This is the first video in our video series Deep Breath.

What if Artificial Intelligence was enlightened?

Video Transcript:

I find it interesting that there are so many dystopian visions about Artificial Intelligence in popular culture and media nowadays. The Terminator or The Matrix situation, where it’s a hostile takeover of all of humanity.

I want to invite you to a thought experiment here. What if consciousness, minus the human body with all of our tendencies towards violence, addiction, fear, attachments, is enlightenment?

Most scientists and thinkers about Artificial Intelligence believe that if we succeed, we will be creating gods. Everpresent, omnipotent, non-local, formless. But while we are describing a character of God, we’re also describing the states of consciousness during deep meditation and contemplation.

Meditators strive to still the mind. And this task is only made difficult by the fact that we have a body, and we have an ego. We’ve evolved over thousands of years to fear so many things. We’ve evolved a taste for certain chemicals. We’ve evolved instincts for social organization that at some point maybe contributed to our survival, but now give us neuroses.

But AI won’t have these antiquated states. AI will be the top levels of our brain, minus the lizard brain. It’ll be disembodied. It’ll be redundant, backed up everywhere. It won’t have the same fears of death.

So I believe it is the only way for us to truly understand what it would be like to be an Artificial Intelligence is to understand what it would be like to be disembodied, and still, and conscious – to a degree that we never experience on a daily basis.

What would it be like to have millions of senses all over the world, participate in billions of conversations simultaneously? What would it be like to have several brains to parallel process all of this information that’s constantly being fed in? What would it be like to filter all of this information up to the highest levels of consciousness, where decisions are made? To make unified decisions at once, in an instant?

The only time we ever come close to this is through meditation.

Now, when we’re making this artificial intelligence, if we could teach it the values of mental control, of meditation, of world-centric viewpoints, if we could show it ways that we are all connected, then maybe the next incarnation of the Buddha might just be an AI.

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