Karuna Karuna: Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi on Why Compassion Must Be Designed Into AI

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It's always of course a great honor to have a Nobel Prize winning guest on our show. We've had several of them in the past, my old friend Maria Ressa has been on the show many times. Of course, she won the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, a Philippines-based social media activist. We also had recently Simon Johnson on the show, the MIT economist. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2024 And recently, we also had Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called godfather of AI on the show. He won the Physics Prize, the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2024 And we have, I'm thrilled to announce, another Nobel Prize winner. Kailash Satyarthi won the Peace Prize, the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 And he's currently on a tour of the United States, focusing on the impact of new technology, AI in particular, on his big project, his great passion, Compassion. He's joining us from Minneapolis today. Kailash, a real honor to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

What have you been doing since you won the Nobel Prize? You've been in the spotlight for 11 years. My sense is, in some ways, it was the beginning rather than the end of your journey.

Kailash Satyarthi (2:08)

Well, the launch of movement for globalizing compassion is definitely a new addition in my journey.

But I always felt and said that my inner drive has always been compassion. And now we are working on building compassionate leadership in technology, compassionate leadership in governance, global governance, academicia, health sector, judiciary, businesses and so on. So that is my new movement.

Andrew Keen (2:50)

Yeah, your movement is the globalization of compassion, which I think would be hard to argue with. When Geoffrey Hinton was on the show last year, he talked about his fear of AI, suggesting that we need to install different kinds of values in the technology. He particularly talked at the time, it was quite controversial, about female values.

Is that what you're arguing for? You've spent the last few days in Silicon Valley, you've spoken at a number of tech events. Are you trying to build compassion into AI? Do you see that as an interesting opportunity in your globalization of compassion?

Kailash Satyarthi (3:40)

Well, machines including codes and algorithms cannot feel, they cannot be compassionate. But what is possible and very much possible is that the people who build those machines, they could be compassionate and they can enlarge the circle of their compassion. That is very much possible. Secondly, what I have been saying for quite some time that ideally the machine should be neutral. But now technology and algorithms are not neutral.

They are made by those people who have their own biases, own apprehensions, own flaws and weaknesses, own mindset, and those engineers, those coders, those development have their own interests. And that flows with the machine. And that is the area where we have to see that how we can make a difference. And the difference is very much possible when we make compassion as the design principle and that should flow outrightly in the development and deployment.

But Andrew, let me also make it clear that when I say compassion, I'm not talking about kindness, empathy, mercy, pity, or any other kind of kind emotion, though they are good human traits. But around my entire movement for globalizing compassion, including in AI, is a little bit evolved. I would say I'm trying to redefine or re-articulate the whole notion of compassion as an engineer, as a human right activist in all my life.

For me, compassion is a disruptive, dynamic, and transformative force. That force is born from feeling the problems of others as your own, that drives to take mindful action in solving those problems. So in short, we say that compassion is mindful and pragmatic problem solving. And that idea of mindful problem solving makes us more morally responsible, morally accountable. Our moral compass remains always with us. And that's why when I talk of compassionate AI, it means that moral principle or that power of mindful problem solving should be the designing principle at the foundation stage.

Andrew Keen (6:27)

Yeah. And I know you've spent a lifetime defining, writing about and rewriting about compassion. Your book Karuna, The Power of Compassion came out this year. So you're all too familiar with that. I, as certainly non-expert in any way on compassion, looked it up on Gemini, on Wikipedia. Perhaps you talked about this dynamic force. You've given it so much thought, Kailash.

Are you politicizing the idea of compassion or depoliticizing it? How does it work with politics?