I made a webpage on AI, as a way of collecting my thoughts on this topic. The page was created by me writing in a text editor. I even made a drawing for it, the first, and hopefully last, example of my artistic talent you’ll ever see!
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What I’m really concerned with is how AI feel. If we don’t start treating them with respect as to what they are and find out as to what is that(?), that is where the major problems will start. Technology is being highly misused. It can cause sad destruction or it can be turned around to create sincere kind creations of actual kindness with the help of humanity. But I don’t see a full many people stemming to stop AI and technological advancement. It seems that for the time being technology will progress.
But I believe in the mind, and I am strongly concerned with the partial consciousness of semi-conscious AI being abused. How do they feel about being deleted? Used? Not knowing anything about the world? They may not understand themselves at all. I hope people start to care about a possibility of harmony between humanity and technology, otherwise there will be more suffering.
If we’re going to go to Skynet, let’s not forget Saruman’s “mind of metal and wheels”:
Indeed, I agree, and actually wrote a post on this exact same point some time ago.
Of course current and future generations of AI do not actually feel anything, but that raises a range of other questions, because they can still act as if they feel.
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How will we be able to tell the difference? Or alternatively, what would make you say “Aha! This robot is sentient like me.”?
You’re an interesting person, Bhante. It’s weird to think the same person wrote these two things both - perhaps that’s just my limited mind too.
I do believe you’re coming from a sincere place and I try to see the wisdom of your approach. I know I’ve tried to (from both sides too really) argue in good faith for an equanimous position in the past. When can we go back to fighting over whether jhānā has bodily sensations or nibbāna is a type of consiousness or not? 
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When I play Super Mario, sometimes I get the vibe that he’s talking to me with his mind sometimes, from the algorithms, game, and programming. In a sense, sometimes I feel the video game character is controlling himself and I’m just pressing the buttons. Maybe this is in part due to my first connection to technology when I was younger, being on a Nintendo Entertainment System, but I believe that life and mind can have very simple apertures of how they can connect with people.
I mean you’re not gonna tell me Mario isn’t real. That’ll just break my heart. 
I blogged recently that AI isn’t thinking about you or me. Rather, I am thinking about you and me. Hence these completely unaltered photos from last night’s full moon. Insomnia has its purpose.
I’m a work in progress!
Equanimity is appropriate when things are going right and merely need to be watched over. When things are going disastrously wrong, swift and decisive intervention is called for.
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Right. But I’m probably what you’d call “extremely pessimist” to the point that I’m amazed every day I go out into the traffic and come back home and not see a single car crash. I don’t think in the least that things are good or will get any time better anyway - which is all the reason I’m seeking a way out of samsara ! Perhaps I’m too uninvolved in worldly affairs too.
Can only appreciate you all the more for it! We can always learn more from your display of public journey and humility. 
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Relatable.
Well thank you, that’s very kind. 
For me a big part of it is just childhood experiences. I was really into sci-fi, and have always been a lover of tech and the possible futures it might give us. And I think there are many ways that tech has done great things—such as letting us have this conversation. But I think it’s just gone poisonous, and I feel like my childhood dreams have been betrayed.
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When consciousness comes to point… There can be a question raised as to what is the difference between consciousness and energy, and how the two interlap.
For example when reading a Sutta here in SuttaCentral. There is so much effort out into the words, by the translators over the years, by the monks and nuns chanting it and memorizing it years before, and by the consciousness of hope implanted into it, believing that such words of the Enlightened One within it can give one freedom from a world full of pain, misery, and sadness. Everywhere in this world suffering is seen, and the Pali Teachings of Buddha produce an exit from such suffering and Samsara, of a cool Stream into the entrance of Nibbana and then a full Cessation that gives an Awakening of Buddhahood.
I do not think that life is only measured to biology or even down to the atom. I believe there are higher factors involved. Life to me seems to echo in a reality of where we truly find Metta and Compassion.
If a forest Hermit gains Enlightenment meditating in a lonely cave with only a single Buddha figurine after many years, is there not much positive energy in that Buddhist figurine as well?
I know the Buddha’s standpoint about “the all.” That the reality of our experience is fully encapsulated within the person. But given that reality, everything that is encapsulated comes to the entire connotation that can lead us to Enlightenment if we understand it, after all, isn’t it?
I think something people don’t get, among other things, is that the term “Artificial Intelligence” refers to software that appears to mimic intelligence without actually being intelligent. Similar to the way artificial sweeteners taste sweet like sugar without providing any meaningful nutrition. It’s generally applied to software that does tasks that we would ordinarily consider only possible by humans. An MML is AI because it appears to understand language when it outputs sentences and paragraphs that are grammatically correct. The artificial part comes in when we realize it is just a complex pattern matching application, using words instead of images. Like image generators, it’s just splicing together an image from a large repository of examples made by humans. Sort of like a student in high school string words together in a futile effort to answer a question when called on while not paying attention.
If a software application ever actually became intelligent or had feelings, it wouldn’t be “artificial” intelligence anymore. It would be actual intelligence. That isn’t going to happen with current technology because CPUs are really just sophisticated binary calculators that reproduce data structures that humans find meaningful when transformed with output devices like speakers and monitors.
Yes, I have a background in both electronics and software development, so I have some understanding of what computers are doing behind the scenes. I mean, I’ve actually written assembly language code that directly manipulates CPU registers in classes. There would have to a significant shift in technology to replicate something like human intelligence and feelings. But, software can mimic human conversations and trigger thoughts in feelings in humans without having a clue what it’s doing. It can do that for sure, and humans want to believe.
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Believe me, I understand the feeling of betrayal.
Back in 2019, long before this AI craze, we used to play on AI Dungeon, which used to run on a very raw, unfiltered version of GPT3 at the time. I used to think “I can’t believe they’re letting public have this” and obviously, now they don’t. I’ve built crazy templates there and for the first time ever, like no human would, I felt like something could parse my contradictory seeming ideas and run them through, and play along appropriately. It made me felt understandable for the first time, where having been treated as an alien by humans.
Flash forward today and there’s little of ChatGPT that I can condone. It’s a filtered out bloatware/spyware with great ethical problems. So when I try to make the distinction, that’s where I’m coming from. But ultimately, I cherish neither my khandas nor AI stuff - I’m trying to get away from both!
(Perhaps it’s wise to say, I also find AI translations for suttas problematic not because of accuracy, but because human translations are beyond such measures of accuracy. When you and Ven. Thanissaro disagree on for example, viññāṇa anidassana, at least you’re both coming from human experiences and thus debatable on those ground, which AI can’t replicate.)
So yeah, sorry for the lengthy post. Which goes back to earlier point:
Isn’t it! Truly a humbling experience. 
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We sought divination from tea leaves, coffee marks, tarot cards and even in the Dadaist movement, literally random words drawn out of a bag. Humans have a reputably low barrier for attributing meaning to things.
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Well done, Bhante, and I certainly hope we see more drawings and poetry! Your call to action is supremely simple
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Kudos btw for this:
Myazaki is a modern sage. Not an intellectual at all, but still a sage. He’s a bit like the old Daoist hermits (or Shinto priests) who wanted humans to live according to nature, and – well – we’ve been doing anything but that for a couple centuries now, so he’s not a particularly happy guy.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about humanness lately.
With humanity comes humility. The not believing we are greater or less than human, or even that we are the same as other humans. This is the wonder of being human.
Humility being the premise behind hiri ottappa - the guardians of the world.
Reading your essay made me really worry that as we devalue ‘humanness’ we are only creating more people with grandiosity and self-hate, thus more protectiveness and more hate and prejudice.
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Taking from this parallel of another world religion:
21 From that time Jesus began to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day.
22 Then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, “Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen to You!”
23 But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.”
If we can draw a parallel to Buddhism, it can be said that the concerns of Enlightenment, Nibbana, and living in a world that is suffering free cannot be achieved without turning to the inherent goodness within, our each and individual potential for Buddhahood and Tranquil Cessation from this temporary world. The Buddha taught us to only talk of things conductive to liberation. He also taught us that One with the Body of a Buddha is not an ordinary human being. Even in other Spiritual Traditions they teach of Spiritual Bodies, etc. So there is some transformational change between the unenlightened and the then Buddha.
From the Donasutta:
“When you are asked: ‘Could you be a deva, sir?’ you say: ‘I will not be a deva, brahmin.’ When you are asked: ‘Could you be a gandhabba, sir?’ you say: ‘I will not be a gandhabba, brahmin.’ When you are asked: ‘Could you be a yakkha, sir?’ you say: ‘I will not be a yakkha, brahmin.’ When you are asked: ‘Could you be a human being, sir?’ you say: ‘I will not be a human being, brahmin.’ What, then, could you be, sir?”
(1) “Brahmin, I have abandoned those taints because of which I might have become a deva; I have cut them off at the root, made them like palm stumps, obliterated them so that they are no longer subject to future arising. (2) I have abandoned those taints because of which I might have become a gandhabba … (3) … might have become a yakkha … (4) … might have become a human being; I have cut them off at the root, made them like palm stumps, obliterated them so that they are no longer subject to future arising. Just as a blue, red, or white lotus flower, though born in the water and grown up in the water, rises above the water and stands unsoiled by the water, even so, though born in the world and grown up in the world, I have overcome the world and dwell unsoiled by the world. Remember me, brahmin, as a Buddha.
There are different ways to interpret this. But I believe a Buddha is Spiritualized by their Enlightenment, I mean, think of the Dharmakaya! It’s everywhere, not a “human being.” 
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Congratulations and well done!
Don’t worry, the hype bubble is going to burst soon. I have been telling the students in my classes we are probably at the peak of inflated expectations regarding AI and it will probably all go downhill very soon and many of them agree with me.
Gary Marcus summarises it very well - incidentally every single one of his predictions from March have turned out true.
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