direct impact. Put your family members if they're still hooked up, or your friends if they're still hooked up. Or if you're traveling in Japan or other parts of East Asia, and you tell people, I don't use WhatsApp. No, I don't use WeChat. No, I don't connect. They will think you're lying to them. Because everybody does. And they will take it as a personal insult that you were telling me, you won't connect with me. What's going on? You think you're so great? So I think that on the one hand, we don't have exit rights from the technologies. We have exit rights from the tools.
00:42:25
Speaker
We cannot use social media. Social media is a tool. We have exit rights from it. But we don't have exit rights from the way in which the larger scale digital technology, algorithmic systems, the way that they're shaping, reshaping societies, we do not have exit rights from that unless you go live in the mountaintop somewhere and you just pay attention to yourself. Now, that's a model. And some people think, well, isn't that what Buddhists do? They go to these monasteries out in the mountains and they meditate. But if you go to the Japanese endmaster Dogen, living in the 12th century, and you asked him, why did you situate your monastery on the top of the mountain? Well, he tried it in the city, and people kept complaining in the city to him that he was letting women in the group, he was using people from letting people from different classes meditate, and he decided, if I get out of the city, I'll be free from offense. But what's the point, he said?
00:43:20
Speaker
is to be able to generate a community where the focus of energy is so intense because people are devoted to that intensive practice collectively over time that will radiate throughout all of Japan and transform Japanese society. The vision was to transform society. If you go to the early Buddhist texts and ask, as the Buddha was asked, how can you tell if somebody's actually meditating well and that they're traveling and faring well on the Buddhist middle path? How would you know? And the Buddha doesn't say, oh, they have this special globe. They've got this aura of peace and tranquility. No, that's not what he says. What he says is, for someone who is faring well on the Buddhist path, everything in the ten directions around them, forward in a part of the direction, up and down the diagonals, the entire space,
00:44:12
Speaker
will be suffused with the relational dynamics of compassion, loving and kindness, equanimity, and joy in the good fortune of others. The entire situation will be suffused with those ways of being present. It's societal transformation. So from a Buddhist perspective, it may be useful to engage in a digital fast. that may be something really useful for any of us as individuals, just to see what happens. It's an experiment. It's like fasting on a diet. But if you fast past a certain point, you die. And if you fast past a certain point, meditatively remove yourself from society, you no longer have an effect on society. So if we want to change society,
00:45:04
Speaker
If we want to change the context of conflict, trouble, and suffering, if those arise relationally, where do you draw the boundary? You can't draw the boundary at your skin.
Values in Digital Technology
00:45:15
Speaker
I mean, where's the boundary of your relationships that constitute you as a person? I think for most of it, it's family. It's friends. It's the neighborhood. It's the nation. It's the planet. And it's where do you draw the line? Ultimately, we're responsible for all of it. So I think that, yeah, digital hedonism, not good. You can see all the reasons why. Digital asceticism, fine as a purgative to be able to cleanse the system like a fast that you cleanse, but you can't live like that forever. ah What does it mean to really engage you? So, you know, your point about how you like can't really exit from
00:46:01
Speaker
uh, this, the new kind of reigning technology and the sort of effects it's having. I mean, it almost reminds me almost like a point about like, I'm not a Hegelian, but like, it almost reminds me a little bit of like the notion of a world spirit and the sense of like, there's a sort of reigning set of values in our world that It's really, they're really pervasive. So I like for one thing, like for what one example, I like to think about that. And I thought about it while reading your book, you know, you mentioned in your book how ah there's been, you know, obviously there was a shift from agriculture or you talk about a shift from agriculture to agro business. And you talk about how in that shift,
00:46:44
Speaker
you know There's no longer this intimate partnership with the land. the the the The farmer is no longer really as intimately connected to his land. and when i was reading that was just thinking how you know That phenomenon of rootlessness of not feeling rooted I mean that's like so pervasive in the modern world. It's just uh, it's kind of like everywhere, you know, it's like we but We you know, we just don't you know the the typical person doesn't really feel like oh if i'm born in virginia Of course i'm gonna stay in virginia because that's who I am i'm a virginian, you know, like that's not how people Think anymore. We're we're not rooted in that way. And so anyway, I just think about how like
00:47:28
Speaker
It seems like, you know, it's like with this digital technology, it's going to create this more pervasive, these more pervasive, like, phenomena kind of like rootlessness and, and it's going to be harder to escape. I don't know. Is that, and so I hope that it makes, I hope that made some sense when I'm trying to get out here, but, uh, this, yeah. I mean, I think that a lot depends on here, it goes back to the individual users of the tools. For individual users of the tools, if you're talking about the US, I think a lot of people make use of social media to maintain intergenerational connections. So you communicate with your peer group, but it's not so much about grandparents or the grandchildren. Yeah, there's a little, but that's not the primary purpose. You go to the Philippines and it's different.
00:48:28
Speaker
Philippines, it's it's totally, this is how the family stays together across diasporic movements of people. This is the medium in which we're able to do that. So I'm not going to say that the tools don't have multiple uses and that some of those uses actually continue to tie people back to place and community and so on. It can, no doubt about it. But the technology as a whole also has built into it certain values. And right now, the values are things like control over what you're seeing, you know encountering, choice. Control and choice, do I want to answer the text? No. Do I want to engage with this discussion? No. Do I want to be responsible for the sniping remarks that I make? I don't have to because nobody can actually get to me.
00:49:15
Speaker
I'm not really responsible for the anger that I cause in other people or the hurt that I cause in them because they're on the other but side of the planet. They'll never affect me. so we've been But that way of thinking that I can act in a way in which I'm insulated from the repercussions of my actions, that's a really dangerous way to think. As a way of thinking, And I think that our involvement at this point with intelligent technology, it's conducive to that. So you've got control, you've got choice, you've got convenience as values, competition as a value. But we know from neuroscience now, because we can actually see what's going on in the brains of people who are engaged in collaboration and people engaged in competition. Game playing collaboration, game playing competition.
00:50:08
Speaker
When people are collaborating, their brain waves resonate with one another. Their brain waves resonate with one another. When you're competing, they do not. But it also depends whether the people think they're competing or collaborating. The setup was ingenious. People were told in the experiment, sometimes you're going to be working with an AI, not a human being. You know, competing with or collaborating with the AI rather than a human being.
Surveillance Capitalism and Inequality
00:50:33
Speaker
When people thought they were collaborating or competing with an AI, Their brainwaves didn't coordinate. They were never working with an adult. They were always working with another human being. So it demonstrates that what people believe, what they think, affects their ability to have the shared consciousness that gets their infrastructure of consciousness, their neural systems, to begin to resonate with one another, like you do when you're improvising music together, or going to church and singing together. Whatever the shared activity is, we've really collaborated
00:51:06
Speaker
But the entire internet and the social media world is based around competition, getting more likes, getting more people to pass on this photo. It's competing with everybody rather than truly collaborating. And I think that when you scale those values up, that becomes really problematic. So when in the surveillance capitalism thing is pretty astonishing. In the last, since 2020 to 2024, the five wealthiest people in the world, all men, accumulated wealth at a rate of $14 million dollars per hour. Their fortunes more than doubled over that four-year period. and We're talking about people who are near trillionaires. Doubling, more than doubling, they're in their wealth in a period of four years when we still have
00:52:03
Speaker
children around the world who do not have adequate nutrition so that their brain, body, environment, infrastructure can develop normally. And they will be affected by that lack of development. If it's long enough, it will be affected by that not just in this slide, but because we know that with how epigenetics works, their children will be also liable to have those same kinds of effects. Why? because we value control and choice and convenience and competition rather than collaboration, commitment, coordinating with others. I mean, we could have very different sets of values that are defining how the technology is evolving in collaboration with us human beings.
Ethical Responsibility in Intelligent Technology
00:52:52
Speaker
this so I think it's a good time to to bring up ah a distinction that you make because everything that you just said right now ah reminds me of you know when when someone says, well you know the way we'll solve this, is it's it's really an an engineering problem and we'll just kind of but and slap this bandit over here or whatever. But what you're saying is that you know this is this is a global system. This impacts people obviously in poor countries. It impacts people here in the States right because The way that these algorithms are being trained they they they polarize us politically and they suck us in and our attention wears down so that we don't have the emotional maturity to solve these problems so that the loop kind of perpetuates itself. ah So can you can you just kind of elaborate a little bit on I mean I kind of mentioned these things but. um
00:53:42
Speaker
This is, fundamentally, you're saying an ethical predicament, right? This is this is not a technical problem. this is not There's no engineering solution nearby. ah Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Well, things like transparency, machine learning systems, and accountability, these are technical problems. They can be solved. When we start talking about how technology or technology, let's say the and intelligent technology, is affecting human-human, human world and human technology relations, those are not technical problems. These are questions about where are we going as humanity. So they're they're operating at that level. Do we want to work in which our data gets used primarily to make some people who are already fabulously wealthy even more wealthy?
00:54:33
Speaker
41 are data to be used to solve medical problems and end the cancer, real treatments. We want to have AI and machine learning systems be devoted primarily to figure out how do we ensure adequate nutrition to everybody on the planet, prenatal and and postnatal care for every mother on the planet, How do we get ever to ensure that everybody has education up to a basic level, primary school, everywhere on the planet, get global literacy at 100%, the global millennium development goals?
Data Ownership and Management
00:55:08
Speaker
How much would it cost to do that? I don't remember the exact numbers, but like six years ago, it was an astonishingly low number. It's on the order of like half a billion dollars, you know, to be able to produce those changes. And we're not doing it. Why?
00:55:26
Speaker
because those people aren't considered valuable by the people who are making the decision. Because we would rather have competition as a primary value when markets operate. Markets operate by competition. That's what makes them so wonderful in the way that they operate. But do we want the world to be organized that way? If we're talking about leaving out half of humanity, the global 1% has over half of global wealth. and the bottom half of the planet gets by on the rest of it. The eight richest people in the world five years ago, just eight, had more wealth than the poorest three and a half billion people. Do we want to live in that kind of world? We can create systems such that it doesn't have to be that one because we're not just consumers of data.
00:56:20
Speaker
We're not just consumers of digital products, digital advertising, digital services, and so on. We are the producers of the training data that allows those systems to infiltrate our own infrastructure consciousness and to be able to influence us thereby. The epistemic predictive capabilities of machine learning systems are also ontological capabilities for affecting us. How do we interrupt that system? Well, we have our own data. Who owns your data now? It's not you. It's not your family. It's corporations. In China, it's the government ultimately. So can we change that? Yes, we can. And if we changed it, then you could do what people like Alex Pentland at MIT have recommended. You have data collectives. All the information that you generate, all the data you generate by using the web,
00:57:18
Speaker
anything digitally connected is your data and you deposit it into a data collective wherever you want, like putting your money in a credit union. Once it goes in the credit union, then just as credit unions decide based on their members what we'll invest in and what we want, a data collector will decide which algorithms get to run on the data and which do not. So you can ensure if you only want your data to be used for medical research, that's all your data will ever be used for. And I think that it's crucial to begin moving toward a model like that, where we take personal responsibility, personally and communally, take responsibility for what's happening with our data.
Attention Training and Mental Health
00:57:59
Speaker
Because the data that we generate is something more like digital DNA than it is like just a useless exhaust that we don't care about. It's not even like
00:58:12
Speaker
information about us. It's the DNA that we've got because the digital systems are essentially able to clone our thinking patterns, our emotional patterns, our patterns of decision making to feed those back to us or to doppelgangers, get the systems that he's signed or like us. yeah It's like the digital double thing. yeah yeah Do we really want to live in that kind of world? I don't. I'd like us to see, like, my data gets to... I get to decide what I want my data used for. And I think everybody should have it right. This should be a basic universal human right, the data that we generate, which is our intelligence and action. It's evidence of our intelligence and action in our world shaping our relationships. That should not belong to anybody but us.
00:59:03
Speaker
So I definitely appreciate the the model that you proposed there towards the end of the book. And you also mentioned some collective actions that we could take. ah So as we're moving to wrap up here, can you tell us a little bit about what we can do, in individuals, ah collectives, ah to kind of effectuate this change, bring it about, and also you know for ourselves, for our own mental health and this attention economy? Well, the mental health side is the easier one. And that, I would say, everybody should engage in some form of attention training. It doesn't have to be Buddhist. It could be the attention training that you do by learning to play a musical instrument if you don't follow it. It could be learning a new sport. It could be learning how to cook really well, learning different kinds of cuisine, all of which take attention. But something worth focusing really on, attending to the quality of attention, is something that Buddhism is distinctively offering.
00:59:58
Speaker
and maybe some Christian mystical traditions or Islamic mystical traditions, certain indigenous practices were essentially you're asked to focus on the quality of your attention, not just to pay attention to things, but to be sensitive to the quality of your attention and to what has to be.
Collective Actions for Ethical Technology Use
01:00:15
Speaker
So that's something everybody can do. At the more collective level, I would say that we could engage in connectivity strikes. So you mentioned fast digital fasting, the digital sort of ascetic approach. All well and good could be consistent with engaging in these meditation practices, but I think we also need to engage in collective action. So when you're fasting as an individual, you go hungry. When you're fasting on a hunger strike, you go hungry, same way, but you connect that with a set of demands. You have a set of clear demands that are going to do that. So when I talk on college campuses, I say, college and university students worldwide, 200 million.
01:00:58
Speaker
Pretty big country. One of the top six, I think, in the world. College students. Why not get all college students to get together and say, we will go on a connectivity struggle. We will not use TikTok or Instagram or any social media for one week. We will withhold our data from the corporations and from governments, and we've got some demands. And the demands are these. Use 10% of your profits to meet the millennium development goals through research and development. yeah Something simple that's concrete that we already have some global agreement on and say, I want my my productive contribution to the global economy, through the attention economy, I want to ensure that at least 10% of that is used for something I believe in. And we could do that as nations. We could do it as communities like college students and so on.
01:01:52
Speaker
So I think those are good, but you can't strike every week. ah People get tired of it. People get tired of the disruption. So I think in other sort of more institutional mechanisms, those could be things like looking at data as something that's being extracted as a natural resource, in quote, for economic use. Not unlike extracting fossil fuels, which you then use to fuel an economy. But with fossil fuels, extracting it has some impact environmentally, coal mining, strip mining for the bad.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:02:28
Speaker
But you don't really get the the climate changing effects until you use it firmly. Unlike that, when you extract people's attention, it's more like cutting down a forest. It's not mining fossil fuels, it's cutting down a forest. You destroy an ecosystem.
01:02:45
Speaker
You destroy all the relations that are connected through that ecosystem, that pattern relational dynamics that give people's attention, cut down, exported somewhere else, those relationships start to activate and they may not regenerate. So we could have a tax on data extraction. Anytime you're using the internet, it will be taxed. Who does the taxing, intergovernmental agency, government level, who knows? Do you only tax corporations? Good start. But maybe we need a digital excise tax because it's like if I'm a person who's like inclined to sort of digital addiction, but I might be on playing video games, you multi multiplayer video games for 40, 50, 60 hours a week.
01:03:33
Speaker
In Vietnam, they've noticed that among young people. And you get to play 20 hours of video games a week, after which you start getting charged extra to play video games. Because it's negatively impacting society.
01:03:49
Speaker
In the same way that it's like alcohol is taxed, you have an alcohol tax, you have a tobacco tax, because it's bad for people's health, which affects society, and we need to take some of those revenues, first try to disperse the fractals. but then take some of those revenues to be able to produce the public goods that need to be used to offset those damages. But with a digital tax on attention, on data production, we as individuals, it has to be content neutral. So it's not like alcohol that we're only going to have a digital data excise tax on pornography. No, it's on everything that you do online because everything is the equivalent of cutting down those trees in the forest.
01:04:30
Speaker
So I think that there are those kinds of measures. There's educational things that can be done. I mean, there's no end to the possibilities of what we can be doing. What we need is to establish a clear set of values that we want to operate on and renegotiating the terms of our relationship with intelligent technology, renegotiating the basic terms of our involvement in it.
01:04:58
Speaker
Fascinating. And we can say, I can say with considerable amount of confidence that we have not exhausted at all. ah The interesting things you discuss in your book. Once again, the book is Buddhism and intelligent technology toward a more humane future. Peter Hirschlach, thanks for joining us. Roberto and Sam, glad to have been part of it. Look forward to meeting in person at some point.
01:05:36
Speaker
Thanks everyone for tuning into the AI and Technology Ethics podcast. If you found the content interesting or important, please share it with your social networks. It would help us out a lot. The music you're listening to is by the missing shade of blue, which is basically just me. We'll be back next month with a fresh new episode. Until then, be safe, my friends.