The Dalai Lama Protocol: Buddhism meets AI

With all the AI-related fears, what if we could build an AI based on the Buddhist philosophy of compassion and empathy?

I just finished the book The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler. And while I got a great deal of personal wisdom from the book, I also found that the Buddhist philosophy of cultivating compassion and empathy to be an interesting angle to machine ethics and artificial intelligence design.

The premise of one of the chapters is that human nature is essentially compassionate and gentle at birth and that anger, violence, and aggression are the result of the unbalanced development or misuse of our intelligence. Intelligence, the same intelligence that has allowed us to be masters of this world, that’s not counterbalanced with compassion can become destructive.

The way we are constructing our AI projects is starting with the intelligence. We are essentially building an entity using the opposite of how we were composed/evolved. While on the surface we appear to be trying to build something similar to ourselves.

The risk then is that our pioneers of AI may not realize or accept this fundamental difference and inadvertently create something that is all intellect and no compassion, which could ultimately lead to something truly destructive.

What might be a worthwhile experiment is to build an AI program that emulates Buddhist thinking — a Dalai Lama-bot if you will, to see if we can build an AI that can make the same decisions as the Dalai Lama based on objective compassion and empathy.

Depending on the results of this experiment, this “Dalai Lama Protocol” can then be applied to other AI projects to reduce the risk of a rogue/destructive artificial intelligence from emerging.

This could potentially be a fascinating intersection between technology, design, and the humanities. And since I’m a novice in both Buddhism and AI, I’d really welcome any thoughts from or introductions to any experts in either field.