Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future

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Machine learning, big data and AI are reshaping the human experience and forcing us to develop a new ethical intelligence. Peter Hershock offers a new way to think about attention, personal presence, and ethics as intelligent technology shatters previously foundational certainties and opens entirely new spaces of opportunity. Rather than turning exclusively to cognitive science and contemporary ethical theories, Hershock shows how classical Confucian and Socratic philosophies help to make visible what a history of choices about remaking ourselves through control biased technology has rendered invisible. But it is in Buddhist thought and practice that Hershock finds the tools for valuing and training our attention, resisting the colonization of consciousness, and engendering a more equitable and diversity-enhancing human-technology-world relationship. Focusing on who we need to be present as to avoid a future in which machines prevent us from either making or learning from our own mistakes, Hershock offers a constructive response to the unprecedented perils of intelligent technology and seamlessly blends ancient and contemporary philosophies to envision how to realize its equally unprecedented promises.

Reviews

This book asks a very original research question: who do we need to be present as in order to respond to the predicament of artificial intelligence This is not a self-help guide, but an invitation to an interpersonal, intercultural, and intergenerational pluralist deliberation about one the pressing challenges of our time. Compulsory reading for anyone who looks further than the usual discourses and is ready to improvise. * Mark Coeckelbergh, Professor of Philosophy of Media and Technology, University of Vienna, Austria *
Hershock breaks new ground in linking Buddhist scholarship to contemporary predicaments occasioned by intelligent technology. Recommended for anyone working in technology ethics as a means of extending their perspective beyond the usual ethical frameworks. * Laura Specker Sullivan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, USA *

Author Bio

Peter D. Hershock is Director of the Asian Studies Development Program and leads the Initiative for Humane AI at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai'i.