Dharma in the Digital Age: Some reflections on Buddhism and Artificial Intelligence.

The capabilities and use of artificial intelligence (AI) have been rapidly increasing in recent years, and this growth promises to continue at such a rate that even industry leaders are sounding urgent warning bells about the possible social and ethical ramifications.  There are concerns around bias, privacy, misinformation and a misalignment between technology and human values. This is particularly alarming when the ‘technological singularity’, when AI surpasses human control, looms ever nearer as a real possibility.   

In this paper it will be argued that religious teachings can provide can offer helpful, multidimensional perspectives to these discussions - the work of a non-profit, Artificial Intelligence and Faith (AIF) will be presented as a helpful model of the engagement of faith communities with AI. As part of this exploration, the paper will focus in on Buddhist teachings.  Drawing on both Buddhist canonical sources and contemporary teachings and scholarship, this paper will explore some examples of how Buddhist theory and practice can offer insights, conceptual analysis and practical wisdom for skillfully navigating in the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the context of bioethics.  

To explore the multidimensional scope of these contributions, the areas of meta-ethics, ontology, and ethics will be considered. In terms of metaethics, it will be argued that Buddhist approaches to other traditions, be they religious or secular, provide models of pluralistic engagement with global ethical predicaments such as AI. Buddhist teachings about not-self and dependent origination will be used to explore the ontological status of AI - what is artificial intelligence? Implicated in this ontology are ethical ramifications – could artificial intelligence be morally considerable? How should humans engage with AI, both in its development and in the way we interact with it? How might Buddhist ideas of skillful action help provide guidelines for ethical engagement with AI? Could it mitigate risks of marginalization that might result from bias in AI? For example, compassion is key virtue or quality in bioethics, but what would it mean to operationalize compassion in terms of AI?  Buddhism makes clear and sophisticated distinctions between compassion, its near enemy pity, its far enemy cruelty, and empathy as well as identifying its dependencies upon the other “immeasurables” of loving kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity. This paper will suggest that these concepts and indeed trained practices can inform Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning training and benchmarks.