226 - Artificial I

Noah Rasheta (0:00)

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Secular Buddhism podcast. I am your host, Noah Roschetta. As always, I want to remind you that you don't need to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. You can use what you learn to simply be a better whatever you already are.

Today, I want to talk about artificial intelligence, but not quite the kind you're thinking of. I want to talk about the artificial I, the letter I, as in me, myself, the one who feels like it's doing the thinking.

Here's the idea I want to explore. The sense of self that feels so solid, so obviously real, works a lot like the AI systems everyone is worried about right now. It was trained on information we never chose. It predicts, it explains, and it answers with total confidence. And most of the time, we never think to question it. So here's where we're going. First, I want to talk about why this matters, especially right now. Then I want to explain in very simple terms how AI actually learns. And you don't need to be a tech person to understand it. And once you do, I think you'll start to see the resemblance to your own mind. Then I'll explain what Buddhism means when it says the self is constructed, because that idea gets misunderstood a lot. We'll look at three things people fear AI will do to us, and notice that the self has been doing all three for as long as we've been alive. And I'll end with a practice that you can try this week.

So some of you know that a few years ago, I left teaching paragliding and started working for a data infrastructure company. That's the kind of company that builds the systems that power the Internet, and more and more artificial intelligence.

I also went back to school to study applied artificial intelligence for a master's degree.

And for the podcast's 10-year anniversary, I built a tool called NOAA AI. It's trained on everything I've taught over the past decade, every episode, every book, every course. And every once in a while, I'll read one of its answers when I'm prompting it. And I'll think to myself, that sounds exactly like me. And of course, I'll realize I've never actually said that, not in those words and sometimes not at all. But it took the way that I talk and the way that I think and produced something new that fits the pattern. And then it hit me.

It isn't lying. It's doing what it was built to do. It took patterns from the past, produced the most likely next thing, and set it with complete confidence. And that's where I had the slightly uncomfortable thought, well, that's a pretty good description of the voice in my own head.

So let me start with the concern or the worry, because I think it's a reasonable one. A lot of people are concerned about AI right now. They're worried about jobs, about misinformation, about machines making decisions that affect our lives without anyone really understanding how those decisions got made. And those risks are real, and they deserve serious attention. I work in this field and I take them seriously. But there's another risk that we rarely talk about. It's much closer to home, and I'd argue it's more dangerous than any of them. It's the mind that's going to be using the technology. So think about a megaphone for a minute. A megaphone doesn't decide what gets said. It doesn't have opinions. It takes whatever is spoken into it and makes it louder, so that it can reach more people faster. If someone kind picks up the megaphone, you're going to get kindness at a high volume. If someone angry and confused picks it up, you'll get anger and confusion at a high volume. The megaphone is the same in both cases, but what changes is the person holding it. AI as a tool is a lot like that. Whatever else it does, it amplifies the mind that's using it. A clear, caring mind with a powerful tool can do tremendous amounts of good. A confused, reactive, unexamined mind with a powerful tool produces more confusion faster. So the question that matters most isn't only what can this technology do, it's also who's holding it, and do they understand their own mind?

And if you look back through history, I think you'll find this pattern everywhere. Every war, every environmental disaster, every misuse of a technology started somewhere. It started in a human mind, probably a human mind that didn't see itself very clearly.