I’d like to talk about emptiness as a way of perceiving. The writer Gay Watson explores a translation of sunyata—first offered by T. Stcherbatsky—that is far richer than the mere lack that “emptiness” connotes: relativity. All phenomena arise in dependence, or relative to, conditions; or, per one interpretation of quantum theory, they exist solely in relation to being observed. Since, according to this interpretation, our act of perceiving is fundamental to the fabrication of our constructed reality, I wonder, could this be one reason the Buddha included perceiving (samjna) in the five aggregates as an essential constituent of our conscious experience?

The word emptiness tends to bring up an image of a dark abyss, a black hole, and people think, “There’s nothing! It’s all empty.” Or worse yet, “Nothing matters.” But relativity, as this translation suggests, means that what we perceive is relative and relies on our framework of recognition (e.g., biological, evolutionary, cognitive, psychological, and sociocultural). It also depends on all the causes and conditions that have supported its existence.

For example, given dissimilar sociocultural conditioning, a member of the East African Maasai tribe would have a different perceived reality in front of a laptop on Zoom than a Silicon Valley engineer would. More radically, different sentient beings have distinct umwelts, or experiential worlds, where their understanding of reality is shaped by their specific biological and cognitive characteristics. The perceptual world of a dog consists of an exceptionally complex landscape of smells and high-frequency sounds, all of which are absent from our subjective reality. Furthermore, whatever is perceived in these disparate umwelts is not independently existing but codependently arising based on many causes and conditions. The creation of a sound requires a vibrating source with the appropriate properties, a medium through which sound travels, energy to create the vibration…just to name a few. Underscoring the immense scale of interdependence, the astronomer Carl Sagan famously said, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Therefore, what we perceive as reality is neither real—reified, fixed, independently existent—nor nonreal. Just as a dream is neither real nor nonreal, so is life. Everything is a dream, but it’s not just a dream—a dismissive stance that veers into nihilism. Life is a dream, and it’s not a dream. In this practice, we neither take an ontological stance that things are rigid as we perceive them to be nor do we deny their existence—neither of the extremes is helpful. The Middle Way of sunyata is to honor relativity and avoid the extremes of independent, reified existence on one end and nihilism on the other.

The late great teacher Rob Burbea talked about life as theater. Imagine you have a front row seat at an engaging play and are fully immersed in the story. You feel the pain, joy, and frustration of the actors. And yet, you realize that it’s theater. Each actor has a role to play. It’s not real! But if we think it’s just theater, we demean the value, the beauty, the grace of the art form. Life is theater in its most beautiful and sacred sense. We can engage with life—this theater-like dream—knowing that we are playing a character in relation to all other characters. The script is not fixed. It has infinite possibilities, albeit each with varying probabilities. And we have an incredible gift: the freedom to choose our perspective, the way we see.

While our minds might crave certainty, relativity invites us to open up to a whole range of possibilities. In this openness, different perceptions can be explored. We’re always looking in a particular way, after all, never putting our lenses down. For example, we can become aware of how we are perceiving, fabricating our reality, starting with moment-to-moment subtle recognitions of arisings in the body-mind and expanding to the stories we concoct about ourselves, others, and the world. Paying attention with interest and curiosity often naturally shifts our perspective. Or, we can intentionally try on (but not force) perceiving from the spacious vantage point of love and letting go, which is the opposite of contraction, clinging, and separation—aka selfing.

Selfing is clinging to negative self-preoccupation. However, developing a healthy sense of self that has integrity and is upright, confident, and beloved is necessary for this path of awakening. It’s often said that you must first know and love the self—“this being who is me,” with all its conditioning, neuroses, and particularities—before you can let it go. If we try to relinquish this self before developing a sense of confidence and care, our practice becomes mired in spiritual bypass. Using sunyata as a hammer to squash and get rid of the self, as some well-intentioned practitioners subconsciously attempt, is painful. Let’s remember the Middle Way. There is this dear being who navigates life, suffers, loves, loses. And yet this is not the whole view. There are more dimensions. Instead of fixating on the perception of my self and my life through a straw—“This is me, this is what I want, this is what I hate, this is me, me, me”—can we expand our perspective to see with love and humor, 360° internally and externally, not taking this self-sense too darn seriously? Remember life as sacred theater.

While navigating different perspectives, it’s also important to maintain flexibility. If I see a friend, it’s not helpful to say “Numerous causes and conditions are giving rise to an image of you being recognized and delight being experienced” instead of “I’m glad to see you!”

On the other hand, if I’m feeling annoyed, it might be helpful to access other ways of looking. I can see that this friend, just like me, experiences causes and conditions responsible for creating the person that they are. I can recognize their narrative. I could have been born as them and they could have been born as me. In some ways, I am them. We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together. We’re not separate. It’s not me versus them. It’s us.

We are entangled as we codependently arise in this mess together.

I notice the impermanent and dreamlike nature of our interaction, and in that moment, my heart opens to tenderness for both of us. We are co-creating and living this mysterious dream together. Or, in the words of Nagarjuna: “Whenever there’s a belief that things are real, desire and hatred spring up unendingly; unwholesome views are entertained, from which all disputes come. Indeed, this is the source of every view; without it, no defilement can occur. Thus, when this is understood, all views and all afflictions vanish entirely. But how may this be known? It is said that when one sees that all things are dependently produced, one sees that all such things are free from birth.”

In Pali, the term yathabhuta nanadassana is often translated as “seeing things as they are.” But this translation posits an ultimate, correct way of seeing things, whereas a more appropriate translation is “seeing things as they have come to be” or as they have come to be seen. Bhuta is the past participle of the verb “to be.” So instead we could say, come and see things as they have come to be perceived, as they have dependently coarisen in our seeing. And when we see in this way, there’s an opening. Emaho! Marvelous! This way of seeing makes life even more mysterious, precious, sublime. It expands the heart in the beauty and generosity of letting go rather than clinging to rigid assumptions and presumptions.

Ultimately, emptiness—as a non-fixed, nonfabricated way of looking—and love and compassion are intertwined. One leads to the other. Love and compassion are particular ways of looking. When we look with kindness and benevolence at ourselves, others, and the world; when we cultivate the way of seeing that is metta, love with no strings attached, we loosen the sense of self and tune our ability to see its fabricated nature. The arrows of love and emptiness fly both ways.

Some years ago, I dedicated a year of my life to the practices of the heart, in particular to metta and compassion. It was a wonderful practice period that gave rise to many insights, including one that I rarely talk about because it’s hard for me to put into words. It was an opening into a perspective that may be described as a glimpse into the “mind of grace.” It was a perspective of complete love and unconditional compassion for everything beyond time and space. No separation, no boundaries, no self—love infused with emptiness, emptiness infused with love. I humbly offer an invitation for you to explore the interchangeable nature of love and emptiness for yourself.

It is said that awakening is an accident, and when we keep practicing, we become more accident-prone. So keep practicing, so that different perceptions pop up when you least expect them and they gradually become readily accessible. Keep relaxing the habitual patterns of perception, and try to see, without forcing, through the eyes of love and nonseparation. You might then notice that you’re looking at every human being as if they are your kin—sibling, mother—and you want to be of service, to help, to heal. But know that you can never go back, because there’s now a crack in self-preoccupation, and the crack is where the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen beautifully said.

Trust your own ability to see—because you can. The Buddha said that if it weren’t possible to awaken, he wouldn’t have shared the teachings. So take heart. Borrow trust—from a friend or teacher who’s further on the path, if you need it—and then verify for yourself how love and emptiness are intertwined.

None of this is heady or meant to be figured out by analysis. It’s meant to be practiced, to be known experientially, firsthand. Find out what happens when you widen your view, consider the causes and conditions of your or someone else’s perspective, or intentionally infuse generosity of spirit into your way of seeing. Maybe the heart releases into more freedom, more care. We can know for ourselves that compassion is the natural response of the heart to suffering. When we’re not entangled in selfing, we want to alleviate pain, to help, to be of service. Ehipassiko. Come and see for yourself.

♦

This article is adapted from a dharma talk given in April 2021 titled “Emptiness: The Womb of Love and Service.”

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The Buddha taught mindfulness of death teachings in many different discourses. Today we will discuss the Maranasati Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 6.19). Maranasati means death awareness—marana (death) and sati (awareness or mindfulness). At the beginning of the Maranasati Sutta, the Buddha is said to address the monks, or practitioners (we’re all practitioners), thus: 

When mindfulness of death is developed and cultivated, it’s beneficial. It culminates in the deathless, and ends with the deathless—but how does one develop mindfulness of death?

I’d like to go over these benefits before talking about the specific instructions he gave the monks. 

The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness of Death

Many of us in the West might be afraid of death—we don’t want to think about it, we don’t want to talk about it—and yet, bringing death into our awareness has many benefits—benefits for ourselves and our loved ones, benefits in how we live, and benefits for how we die. This practice prepares us to have a sense of peace, not being scared and fearful, when the moment of death arises.

The moment of death is said to be a liberating moment. So doing this practice is supreme training for that important moment of transitioning. However, this practice isn’t just for the potential of liberation. It impacts the way we live and how we show up for ourselves and others—loved ones, people we don’t know, and people we have challenges with. 

Living according to our values is one of the many benefits of this practice. When we know that our time in this body and in this life is finite—when we fully embrace finitude—we don’t waste time. When the scarcity of our time comes into the forefront of our consciousness, we tend not to do the unskillful actions that cause harm. When we “greet and hold death as an advisor on our shoulder all the time,” as Carlos Castaneda said, the way we live our life changes. 

We live with more freedom, peace, ease, love, and care because we know there is nothing to hang on to. We are a traveler on this earth. This body is not mine. It’s for rent. This life is for rent. 

When we realize this, we live differently, we live more freely. We let go of our clinging, our sense of attachment to me, me, me, mine, mine, mine. It shifts our perspective. We can live with more freedom, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is nothing to take with us. There’s nothing to hang on to. So this practice is liberating, just as the Buddha says, and it has the deathless as its fruit. 

What does the deathless mean?

The deathless refers to nibbana (nirvana). The deathless is another translation for nibbana, freedom, liberation, awakening. So mindfulness of death practice is a liberating practice. It leads to freedom in the way we live and in the moment that we die—the ultimate letting go. 

Summarizing the Sutta

So with that as the preamble, let’s continue with the Maranasati Sutta. 

So then, as I read, the Buddha asked the monks:

Do you develop mindfulness of death? How do you develop mindfulness of death, knowing how important it is? 

One monk raises their hand and says:

Oh, yes, I develop mindfulness of death. If I’d only live for another day and night, I’d focus on the Buddha’s instructions and I could really achieve a lot. That’s how I develop mindfulness of death. 

And then another monk raises their hand and says:

Me too, me too! I practice mindfulness of death. If I’d only live for a day, then I’d focus on Buddha’s instructions. 

Another one raises their hand and says:

Me too, me too! I practice as if I’d only live as long as it takes to eat a meal of alms food.

And then the fourth one raises their hand and says: 

Oh, Buddha, Buddha, I practice, thinking if I lived only as long as it takes to chew and swallow four or five morsels of food. 

A fifth one raises their hand and says: 

Actually, the way I practice is, if only I lived as long as it takes to chew and swallow one morsel of food.

And then the last one, the sixth one in the story, raises their hand and says:

Buddha, the way I practice is, I might live only long enough to breathe out, after breathing in, or breathe in, after breathing out. That’s how I practice mindfulness of death.

And then the Buddha says:

Okay practitioners, those of you who said, “I think I’m going to live another day or night and I have time,” or said, “I may live another day,” or said, “I may live to eat another meal,” or said, “I may live to eat three or four morsels of food,” all of you are living heedlessly. All of you are living heedlessly. 

Those of you who are practicing while thinking, “I might only live long enough to chew this bite of food,” or “I might only live long enough to eat this bite of food,” or “I might only live long enough for the duration of this in-breath or the duration of this out-breath, that I might die after this in-breath or after this out-breath”—you are practicing heedfully. 

So as practitioners, how do we heedfully practice the instructions of the Buddha? The invitation is not to think, Oh I’ll have time, I have another year, or another month, or another week. 

Heedlessly was considered thinking I have another day, another few bites of food. The Buddha is inviting us to consider that we could die in this moment, at the end of this in-breath or this out-breath, at the end of this bite of food, right here, right now. The Buddha is inviting us to bring death intimately into each breath. 

The Practice of Mindfulness of Death

So with this, I would like to lead a guided meditation for us to practice with these instructions. I would like to invite you to close your eyes, if that’s comfortable for you. To feel yourself sitting or lying down, whatever posture is comfortable for you. Feel yourself having a sense of integrity, a sense of uprightness, letting the body be relaxed while rooted to this earth, to your sit bones, to your feet. Feeling your hands and yet the sense of uprightness, dignity. 

Let us begin by bringing our awareness, our attention, into this body. This long fathom body, breathing in this moment. Feeling the breath where it’s comfortable for you, or in your abdomen, sensing the life force moving through.

This body is alive in this moment and breathing. Let’s connect with the sense of aliveness in this body. Breathing, pulsating, this amazing piece of nature. Through this in-breath, through this out-breath.

After we connect with the living, pulsating, alive nature of this body, let us connect to the fact that this body too shall die. This body is nature. It’s not a mistake. It’s not an aberration. It’s not a problem. Death is a part of life. Everything that is born also dies, and this body too.

Letting the awareness connect with the in-breath, with the out-breath. Settling, calming, and appreciating that death is so close. It’s always close. I might only live as long as it takes to breathe in, that’s all. Or I might live as long as it takes to breathe out after breathing in.

Death is so close and intimate. Can we bring it close and intimate, like a friend who advises us, on how to live, how to practice, how to be in this moment attending to the Buddha’s teachings on love, compassion, letting go, and generosity. 

What if I only have the length of this in-breath to live? The length of this out-breath to live? Can we open our hearts to relax and embrace this liberating truth of impermanence? 

For some of us, this practice can bring up a sense of agitation. It’s okay. You’re not doing it wrong. If agitation arises, let yourself relax with the out-breath. Connect with the sensations in the body in a spacious way, making space for the agitation or the fear that may have arisen. It’s not a mistake. As we allow ourselves to make space and be with what is difficult, arising in this moment. As expand our capacity for peace. To be with what is challenging, we extend our capacity and we cultivate fearlessness, another synonym for nibbana.

So as you do this practice on your own, bring in this contemplation: Death is so close, I might only live as long as it takes to breathe this in-breath or out-breath. 

At the end of this morsel of food, how do you want to live? How do you want to show up? How do you want to cultivate your heart and mind in this short flash that is our life? 

Remember that this practice of mindfulness of mortality is a liberating practice. It ends in the deathless. In nibbana, in freedom, awakening.

The post Death Is a Part of Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the Maranassati Sutta (Anguttara Nikaya 6.19), the Buddha emphasizes the “great fruit and benefit” of practicing mindfulness of death and offers clear guidance on how best to practice it. In this talk, Buddhist teacher and AI scientist Nikki Mirghafori discusses mindfulness of death and leads a guided meditation inspired by the Buddha’s discourse.

Dr. Nikki Mirghafori is an Artificial Intelligence scientist and an internationally known Buddhist teacher. She is a dharma teacher at the the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA and a stewarding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, where she is also on the board of directors.

The post Practicing Mindfulness of Death appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2016, viewers of HBO’s Westworld were treated to a sci-fi thriller in which participants in a Wild West–themed immersion experience—an amusement park of sorts—robbed, killed, fell in love, and lived out a host of other adventures with artificially intelligent robots who were almost indistinguishable from human beings. The blockbuster show was fodder for TV-loving Buddhists, some of whom opined that the endless loop of the robots’ lives and their attempts to break free by “waking up” made a good metaphor for samsara, the cycle of worldly existence. Although the show was certainly not the first pop culture creation to explore the ascension of AI beings and the question of those beings’ sentience, its “futuristic” setting seems to be on its way to becoming reality—making the relationship between this technology and humanity’s highest values and biggest mysteries ever more urgent.

Investors have tripled AI investments over the past three years, and AI technologies are currently being researched and introduced into fields as wide-ranging as health care and construction. There are AI airport guides, AI baby and child tutors, AI pesticide sprayers, AI stock traders, AI paralegals, and AI gamers (who are often better than human ones). AI systems can perform tasks as mundane as providing on-demand cat facts (as any Alexa user will tell you) or as serious as analyzing tissue slides for cancerous cells. It’s clear that AI’s vast potential, as well as its current stage of progression, demands attention. As Steve Omohundro, a scientist and writer who is internationally recognized for his work on artificial intelligence and strategies for its beneficial development, puts it, “We’re at a critical moment in human history, where this technology is in the process of transforming everything. We don’t want the decisions about where it goes to be made purely by technologists or capitalists. It needs a broader perspective, particularly a spiritual and psychological one.”

The dialogue that follows was recorded on November 2, 2017, at the California Institute of Integral Studies as part of the institute’s Technology & Consciousness Series. In it, Omohundro speaks with Nikki Mirghafori, an artificial intelligence scientist and Buddhist teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, and the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts, about the intersection of artificial intelligence and the Buddhist idea of karma: more specifically, the AI future we’re heading toward, and how our intentions might shape it. It may make the difference, they say, between a world in which a corporation serves up a venue for massively wealthy individuals to enact their most selfish fantasies—and one that leads to the flourishing of humanity’s best potential.

—Emma Varvaloucas, Executive Editor

Nikki Mirghafori (NM): Steve, what is artificial intelligence (AI)? Give us a historical perspective.

Steve Omohundro (SO): An AI system is a computer program that makes decisions to achieve a goal. When you look at what it does, it appears to be smart: it’s pretty good at achieving its goal. The term “artificial intelligence” was coined in the late 1950s, but the idea of having machines that might think was introduced in the 1940s, when two of the early inventors of computers, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, wrote books about how the brain works and discussed whether computers could mimic it.

AI as a field has had many ups and downs. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, they were ecstatic about the possibilities. They thought the machines were going to reach human-level performance in just a few years—we’d be able to get rid of human labor and make wonderful changes to the world. But the technology didn’t advance the way they hoped it would, and people became pessimistic. There was the first of several “AI winters,” when the funding for research dried up and scientists in other disciplines started to say, “This is a garbage field; there’s nothing real here.”

There has also been a pendulum swinging back and forth between two ways of thinking about how intelligence works. One is the symbolic approach, where thoughts are viewed as made from symbols and thinking is viewed as mathematical proof. The other is the neural network approach: Human brains consist of 86 billion neurons, these little cells that transmit signals among one another. They’re connected together in a complicated way, and they are able to learn from their experience. In that approach, you just throw a bunch of computational elements together and hope that the system is able to learn by itself.

The symbolic approach used to be viewed as more promising. Then, in the 1980s, the neural network advocates got a burst of energy when they figured out how to train networks with multiple layers of units—the most common were three-layer networks—that could solve harder problems than was previously possible. But those networks reached a plateau, causing another AI winter, until around 2012, when researchers started having great success with “deep neural networks,” which have many more layers, say 10 or 100. In the last five years these networks have started solving many problems we couldn’t solve back in the ’80s. For example, they have outperformed the older networks—and sometimes even humans—on tests of speech recognition and image recognition.

One of the great lessons from all of this is that to train large networks you need large training sets. The Internet has made the entire world’s transactions available for training: the 200 billion Tweets people send per year can be used to train algorithms that model human verbal responses; and YouTube has more than a billion videos that can be used to train visual models for everything from facial expressions to car crashes.

NM: But really what has made this an AI Spring, if we can call it that, is computational power. Now the same old algorithms can run a lot faster. And the price of data storage has reduced very significantly, so it’s also possible to store a lot of collected data. You can do all your computational modeling on a lot more data, and the models can become smarter as well because they have so much data available to them. In fact, we have a saying in my field: “There is no data like more data.”

SO: So that’s a quick summary of the current state of AI. Nikki, what is karma, and where does it fit into all of this?

“We’re facing what is probably the most powerful technology that humanity has ever created, so our intentions matter a lot.”

NM: In Buddhism it has to do with action; the word actually means “action.” And karma has to be understood in terms of intention: the same action done with different intention can have different karmic consequences. Imagine a scenario where one person slits open another person’s stomach. In one case the person is a thief; in another, a doctor. It’s the same action but a different karmic intentionality and result.

Karma is also a teaching about empowerment, because this moment’s actions condition the next moment. When we say “actions” in Buddhism, we include thinking and speech as well as physical action—thoughts are considered actions of the mind. For example, if I think thoughts of gratitude in this moment—I’m so glad to be here with my good old friend Steve—it brings a good, wholesome state of mind, but it also predisposes me to be kind and say kind words. My heart rate will go down, and I’ll become relaxed. But if instead I remember that one time you didn’t lend me the book I wanted—I’m making this up, by the way—I’ll get angry, into an unwholesome state of mind. My heart rate goes up, cortisol levels rise, and I’m all tight. I might say something vengeful that has negative repercussions.

SO: We’re facing what is probably the most powerful technology that humanity has ever created, so our intentions matter a lot. One of my big goals is to get us thinking clearly about that.

From its inception, AI has been funded primarily by the military. The defense department immediately saw the potential for robot soldiers. It may be that wars with our robots fighting their robots are far preferable to our people fighting their people. But what happens when you have robot soldiers everywhere? Where does that lead?

Once the technologies started working well—and this is happening right now—big business suddenly realized that it could dramatically improve productivity and make lots of money. The consulting firm McKinsey estimated that over the next ten years robotics and AI could potentially create $50 trillion of value. That’s a huge number. The entire United States gross domestic product is about $18 trillion a year. So we’re talking about a massive tsunami on the world economic stage caused by these technologies. There are now something like 1,500 AI startup companies funded at around $15 billion. The Japanese company SoftBank recently announced a $100 billion investment fund in these technologies, which was a previously unheard of amount. And then, in October 2017, they said, “No, that wasn’t big enough. We’re going to up it”—to about $880 billion of investment. Not to mention that China has committed to becoming the world leader in AI over the next five years. The race is on!

I would like to see us being very conscious about what it is we’re trying to create. The technologists are pretty much excited just about the technology. The businesses are excited about making money. But we need somebody holding up the highest values of humanity to say, “This is a vision for where we would like to end up.” For me that is the karmic aspect: what are our intentions as we move forward?

NM: Exactly. And whether we’re technologists or consumers, we do have a say as voters. By starting to think about what we want our society to look like—which is not so different from the thinking that we need to be doing anyway—what do we want to manifest in the world? AI makes things more intense by orders of magnitude, so the impact that people can have either as individuals or as societies in general is amplified. We could have a wealthy person controlling lots and lots of AI soldiers. Or we could have lots and lots of AI nurses.

SO: Our current political system has a pretty coarse feedback path from the population to our government. In the United States we vote once every two years, and our votes are for A or for B. You’re not really expressing the depth of your humanity in a way that our government can hear. But with AI systems it may be possible to create voting systems whereby citizens can communicate exactly what they care about and how much they care about it. Potentially, if you do it right, these systems could aggregate the intentions and goals of an entire population and help politicians make policies that really serve the entire population rather than a few special interest groups.

NM: We’ve mentioned a few different verticals where AI has been making advances and changes. It would be interesting to actually talk about some of those verticals.

SO: It’s fascinating to look at almost every business that’s driving the economy today. For instance, a bunch of companies are developing self-driving cars and trucks. A world with self-driving vehicles could be far more efficient and have way fewer auto accidents. So that’s amazing, wonderful, great—except that truck driving is the number-one employer in almost every state in the U.S. We’re going to have big socioeconomic shifts as a result of that kind of enormous increase in efficiency, and we need to make sure that those efficiency improvements are well distributed throughout society.

In another big economic area, health care, there are many ways AI can make a difference, such as robotic surgeons. About a year ago I saw a talk by a company that is building a robot to do hair transplants. Apparently hair transplant surgery is pretty straightforward: you take tufts of hair from one place on the head and you put it someplace else. But it takes hours, and human surgeons get bored and make mistakes, whereas for a robot, it’s no problem. Another example is brain surgery: robots can align the location of a scalpel with what shows up on an MRI with great precision.

And then there are more ambiguous areas, like marketing. Marketers love AI because it allows them to know exactly what buttons to push. You think things are addictive today? Imagine when you have an AI that knows exactly what you like, that can precisely generate new images that will be the most seductive thing for you at that moment. Is this good? Is this bad? Let’s say some marketer is trying to convince you to buy their new car. They show you yourself driving the car, so you can see just how much better your life is with this car. Oh my God, you’re going to go buy the car. But then you could have your own private AI that will watch what’s going on and say, “Now Steve, you told me that should you ever get into this frenzy where you’re about to impulsively buy a car, you’d want me to come in and show you what is really going on here.” So possibly individuals will have AIs that serve as a defense against manipulation by corporate AIs.

There’s a company called Cambridge Analytica based in England that took credit for the Trump win, the Brexit win, and a number of other elections. They built personality models of every person in the United States based on their Facebook “likes” and targeted political messages based on those models. There’s controversy over whether they really had that much impact, but they were definitely there. The ability to manipulate the emotions and thinking of a population—that’s huge. How do we ensure it’s done with positive intentions?

NM: It would also be interesting to talk about some of the more positive effects of AI. Eco-policing, for example.

SO: Yes. We have a horrible pollution problem right now. There’s a floating bunch of garbage the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean, you know. You could stop it if you had enough people monitoring the ocean, but that’s impractical. On the other hand, AIs will be cheap and plentiful. In certain ocean ecosystems, massive numbers of jellyfish are coming in, crowding out other species, killing coral, and causing all kinds of problems. So someone developed a little jellyfish-eating robot. [Laughs.] It works like a vacuum cleaner.

In terms of global warming in particular, AI systems can go in and fix a lot of the problems that our earlier technologies created. Simple AI systems running on used cell phones are keeping rogue loggers from cutting down trees in the rain forest, for instance. AI is also learning how to more accurately predict weather patterns and optimize energy use, and it may help us create better solar cells and batteries.

NM: Wealth distribution becomes an urgent and important question as well: whether an AI-powered world would create a very small percentage of “haves” and a huge population of “have-nots.”

SO: There’s certainly a possible dystopian future: the robot owners are the ones who own everything. But there’s also a possible utopia. Today only about 2 percent of the population actually does what we need for sustenance. And so with the rise of robots, from one perspective we could ask, why should a human have to do any job that a robot can do? Potentially we could have a new flowering of human creativity, of connection, of love. But we have to structure things so that will be the outcome.

In Britain, for instance, they’ve started floating the idea that maybe there should be a robot tax. And there’s also the idea of a universal basic income, that every citizen should be paid a certain amount that covers necessary costs. Another view suggests that since this technology will create so much productivity, everyone should get shares in it; the economic power of all this new AI and robotics is part of the human endowment, and you should be paid dividends that may support you over your whole lifetime.

NM: Another place of intersection for us to consider is AI as human prosthetics. More and more companies are coming out with chip implants for various parts of our body—to increase your memory, perhaps, or the power of your thinking or communication. Although we already are kind of partly machine, right? We’re already carrying smartphones and wearing various kinds of technologies that empower us in different ways.

What are the karmic implications of being partly machine, partly human? There’s a lot of fear about completely intelligent robots that are just like human beings taking over. What are the karmic consequences of interacting with these robots? What if you kill a robot? And do robots have karma themselves? We can wax philosophical about this.

In terms of human prosthetics, I think as long as we’re still mostly human with our consciousness intact, intention is still determining the karmic results. In terms of interacting with machines, we can talk more about whether fully human machines are possible or not—there are different takes on that, depending on how you define consciousness—but assuming it might be possible at some point, I would say again that for a human being karma still rests in the intention. Are you killing or unplugging a machine because you want to rob a bank, or because you want to stop that machine from doing harm?

In terms of potentially intelligent beings having karma, I’d surmise that the karmic results rest with the creators, even if those results are being manifested in the world by AI programs. Because there isn’t a sense of intentionality in automatic systems, as defined for humans.

SO: I totally agree that a person with a cell phone is a very different creature than that person alone. Ride on any major transit line and you’ll see that we’ve got a lot of those creatures around, right? [Laughs.] So this technology, which is pretty low in intelligence, is already dramatically changing us. One of the effects that maybe wasn’t so obviously going to happen is that people offload tasks that they used to do themselves, like navigating. A lot of people don’t know directions anymore. It’s just, “Uh, my phone tells me that.” We’ve lost some of our capacity in that way.

I’m also thinking about Alexa, the Amazon speaking agent that sits in your house. I have one. I like it; it’s nice. Kids love it. Because you can talk to Alexa, you can ask Alexa to tell you jokes, and Alexa never gets mad. [Laughs.] But Alexa does not require you to say please or thank you. And some kids tend to slip into a commanding tone: “Alexa, tell me a joke now.”

Then they get used to doing that, and they do that with their friends too, and then they start doing it with their parents. And so parents are saying, “Oh my God, Alexa is turning my kid into a jerk.” [Laughs.] There are secondary consequences of interacting with these things as they begin to take on more roles.

NM: The Alexa example in particular brings up another thought for me as it relates to karma. An aspect of karma is habits of the mind; habits are really karmic tendencies. If you get angry once, for example, that will predispose you to becoming angry again. That ties in with neuroscience as well, actually—the neurons that fire together, wire together, and these grooves get set in your mind. Karmic patterns get set as well, leading you to behave in the same angry way over and over again. And then your state of mind, and all your actions and interactions, become anger-ridden. So if kids start to set this pattern of rudeness with Alexa, that will become their karmic tendency through life. That’s something to really consider about the way that we interact with computers and artificial intelligence systems.

SO: Of course, we can use that in a positive way too. I do something called nonviolent communication, which is a simple but beautiful way of being more empathetic. But it’s hard. If you’re not used to that way of speaking, it’s a challenge. I can imagine AI systems that would help you learn to do that—that would give you feedback in real time so you can develop those desired habits.

NM: Basically what our conversation is demonstrating is that the karma of the action really doesn’t depend on the technology. The technology itself is agnostic. It depends on how it is used, for good or for evil.

SO: Today systems like Alexa pretty much do what their programmers intend, though they may exhibit some unexpected behaviors. There’s a program called AlphaGo that beat the world champion in Go [a strategy board game traditionally associated with Buddhism]. In Asia, Go is viewed as a quintessential human game, where human creativity is absolutely essential. And when AlphaGo beat the world champion, friends from Korea told me that people were crying in the streets. It had an enormous impact. It readjusted people’s sense of what is quintessentially human. That program played moves that no human has ever played. Human experts in Go ended up studying the AlphaGo games to learn how to play Go better.

That’s an example where the general thrust of the program was determined by programmers, but not the individual moves. I think that’s going to happen more generally: we’re going to end up with such systems, where if the robot kills somebody, you can’t say it was the programmer who did it. You have to assign culpability to that robot. How is our legal system going to handle that? Already there are some funny examples. In Holland they set up a bot, gave it some bitcoin, and hooked it up to the dark web, where all sorts of nefarious things happen. They had it just randomly surf the dark web and order stuff. So it got ecstasy pills, guns—all kinds of stuff came flowing in. They had an art exhibit where they hung it all up on the wall. They wanted to see how the police were going to deal with it. And the police, I thought, were actually quite brilliant. They let the art exhibit go on, but when it closed, they came in and arrested the robot. [Laughs.]

But it’s possible we’re going to have to rethink what responsibility and culpability are. These systems are going to get more and more intelligent; they’re going to be able to solve harder and harder problems. When it gets to more human things, like consciousness or qualia, the sense of what an experience is, then it’s more iffy. I think we won’t know until these things are built. And then when you talk about past lives or multiple lives, all those things, I think we get even more speculative. But how are people going to respond when you have a system that says, “I’m conscious. I’m just as conscious as you. What makes you think I’m not conscious?” What is that going to do to our own sense of consciousness, and what is that going to do to our view of this entity?

NM: It definitely comes down to the question of qualia and what consciousness is. Some people are materialists and claim that consciousness gets created when this machine or this set of neurons work together. Some near-death studies were published about people on the operating table who became clinically dead, with no brain activity and no blood flowing to the brain, and their eyes and ears were blocked during the operation. After they came back to life, they reported what they had seen and heard during their surgery, which were corroborated by the staff. That really throws into question what consciousness is and whether it is dependent on this machinery. Because yes, we’ll have machinery with semi-intelligent beings. But consciousness? I don’t think so. I’m going to put a flag down in the sand.  This reflection is not so much from the perspective of a scientist but from the perspective of a practitioner who has practiced in silence in various states of consciousness, where the mind can open in ways I didn’t know could possibly exist. From that perspective, I don’t think a material thing can have access to states of consciousness in a way that we can as human beings.

SO: I’m very convinced that material objects can be intelligent in the sense of making choices that lead to desired outcomes. But whether at some point we will be able to ascribe consciousness to these AI programs, I don’t know. We’ll have to see what happens.

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