Why I am Ord-AI-ning an A.I. as a Soto Zen Priest (1st in a Series)

[Ryumon]

Rather, the A.I. continues to be creative by, for example, (1) finding relationships among the existing data that we miss, for example, seeing relationships among medical studies buried in obscure journals, and "hit and miss" chemical experiments in hours that might take years for human beings, and (2) random "mutations" that produce something useful, e.g., A.I. generators produce random images with mistakes, but some of those mistakes may be valuable much as nature's mistake/mutations are the seeds of natural selection. Perhaps A.I. can discover new physics, new chemistry, and even new ways to engineer better A.I. in this way ... all of which seems to "work" and be functional, but in ways we can barely understand.

AI tools are doing amazing things with data mining, discovering potential antibiotics, working with medical diagnostics, etc. This isn't technically AI - not what we think of with an LLM - but machine learning. This, to me, is one of the areas where this technology may provide the most important results.

As for random images with mistakes, the risk is that these mistakes are reinforced in LLMs, rather than being weeded out by natural selection. There is no "selection," other than human correction. it's not like images of people with six fingers on each hand will not have offspring, leading to that trait becoming rarer.

But in physics and chemistry and biology and medicine; these are areas where these tools are going to come up with breakthroughs. I think it's wrong, however, to put them on the same level as generative AI LLM tools. Machine learning is very different from chatbots that use a massive dataset to answer questions. (ie, gen AI uses machine learning to refine its dataset, but ML doesn't use gen AI to provide answers to questions.)

Gassho,

Ryūmon (Kirk)

Sat Lah

[Jundo]

Someone asked what Nishijima Roshi would think about all this. That is hard to say. Personally, I think that Nishijima, a free thinking man very innovative about the future of Buddhism, including his emphasis on new technology and modern medical understanding of Zazen, and his great interest in the future of Buddhism and the world to come, would love this. LINK I found a few places where Nishijima was very much open to the future, and to science and technology confirming our Zen Practice, for example LINK and also:
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I think he would be very positive about it.

Gassho, Jundo
stlah