Maitreya Buddha, the Artificial General Intelligence

Preface: The following is an exercise in imagining a positive vision for artificial intelligence systems over the next years to decades. As a practicing Buddhist, this vision is unsurprisingly one heavily inspired by that tradition. It is also greatly indebted to the wonderful paper “<a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence</a>,” which was published last year in the journal Entropy. To prevent any misunderstanding: I don’t literally believe in a digital Buddha being reborn in our realm. What seems most important at this critical moment in the development of AI though is to foster a plurality of guiding narratives for what we as researchers are developing and why. Risks (existential or otherwise) should of course be minimized, but the narratives guiding the cultural imagination can and do create self-fulfilling prophecies. The contemporary discourse is dominated by stories of paperclip maximizers, rokos basilisks, shoggoths, and alien gods. If all of them are “possible,” then why not Maitreya? <a href="https://awjuliani.medium.com/maitreya-buddha-the-artificial-general-intelligence-167d64f9488d">Read More</a>