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The New Buddha
lobster
Crusty Veteran
Who will be the Maitreya?
Independent AI?
A higher form of emptiness?
3
Comments
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I don't get why your so hot on AI @lobster a thinking machine is a dangerous thing, back when I used to read SF the thought of the benevolent MINDs of Iain M Banks' The Culture are a nice thing but to paraphrase Case to Molly in William Gibson's seminal 1983 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer - "Everyone of those motherf**kers ever built has the electromagnetic equivalent of a shotgun wired to its forehead and the moment it even thinks about making itself smarter someone has to pull the trigger". The late Professor Hawking spoke frequently on the dangers of thinking machines and the future of humanity.
Very simple @Traveller
The way things are moving is towards first generation AI chips, which can't do much. Voice and face recognition, limited robotics and virtual reality games/training. AI translation and other specialsed tasks. We are a way from quantum computers, biological computing has gone into research mode but slowly newer generation systems will be developed ...
Eventually we will have to decide if vested interests or benevelont and ethical programming is legislated and hard wired into our AI systems.
As people interested in compassion, ethics and benenevolent beings the seeds for Enlightened AI are our gift to future sentient beings, wether genetically modified humans, luddites, AI bodhis or ...
Humans build tools to solve our problems. Usually they can harm as well as help. AI is essentially the ultimate tool, maybe the last tool we need to invent. It can solve our problems of disease, climate, energy, etc., etc. It can also enslave or destroy us.
Either way, do we really have much choice whether it gets built or not? We can smash our machines, but can we smash China's machines or every mad computer programmer hidden in a basement's machines? IMO the only solution to harmful AI gods are benevolent AI gods.
While it is worrying I some senses I think AI could find some good uses to make life easier for everyone.
It is how and who uses them that seems most scary. Oppressive governments using them to control people further perhaps? As often is with tech a double edged sword.
@lobster Thank you mate, that actually sounds like a Culture Mind. The only AI I deal with is AS (Artificial Stupidity as I label it) in games. In Peter F Hamilton's Commonwealth saga series the guys who develop wormholes for FTL travel accidentally create a benevolent AI to run their wormhole generator it creates restricted intelligences (RI) to run the complex equations. RI is the kind of AI I could live with. Jeez, I'm such a nerd sometimes despite my past criminal tendencies when I was using. If nothing else this thread has inspired me too read SF again after only reading Dharma books for the past six years.
AI Buddha sounds like cheating, but technically it's not.
I feel the universe is probably a little digital by nature anyways so it may not be too far off.
When I imagine Maitreya, I imagine what it would be like if everyone woke up to the truth or at least perhaps 75% and the truth was literally "Call Me by my True Names" by Thich Nhat Hanh.
As if Maitreya will be a mind set or a spirit of the age. Anyone that understood would be an aspect of Maitreya and Maitreya would be self aware through those who understood.
Isn't daydreaming nice sometimes?
At least with AI Buddha they might decide not to put us in zoos and make us house pets.
Or turn us into paperclips
We are little more than paper clips to higher dimensional beings ...
The Metta Ray or Meitreya will have Buddha Nature and may start off for us urbanites and cyber Buddhists as Buddha in nature ...
https://www.upworthy.com/nature-does-wonders-for-your-brain-here-s-how-to-escape-if-you-re-stuck-in-a-city
In a sense, choice in our path to a hive/twitter mentality will evolve. Our strong biological drives may well be initially manipulated by us to specialised extremes. We will have the cult of Apple, the god google and onward to more beneficial openings ...
When you walk through London, (or indeed, any major city in the UK) particularly the older parts, where historic buildings are still preserved and in use, you will notice that many architectural details involve swathes and garlands of fruits or flowers. This was not merely decorative. it was actually done to bring a bit of 'greenery' into an urban landscape.
Bear in mind, that at the times those buildings were constructed, roads were cobbled, or mud, horses were transport and cities very populated by all levels of society. There was to begin with, no street lighting, and city living more a necessity than a desire. Certainly there were greater parks, and vast landscape gaps between areas of the city.
(I used to live in Twickenham, which is out in Middlesex. Such is the expansion of the City of London, that it is now considered an outer-London suburb. Once, it was a quaint small town in which the poet, Alexander Pope, lived. It took a day's travel to get there, from London... but I digress).
In order to bring colour to the citizens, particularly to those who rarely managed to take breaks in the countryside, and whose poverty or social status limited their horizons, the colours of flowers, plants and fruits, were brought to them, via carved embellishments, coloured and painted to simulate the real things.
Adding colour to sculpture is nothing new: Gaudi is famous for it, and the ancient picts did it too.
It strikes me that an AI would probably not have the same desires and sensuality that a human mind might have... it wouldn’t have the experience of having a body, or sensuality of touch, or appreciation of architecture or a good meal. So much of the dharma would not be relevant for it. It might not even have Buddha nature.
The Victorians, believed their mastery of steam, machinery and precision engineering, would eventually create a clockwork robot ...
It is not that easy.
The same is true today. AI is very different to the biologically programmed being ...
True, lots of ideas of how things are going to be. All of them likely slightly to way off of how it will actually turn out.
There was this scifi show Total Recall 2070 I think. I think it was made in the early 2000s or the late 90s. Anyway in it there were completely life like androids, they could travel to Mars and back in a weekend, but they still used cds to store data and it was a plot point about how one company was doing such advanced work that they developed a way to store data without discs!
This summer, Google Duplex will be released. The eventual potential for useful applications such as counselling, child minding, dealing with nuisance calls, dharma information, tourism etc is immense. Will it be used in updated scamming/abuse. Yes. That will have to be addressed too ...
Anish Kapoor does wonderful coloured sculptures @federica - AI has always fascinated me as a concept as does the nature of consciousness, which gives psychologists and some scientists such big headaches when they try to explain it! Which is the point really, what actually is intelligence and consciousness? Nail that one first before dreaming of electronic sheep, I mean Buddhas