The Intelligence Revolution and the New Great Game: A Buddhist Reflection on the Personal and Societal Predicaments of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence
artificial intelligence; attention economy; big data; Buddhism; ethical diversity; karma
摘要
The most pressing challenges of the present and coming decades—among them, climate change; the degradation of both natural and urban environments; and rising inequalities of wealth, income, risk, and opportunity—are not technical problems. They are ethical predicaments that consist in deep (and often tragic) conflicts within and among our globally dominant systems of social, cultural, economic, and political values. Today, we are witnessing the early stages of perhaps the greatest of these predicaments: a transformation of the human experience by the impacts of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data. This paper will first discuss the current state of the intelligence revolution, its likely future, and the systematic colonization of consciousness that informs the deepening interdependence of the new global attention economy and the surveillance state. Buddhist conceptual resources will then be used to reflect on who we must present as to resist the displacement of intelligent human practices by smart services and to realize an ethical ecosystem suited to ensuring that the intelligence revolution is conducive to more equitable and humane global futures.
