Can Artificial Intelligence Be Built with Compassion: Enlightened AI?
Will Artificial Intelligence be handed the responsibility of governing electricity, internet, power, energy, military? If you refuse to follow a mandated government order, will AI send drones to police your house - to have you under house arrest? We have created technology that can be the micromanager of all micromanagers. If we allow AI to govern such systems, which is being talked about, then do we program AI to make decisions based on compassion?
This is excruciating for the writer to write because we are talking about when it comes to this technology is a replica. AI is a model built on human thinking. It may be able to do things faster and potentially better than humans, but it is built on human understanding, history, information - in other words, what we are feeding it. Therefore, I don’t refer to anything as being intelligent if it is operating based on the past. The past meaning information, knowledge, experience, memory. And this is true for humans as well. What we have essentially done is built AI on the same process that humans build which includes a “center”, a “me”, an “ego-self”. And therefore, building-in compassion is simply a cultivation effort, for which humans are also trying to do for themselves. There is always talk about building compassion at work, at school, etc. Anything that requires cultivation is superficial. Artificial Intelligence is really superficial non-intelligence (SNI). There is nothing intelligent about a model that is based on structures built in the past.
Compassion is not based on thought, philosophy. learning a particular belief system, or the ability to make compassionate leadership decisions whilst also being firm and authoritative. Compassion is something that comes about when you have compassion for all human beings, all living things on the earth including that which lives in the ocean, the trees, everything in the world. If we truly understood compassion, there will be no wars in the world today. How can AI (or SNI) be programmed for compassion whilst we are talking about it governing the military? Will one country’s AI capabilities be better than another? If countries go to war in the future, the one with the more “intelligent” AI will win?
Compassion is not the description we have defined it to be. It’s not some dictionary meaning or something defined by some great book. Therefore, how can we program AI to be compassionate when we have nothing to feed it? Or are we just feeding it some definitions which are some dead/static words? Do you see the difference between humans and technology? Compassion is something that comes about when the mind is absolutely free of itself - free of its own thinking. Otherwise, what you are cultivating is an intellectual theory, definition - put it into practice, repeat, repeat, repeat, then it’s supposed to find it’s way through all the other misery in the world or ignore it all. Compassion is not a mechanical process and it has absolutely nothing to do with thinking of any kind. Now, does that means AI would come to a complete standstill if it no longer has the ability to think for itself? Will it be aware of it’s own ego-self? Now we are talking about enlightened AI. If that ever happens…
Love and light,
GC