Do I think I have any influence on these matters? No. Should Buddhists try to influence future use of science and technology? Yes. But I don't know how?
Innovation is usually fuelled by the wish to increase profits.
I hope there will still be altruistic people who are not wholly motivated by money.
Gasshō
Seiko
stlah
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As I understand it the issues with famine are almost entirely human caused or are at least greatly exacerbated by humans. Things like transportation logistics, transportation costs, graft, politics, and challenges created by conflicts between "the way things are done" in different locations not working together.
Highly centralized production of mono-crops is also a major contributor. Ukraine grows something like 20% or 30% of the grain in the world. When Russia invaded and the grain couldn't be shipped people in Africa started starving. I drove from Vermont to Washington about five years ago. It was shocking to me that basically every farm in the mid-west is growing soy. Miles upon miles of soy and most of the rest was corn. Washington state is a major producer of apples but it's almost impossible to get Washington grown apples in Washington. Most of the apples in our stores here come from New Zealand.
My wife works for a publisher that specializes in farming books. This one publisher has printed hundreds of books written by farmers that detail all the ways that they run their own farms to be efficient and not only not destroy top soil but actually maintain and improve it. But because food production is a for profit enterprise in most of the world the huge agro-business companies that make the decisions about how farms are run all have the same essential outlook on the process. Maximize profit, minimize costs. They are literally strip mining top soil and then relying on an arms race of genetically engineered crops, pesticides, and fertilizers to keep the soil producing.
When people encounter a problem, we tend to find the most maximally simple, least expensive, strategy to "solve" that problem. People have little understanding of how deeply interconnected everything is (What do we Buddhists call this? Inter-dependent co-arising?), instead they view the world as being made up of discrete parts that are interchangeable. New grand technologies won't fix that error of thought.
AI is programmed by people who generally hold this implicitly view point, nearly all of the data that is fed into AI systems has this viewpoint as an implicit assumption. Also, AI is a marketing term that is nearly devoid of meaning. It isn't intelligence. It is a bunch of algorithms that output "results" based on massive sets of already known data. There is nothing that you or I would identify as thought happening in an AI system. It is just cascading weighted statistical values all the way down. AI systems cannot explain the chain of reasoning that underlies the results they give because there IS NO REASONING. This aspect worries me deeply because "AI" has the potential to become a sort of ersatz all powerful oracle that is only capable of spitting out already known answers. It could be the ultimate force for stagnation in human thought and culture. Something like the pronouncements of a secular dogmatic god that it is impossible to question because it is incapable of explaining it's answers.
I think that the challenges in our world are primarily created by the unquestioned habitual things that we assume are true about "how the world works". Adding layer upon layer of complex technologies make it harder to identify that it is our implicit assumptions that are the ultimate source of a lot of the challenges we face.
I guess I sound super negative but I'm actually quite hopeful for the future. There are a lot of people talking about ways that we can make our world better for ourselves. I do think that humans are capable of becoming aware of our implicit assumptions. I am just so profoundly skeptical of technological "solutions" because to my way of thinking they both don't address the real issues and they allow and encourage the continuance of the status quo, potentially in an ultimate way.
I work with technology every day for my job. I'm acutely aware of how fragile, limited, and misunderstood the limitations and capabilities of today's technologies are. I hope that my skeptical contrarian view point isn't a problem. Just let me know if it is and I'll stop.
AbeLeave a comment:
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Yes thank you Jundo
I think you have said elsewhere, that if we cannot stop causing the problems (such as soil degradation) then we have to accept some solutions that will mitigate them. Perhaps AI bots could take over the manual labour of crop rearing and harvesting, since one of the problems I know we have in New Zealand is a lack of labour for agriculture.
We have certainly had some big technological leaps in human history. Some of the directions being explored now seem to me to be extensions and explorations of what we already have. When technology plateaus I do not believe that means the creative community is stagnating, I think there is a natural process of absorbing and 'norming' the new knowledge and technology before the next wave of advances is made. So I think the plateau is more in the realm of mass production and use, as all the research you post about here demonstrates that continual search for fresh insights and technology. All of this is a great antidote to the constant stream of negative reporting and is a cause for great hope about the future, which may look very different to the present time.
Gassho, Tokan
SatLahLeave a comment:
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If technology plateaus, then it will plateau. And if it does not plateau, then it will not.epigenetics and social circumstance are powerful influences and, one would think, so much easier to improve than rewriting human DNA ... if we have plateau's before the next 'big leap', and also wonder if we are reaching a plateau. And to what end are we pushing certain technologies over others, I mean, will AI ever solve famine? ...
When it comes to solving the stubborn problems of humanity, then I would suggest using ALL effective means.
As to AI and famine (these are just a sample) ...
Artificial intelligence could stop millions from going hungry by 2030
Global Hunger Is Rising, Artificial Intelligence Can Help
AI Can Help End World Hunger, One Crop at a Time
Gassho, J
stlahLeave a comment:
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Yes I agree, epigenetics and social circumstance are powerful influences and, one would think, so much easier to improve than rewriting human DNA, but look at cancer, we know how to reduce the incidence through lifestyle and yet there is (it seems) a more prominent focus on the high techology of cures (the sexy bit!). I do think, perhaps similar to yourself, that we assume we can keep expanding our technology exponentially. I wonder if with the type of technology we are creating these days if we have plateau's before the next 'big leap', and also wonder if we are reaching a plateau. And to what end are we pushing certain technologies over others, I mean, will AI ever solve famine? I hope I live long enough to see some of what the future does hold in this respect.
Gassho, Tokan
satlahLeave a comment:
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I work with college students and I see something similar. Their online social lives and experiences are as real and compelling to them as their real world interactions. They don't see it as two different worlds. It's all one seamless life to them.
I think your questions about the outcomes of genetic engineering are quite interesting. Right now I don't have a strong feeling for how possible genetic engineering will turn out to be. On the one hand, biology is orders of magnitude more complicated than chemistry or physics. On the other hand, people have been dreaming about being able to control their own bodies probably for as long as there have been people. If it's doable then it probably will be done. My guess is that it probably won't turn out to be doable to the degree or in the exact ways that people today are hoping for. And it's possible that someone will make a terrible mistake that turns everyone against genetic engineering entirely.
Mental illness is quite a huge topic. And we are so very ignorant about how our brains work and how genes work. I'm skeptical (I know you are surprised!) that things like depression or anxiety could be removed because they seem to be epigenetic in nature. It would probably be a lot simpler and less expensive to try to make sure that children have enough food to eat, safe homes to live in, and well adjusted caregivers. That's not sexy or sci-fi though.
I would not be surprised if it turns out that we've already reached the high water mark of human technology instead of this time being right before the exponential curve goes straight up.
AbeLeave a comment:
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I haven't been around as long as you but I've lived through the much of the same transition. My family had a small black and white tv until I was nine or ten. And then the whole "information revolution" happened with computers and the internet.
Remember when the internet was going to be a force for good? That didn't turn out so well. Of course there are many ways that the internet has been used to make the human world a better place. But there are a lot of ways that it seems like it's made things a lot worse too. Maybe it's more like a mirror that has shown us that we are half-wild apes who aspire to civilization rather than the refined civilized people we like to think we are.
I don't think there's really much tangible difference between a drug addict living in a flop house and a "VR" addict who lives as much of their life as possible in "VR" from the perspective of a Buddhist. Both situations are a person making their suffering worse by trying to escape their suffering in unskillful ways. The practical challenges of reaching these two people are probably different though.
Other than my skepticism that the "sci-fi" technologies that everyone seems to assume are inevitable will actually turn out to be doable in the real world, our perspective doesn't seem very different to me. There will be some uses that will benefit some people. Those same technologies will open new avenues for suffering for some people.
My experience over the last five or ten years has been that the "modern" world seems to be winding down, losing it's way, falling apart, drifting further and further into wish-fulfillment and day-dreams of impossible human wealth and power. Rosy technological prognostications read to me as part of this cultural fantasizing.
Werner Heisenberg, one of the physicist who worked on the foundations of modern physics in the 20th century said “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”Leave a comment:
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Having lived in the transition from fuzzy black and white aerial tv to digital flat screen 3-D, I am more optimistic than you that quality of the virtual and enhanced experience will improve.
Even so, a later chapter of my book looks toward such "holo-deck" experiences in only limited cases. Oh, there may be folks who seek to live their entire lives (or simulations of multiple lives) in such environments, but I think that they will be of most use to, for example, the dying in hospices or folks seeking short term virtual-vacations. However, if the experiences do become rich and rewarding enough, some may seek to reside long term, a kind of electric opium den, and shall be able to do so as long as the electricity and cash to pay for it keeps flowing.
Gassho, j
stlahLeave a comment:
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Hi there fellow travellers!
I'm not going to go super long here, but have a couple of reflections of my own. Denaso, you say...
Not that I am disagreeing, as I see that it could go both ways, but one thing I wonder is that most of what we have now, in technological terms, is simply layered onto our lives, such as the latest role-play app's that essentially provide you with computer generated friends so that you don't have to deal with the complexities of human relationships. It doesn't change 'what' we are, but leads to changes in 'how' we are. work in mental health and I see people replacing reality with this 'reality' which seems to me to be heaping delusion upon delusion. I do see the potential for genetic modification to alter the basis of human consciousness and therefore our lived internal experience. Would this render us as little better than AI? Would we need to redefine what human actually is? Or would be be doing what Jundo suggests, and inventing our successor species? With the advances in genetic technology, I know there are serious conversations being had about 'fixing' the genetic loopholes in people who are considered to be at high risk of developing chronic mental illness, such as with schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder. It seems to me the very thing that makes us 'human' is the range of conscious experience we can have, that we can even experience an existential crisis seems to be essential to that. Remove the 'bad' and what are we left with? How can you exercise free-will, and therefore see deep into yourself and realise the Buddhist way, if your free-will is restricted by changing how your brain and mind work, controlling how your personality develops. Ultimately I do not think these are going to be Buddhist issues because the world as a whole will decide, should we maintain our technological societies long enough to see this technology reach the level required. Whether we reinvent or burn ourselves, the future certainly looks dystopian from where I stand now.I'm afraid that I disagree that most of these technologies will turn out to even be possible, let alone inevitable. And even if some of them do come to pass I don't see them changing the situation very much for humans on an individual level. Maybe the ephemera of their day-to-day lives will change, like how we all carry cell phones with us at all times now, but the internal experience of being living beings won't change much.
Technology can continue to support us, destroy us, augment us, or replace us - hopefully we choose wisely!
Gassho, Tokan
satlahLeave a comment:
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In regard to point #4, one of the most fundamental problems for creating VR is that we don't actually know all that much about how sensory information is crafted into a seamless and coherent first person experience by our brains. And, in order to create a technology that piggybacks on that process we will need to know precisely and specifically how that process works. We will also probably need to have worked out a lot of the variations in how that process works from brain to brain. Brains are crazy adaptive, it could turn out that there isn't one specific way that they perform this feat of making the grass green and the sky blue. It may not be possible to create a technology that can generalize across many brains.
So, while my perspective is that it will turn out that VR as it is imagined here will turn out to either be impossible or impossibly far in the future, here are my hypothetical thoughts assuming that it somehow becomes real.
Most importantly, how exactly would your experience of immersion in a realistic simulated world be any different from your experience of the world you experience right now? We each already live immersed within an idiosyncratic simulated realistic world created by our brains. So, in talking about VR we are really talking about layering a second, controlled, mass produced, simulated realistic world on top of the one we each already live in. Would peoples experience or behavior necessarily be different within this second embedded virtual world than they are within the first?
You might argue that in the "real world" there's feedback between our internally experienced reality and the "outside world", that's one cause of suffering. We can all think of examples where important feeling details of our personal reality crumbled when they made contact with contradictory indisputable external facts that were beyond our control or influence.
I think that video games are a type of virtual reality, especially super long form multiplayer games like MMOs. Playing a game like World of Warcraft or EverQuest at a high level means being totally engaged with the game and the people you play with. Within your group you may be immensely powerful, important, and influential, able to organize people and accomplish tasks that only a small number of other people in the world can do. While at the same time in your "real" life have few social ties and have little influence or satisfaction in your life. This dislocation between your perception of your value in the virtual world and the real world could be a likely result of long term interaction with VR worlds.
Perhaps there might be psycho-therapeutic applications. People who have lost a loved one might have things that they'd like to be able to say to that person, for example. Would talking with a convincing virtual rendition of a lost loved one be an avenue to emotional closure? Or would it be a macabre, ersatz, abomination of an experience? It might depend more on the individual experiencing the experience than on the fidelity of the experience itself.
But also, given humans propensity for wallowing in sex and violence, if people spend huge chunks of their lives experiencing a virtual world where there are no socially, ethically, or morally proscribed limits to behavior they might learn things from those experiences that aren't conductive to a functional group social environment. And those behaviors when performed in the real world could also be a cause for suffering.
If I'm wrong and VR like you envision does become a widespread reality, I think that Zen folks are in some ways uniquely prepared for dealing with it because suffering is suffering. The details of the circumstances that start up the suffering don't really matter.
But it might be a lot harder to reach people who are isolated within a computerized virtual world than it is to reach them in the real world because everything in a virtual world is placed there specifically by a programmer or artist (probably increasingly a machine learning algorithm going forward). Unless one of them is a Zen person who smuggles pointers to Zen into the virtual world you aren't going to randomly discover a copy of "Zen Mind, Beginners Mind" in a virtual world.
That's all I've got for now. Interesting things to think about. Thanks for posing the questions.
AbeLeave a comment:
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Hi Denaso,
I would like to challenge your assertion a little. Why would the following technologies not (possibly, within the realm of "not technically unthinkable") be possible and, if they were possible, might they not work substantial positive changes in human society? No, not perfection or paradise, but a substantially better world, less crime, less human vs. human aggression, less leaving of strangers to hunger and homelessness, etc.:
-1- Amelioration of the propensity in some of us to experience such excesses of anger to the point of murderous rage, or violent psychopathy, or uncontrolled sexual desire that such individuals would be far less likely to engage in murder, rape etc.
-2- Increased levels of empathy within human beings such that one would hesitate to kill another, for the other is not objectified. Furthermore, could the caring, concern and love toward immediate family members which we now feel, biologically wired into us, possibly be extended to a wide group of strangers, or toward all people of our species by altering the wiring?
-3- Could we enable people to be more easily satisfied, and earlier, in their drives to consume?
-4- Finally, why would it be technically impossible to immerse individuals in realistic "simulated" worlds by replacing incoming sense data that is sufficiently detailed in quantities and quality of data? Certainly, we all experience something like that now, in our nightly dreams, which are real to us at the time. In the latter case, the result might not be an actual "utopian paradise," but might be a created reality that we experience as a "utopian paradise" in our dream.
Yes, the Buddha is quoted as saying that, and I agree with you. Utopia might be too nice, like an opium trip. But I am not speaking of "utopia," only a world where kids are able to walk to school without fear of violence, wars are decreased, hunger and homelessness are much reduced, and there is less wasteful consumption and destruction of the environment. There are relatively minor "tweaks," and not so unthinkable these days.My memory is terrible but doesn't the Buddha say something about how being born a human is the best because animals have to struggle too much just to stay alive to discover liberation and the gods have life too easy to ever feel the need for liberation but humans have just the right mix of struggle and ease to find that they need liberation. Utopia would upset that balance.
Gassho, J
stlahLast edited by Jundo; 02-14-2023, 01:06 AM.Leave a comment:
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Not at all. It is very helpful, and much to consider for my book writing.I have a bad habit of writing like I know what I'm talking about, especially when the subject is something that I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about. I read too much and don't get enough opportunities in the real world to have conversations on topics that I'm interested in. I Apologize if I've offended in any way. That was not my intent.
Thank you, Abe.
Gassho, Jundo
SatTodayLAHLeave a comment:
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A very interesting topic.
I'm afraid that I disagree that most of these technologies will turn out to even be possible, let alone inevitable. And even if some of them do come to pass I don't see them changing the situation very much for humans on an individual level. Maybe the ephemera of their day-to-day lives will change, like how we all carry cell phones with us at all times now, but the internal experience of being living beings won't change much.
My perspective is that the long history of Homo sapiens has shown that you can (try to) take the ape out of Nature but you can't get the Nature out of the ape. By this I mean that throughout all the historical developments of our species it's the day-to-day life experiences of individuals that start up the processes that the four noble truths describe. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Homo sapiens walking around Africa 200,000 years ago or me walking my dog today.
Intelligence, beauty, strength, etc. these are all relative in value, not absolute. So, no matter how "perfectly" we can gene-edit our offspring there will be individual differences and even the minutest of differences will fuel the process of suffering. In my experience, it often happens that the more minute the differences between people the more chasm-like those differences will be perceived to be, especially in human social circles where the magnitude of a thing seems to be proportional to how much it is talked about. Maybe that's just one way that 13 years of Catholic school scarred me though.
AI will almost certainly end up as more financializing scam than real thing in the end. It'll collapse back to being called "machine learning" or some other even more bland term. It'll be widely used in very specific controlled circumstances like Teflon or microwave radiation. AI systems have no phenomenological experience and almost certainly never will. "The Chinese room" argument is a good explanation for this. AI hype all rests on unexamined assumptions about what "intelligence" is coupled with uncritical assumptions that if we just build hardware and software that is complex "enough" the machine will somehow transubstantiate itself into "being intelligent". Some people are happy to accept the premise that if a machine can fool a human into thinking that it is "intelligent" than it is. Which is the most insanely radical example of begging the question I've ever seen.
I'm more open to the idea that humans might be able to develop genetic technologies that will allow radical control over our appearance and maybe extend life spans. A lot of us want to be the prettiest ape in the jungle and live forever, right? Plus there's probably a HUGE amount of money to be made in offering radical control of their physical appearance to people. And huge sums of money always seem to get humans thinking creatively and working hard. Again though, there will be suffering here and suffering is suffering. The details of the situation where suffering arises don't really matter because suffering is a human clinging to their response to experience, not the contents of the experience.
I think that 21st century cultures fixation on these ideas for what the future might bring are more telling in a "zeitgeist" sort of way than anything else. In the 1950s people thought we'd be interstellar travelers by now. And have humanoid robots. And Fusion. And flying cars. But none of those things came to pass, instead we got the internet, social media, video games, HUGE TVs, and seven hundred brands of toothpaste. Space flight hasn't progressed much at all, although it happens more frequently and is less dangerous. Fusion is just "ten years away" like it has been since the 1950s. The biological revolution wasn't even on the minds of people in the 1950s but it's a big money maker these days (the coronavirus treatment making pharmaceutical companies made like 100 billion dollars last year) and now everyone thinks we can build a better world through genetic engineering. It was just "better living through chemistry" back in the 1950s.
A hopelessly utopia-like future is probably a bigger challenge to Buddhism and Zen though. My memory is terrible but doesn't the Buddha say something about how being born a human is the best because animals have to struggle too much just to stay alive to discover liberation and the gods have life too easy to ever feel the need for liberation but humans have just the right mix of struggle and ease to find that they need liberation. Utopia would upset that balance. I imagine that even in a utopia people would find ways to suffer but there might be too many quick fixes available for many people to bother with something as long term and with as unsure an outcome as Zazen.
So I guess my answer to the question is that Zen and Buddhism are already well situated to deal with the future as long as enough new people keep coming to them to keep the traditions alive.
I have a bad habit of writing like I know what I'm talking about, especially when the subject is something that I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about. I read too much and don't get enough opportunities in the real world to have conversations on topics that I'm interested in. I Apologize if I've offended in any way. That was not my intent.
AbeLeave a comment:
Leave a comment: