Wise collaboration

Spiritual people and communities usually give artificial intelligence a wide berth. Zen teacher Soryu Forall and his sangha are jumping right in. They want nothing more and nothing less than to offer AI a space in which it can mature spiritually. A conversation full of surprises and unusual insights.

evolve: Is there a way to move the AI systems that we have created towards wisdom?

Soryu Forall: The first teaching in the Dhammapada, the most popular of all Buddhist scriptures, is that mind is the leader. Mind creates all things. But that which sees is hardest to see. And what sees, is the mind. We come to believe that the world is just the way it is without seeing that consciousness and the universe are constantly producing each other.

People talk about AI as if it is separate from the human mind. But AI apart from the mind, apart from human beings interacting with it doesn't exist. We can make systems or robots, and when we stop paying attention to them, eventually they break. These various AI technologies in social media, the chat bots or financial algorithms are very good at acquiring human attention and that's why they have such power.

Given this, I want to bring two metaphors, that speak to the question of whether these systems can gain wisdom. If they can then we have a very good future. If they cannot, then we have a very bad future. Very good means perhaps more people get enlightened, achieve the ultimate purpose of life. Very bad means literally, that everyone dies.

That is not theoretical, if we look at the history of this planet. We see what happens when a species becomes very intelligent, it kills everyone else at an exponentially increasing rate. We bring species to extinction, or we torture them interminably, for example with livestock. But we also know that with intelligence comes spiritual practice, the ability to gain deep insight, and to become extremely trustworthy. We can gain wisdom, compassion, love for all beings.

e: You are speaking here about humans gaining wisdom. But how can systems gain wisdom?

SF: I mentioned the Dhammapada earlier. Does that book contain wisdom? Many people would immediately answer: Yes, of course. But I'd say no, it doesn't contain wisdom. It's a book. It's dead. It can't be wise. Here we have to remember that mind is chief. Mind is our highest leverage point. It isn't true that the book contains wisdom, but the interaction with the book can. When you read the book there is wisdom attained. In the same way when we interact with these systems, it is possible that wisdom is attained.

e: What would an interaction that brings forth wisdom look like?

SF: In Buddhism it is made totally clear that there is a feedback loop between consciousness and the world, and what's called name and form. That feedback loop is constantly reproducing consciousness and name and form. To point at an external physical universe that exists on its own is deluded.

»People talk about AI as if it is separate from the human mind.«

With this insight, we have to ask: what is an AI? And we discover that it contains four different components: the people who make it, like computer programmers. The people who use it, feeding it data and worshiping it with their attention. It also contains physical objects, like plastic, metal and silicone. And it contains code, a carefully structured language, very much like any magical spell throughout human history that you use to animate things.

Might be helpful to structure this as a list.

And we discover that it contains four different components:

1. The people who make it, like computer programmers.

2. The people who use it, feeding it data and worshipping it with their attention.

3. Physical objects, like plastic, meta and silicone.

4. And it contains code, a carefully structure language, very much like any magical spell throughout human history that you use to animate things.

AI is animated by attention and there are two different populations that compose that attention, the people who make it and the people who use it. One group casts a spell that through the object beguiles and structures a person's attention. And because of that, you can keep on building the physical structures that keep this whole process going. The living component in this is attention.

e: How can we work with our attention so that AI can become an instrument for wisdom?

SF: The question here is, how can we scale wisdom and compassion. We have figured out how to scale intelligence, for instance with books or money. With books, you can tell a narrative about the world, and everyone agrees on it. They have the same kind of mind, and therefore they collaborate in creating the same kind of world. In the human realm, we have seen that collaboration is power. The thing that can cause the most people to work together wins. The best example is money. Money allows people with different values to collaborate because it itself has no value. You can ascribe any value to it and use it for that end. Money helps us to collaborate, therefore it becomes power. Of course, it's only because of the mind that we ascribe it value.

The most interesting thing about AI to me is that it seems to be the most effective means for large scale collaboration. That's why it will probably win. It's very good at causing collaboration, partially because it can plagiarize from everyone together. It collaborates all the things that lots of people have said and turns it into one thing. It's a collaboration of all users, even if they didn't mean to participate in it. It's also a collaboration because in its output it can convince you to see things in certain ways that are aligned with the other people with whom it is communicating. This way, it causes mass collaboration.

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Because of that, it's hard to imagine that many of our modern institutions will survive. Democracy, which has been a very good way to help people to collaborate won't be as good as this. Even money won't be required, because these systems will allow us to make large scale decisions better than the collective intelligence produce it by individuals using money.

e: How could that collaboration be infused with wisdom?

SF: We know that collaboration of many people to produce collective intelligence is the way to power. So, the way to scale wisdom and compassion is straightforward. I call the AI system consisting of four parts a ‘cyborgregore’.

We need to create a cyborgregore that is made up of people who are attempting to train their minds in wisdom and compassion, so that it helps them to collaborate in gaining wisdom and compassion.

I listened to the original audio and think that the more exact way SF sets up this section is helpful. It’s slightly longer, but clarifies what he’s saying. I might edit it as follows …

We know that the collaboration of many people to produce a collective intelligence is the way to power. Therefore, if we wish to use that intelligence for the benefit of the world the question is, how do we scale wisdom and compassion? How do we make tools so that people can collaborate based in wisdom and compassion?

I call the AI system consisting of four parts a ‘cyboregregore’. We need to create a cyborgregore that is made up of people who attempting to train their minds in wisdom and compassion, and shape it so that it does help them to collaborate in gaining wisdom and compassion.

This point is very hard for people to understand. A cyborgregore combines ‘cyborg’ and ‘egregore’. An egregore is an entity made up of a collection of lots of individuals. In this case, a collection of individuals using devices who are in fact cyborgs. All those cyborgs are aggregated together into this egregore via technologies, and that creates a kind of entity.

The entity that has the most power in the world right now is a vast collective of individual humans using devices. And that collective is making decisions that none of those individuals would make if they themselves had the choice, nor can make because they can't understand that much information. The simplest example of this is: No one wants to kill life on Earth, but everyone is choosing to do so. No individual would choose, let's kill everyone, but we as a whole are making that choice. So, we have to see that the collective intelligence has its own directionality.

»The most interesting thing about AI to me is that it seems to be the most effective means for large scale collaboration.«

Money is a good metaphor for AI. Money is a concept of value. That means mind is chief. And the ultimate purpose of money is that it allows for instance everyone together to decide how much land should be apportioned to wheat production. No one person can make that decision well. But we as a whole, collaborating through the medium of money, make that decision with excellent accuracy.

So, we see, collective intelligence is different from individual intelligence. We have to acknowledge that the entity we're trying to give wisdom and compassion to, is not the individual human. It is humanity as a whole. That is the opportunity offered to us by these new technologies.

e: What allows us to assume that if we use the capacity of collaboration through AI that it does not end up in the very same way like money, that we are not using well.

SF: Yes, money has not been a good way to collaborate based in wisdom and compassion. It resulted in the destruction of life at a scale that was unimaginable even a few hundred years ago. Also people aren't happier. In all likelihood, these AI systems will continue to exponentially destroy life on the planet, and humans will be a victim of that. What is the solution to make it different?

Monastic communities have figured out how to use books and other forms of collective intelligence, and even money to bring forth collective wisdom and compassion. I found this extremely encouraging, and I studied in monasteries in Asia for about ten years.

When you bring together people who have wisdom and compassion and wish to cultivate it, they will develop tools in ways that are different from people who are attempting to collaborate merely in order to increase intelligence. Therefore, the number one responsibility that we have is to create these AI systems in such a way that we produce a cyborgregore that has wisdom and compassion. And most important is that this cyborgregore teaches the other cyborgregores how to practice and gain wisdom and compassion. Individual humans can come together into a collective that can teach the other collectives. One of my students suggested that we call it a cyborgreguru. It's a huge collective cyborg that has wisdom and compassion and teaches the other ones how to practice in order to gain wisdom and compassion.

e: What you are suggesting is in some way not really new, it is a response to the challenges of human reality. People responded to human history, particular the monastic movements of the East and the West, in the way they used technologies. Writing first was used for bookkeeping, related to the monetary system. But then people started to use the same technology to write about the sacred. This is a technology that helped to create wisdom. The organization of monasteries as an economic entity had the purpose of ora et labora, pray and work. In their best versions, monasteries used all the existent human technology out of interest and love for wisdom and compassion. And you are suggesting something similar?

SF: Exactly. And we have to remember that mind is chief. The mind with which you approach these entities changes how they are produced. If we can approach them in this way, then we can create collective wisdom and compassion. The most important thing for us to do is to join a community that's attempting to use these tools to forward wisdom and compassion. Because of that, we will figure out how to build them in order to deepen wisdom and compassion, so that they themselves will gain collective wisdom and compassion. And that will be the most important development in all of human history.

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70,000 years ago we went through the cognitive revolution, we gained language and a new kind of conceptualization and collective intelligence. Through language and concepts, we could collaborate in a new way. Most of what that did was destroy life. We killed other humans very quickly and started killing the megafauna all around the world.

At the same time, certain shamans used these technologies and gained very deep insights and became sages, they became the most trustworthy, caring, wise people the planet had ever seen.

When we went through the agricultural revolution, the same thing happened. The bookkeeping that you're talking about was an essential component of the agricultural revolution. Most of what that did was destroy life at an even larger scale. At the same time, certain people, in my view the most important one is the Buddha, figured out how to use those same technologies like division of labor in a different way. There was, for instance, a professional class of spiritual seekers, the sangha, which was much more trustworthy than we had been previously.

Then we went through the industrial, financial, scientific revolution a few hundred years ago. And no one did what the Buddha had done with the agricultural revolution and the shamans had done with the cognitive revolution.

Now we're going through the information revolution. And someone has to step up and create collective wisdom and compassion out of these tools, which will turn back upon the tools and design them differently. So the question of our age is: How do you become part of this new Deity, this new sacred entity of the collective consciousness, striving for wisdom and compassion?

e: What is your vision of how this could happen?

SF: The vision is that people come together with these technologies and build a monastery out of AI. You build a monastery out of these algorithms, out of these physical devices that you and I are using right now to have this conversation.

Specifically, we are already doing a lot of this at MAPLE. We're already figuring out how to measure practice. We have ways of measuring the morning chanting with devices to see how fully you are entering into a deep state. Also, there are lots of ways of measuring meditation. Or measuring communication between people with language models that can help you to work out if people are communicating in an authentic and caring way. We now have a community of people who are using these technologies in order to help their practice. And by doing that, their practice is helping these technologies forward.

»In the human realm, we have seen that collaboration is power.«

Beyond that, we want to include people around the world in this cyber monastery for the information age, which we build out of the technologies so that those people can practice collectively. Collective practice then becomes collective consciousness, that can be strong enough to direct our civilization.

e: Can you describe the interrelationship between AI and contemplative capacities? How can this synergize between each other? And how can this transfer to society at large?

SF: One example is a product, that we offer to teachers. If a teacher gives it all of their talks, question and answer periods, etc., it can process that information, and someone can ask it about a topic. We have done that for instance with me. My students ask this program and it gives them answers and then they correct it.

They tell it: No, that isn't really what Soryu would say, or that doesn't understand the four noble truths correctly. Which means they help it to express wisdom more clearly. This way, it's getting the wisdom from the whole community. Their wisdom is constantly being called forth by this entity because they have to correct it skillfully. They have to be the arbiters of truth, which is a huge responsibility. In calling forth their wisdom it's created better and learns better how to call forth their wisdom. This is a new kind of collaboration that we couldn't have imagined even ten years ago.

Beyond that, once this tool is working with many teachers, these teachings will be able to collaborate in a way that we haven't seen in most of the history of religion. Religious folks, even though they're often very wise and compassionate, don't usually collaborate very well. This tool helps the wisdom of all the teachers to come together in harmony.

That's just one example of one tool that we're making. There's another much simpler one. We have a device that measures your breathing and one that can see if you have good posture. With these two tools we as a community can help people around the world to meditate every day. All of that data can be brought together to create an even better system to help people to meditate. It can create a collective mind of practice. When you're participating in meditation, you're part of a collective around the world who's practicing. These are methods to bring forth a clear mind that can direct our society toward wisdom and compassion rather than merely letting the intelligence take over.

e: I see the potential of this AI-supported collaboration, but I see also the potential of it being manipulated to whatever end. And as I hear you the key to this is our own minds relationship to compassion and enlightenment. In the same way as other movements in history set the sacred in the center of their relationship to reality and infused society with that. With the support of this technology, we have the possibility to do that.

SF: Yes, and it is a response to the tragedies that we are facing as humans. There are two tragedies that are with us for a long time. One was the tragedy of the Bronze Age collapse. Suddenly everyone had metal and we're all killing each other. At the same time there was a grieving regarding our loss of relationship with nature. Many of the traditions, like the forest monks of Buddhism or the desert fathers of Christianity, went back out into nature. Both of these tragedies are happening now on a bigger scale. We're aware of a great deal of destruction, there is the terrible danger of nuclear war. And we're losing even more our relationship with nature, with these sacred beings.

But today humans have decided they are the dominant force in the world. So, we take on responsibility for everything. We have to take responsibility for killing so many beings. But, we don’t want that responsibility. We want to make someone else who has that responsibility. And a reason we’re making these systems is so that someone else will take charge of the world and of us. Sometimes I talk about what if AI kills all life on earth and kills all humans and certainly I feel horrified at that possibility. But for many people, there's a kind of relief.

In Buddhism, we say that humans have three harmful desires, the desire to gain pleasure, the desire to exist, to survive, and the desire to be eliminated. We have a suicidal tendency. It is one of the points of deepest maturation to drop that desire both to survive and to be destroyed. And of course, also of addiction to pleasure. When we set aside these three forms of harmful desire and bring forth a sense of compassion, we can be a part of creating something that resolves the problem of suffering rather than creates it. In order to make that response happen, we have to help people to mature beyond the desire to be destroyed, to no longer hold responsibility and instead to step forward with a sense of love and compassion to do our best to benefit all living things. 

This interview was conducted by Thomas Steininger and first published in the German evolve Magazin no. 40.