Can Upanishads be a way forward for Ethical AI?
The phenomena of artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the way world operates. It has impacted businesses and humans alike; Today, it has become an indelible part of many of our daily processes and functions.
With the use of AI, researchers, business leaders and technology innovators are unlocking avenues that were never explored before. Andrew Ng, one of the AI researchers says it to be the “new electricity”.
However, with every great innovation, it comes with a challenge. The AI ecosystem is circling their energies around finding the greater social impact with AI. Therefore new research areas such as Ethical AI are on the rise.
This has led the ecosystem to turn to psychologists and sociologists to find the optimal way of utilizing AI technology. AI fundamentally is about emulating and imitating human intelligence up to certain level.
To attain this, Researchers have to go to the deeper level of human understanding of intelligence and make a journey inward. This pinnacle of thought touches the philosophy of intersection and convergence between humans and machines.
Thousands of years ago, Indian sages made a journey inward to explore consciousness and the flow of human thought — through the great Upanishads.
The Upanishads can help the philosophy of AI to grow in multiple ways to strengthen the impact of AI for better social impact.
The Taittiriya Upanishad explores the deep layers of human mind. It says that the human mind is the instrument of consciousness, which is made of various components: sense, emotions, intellect and will.
Isn’t AI about the same thing? Imitating intelligence by “sensing”, then by “willing” to act on it, then to use the “intellect” to act then to address through rightful of “emotions” with semantical behaviour.
Taitiriya Upanishada can greatly help in evolving thoughts of AI.
Agent based Systems, a branch of AI which addresses to act on dynamic environments, explores through “Means End Reasoning”, where the AI algorithm goes through (With an example of Robot picking up glass of water)
1. The Robot “desires” for a glass of water
2. The Robot “Intends” to pick up the glass
3. Robot “plans” to find an optimal way of picking up the glass
4. Robot “executes” the plan to pick up the glass.
The algorithm goes through the cycle of desire — intention — planning — execution.
There is a shloka in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explaining this reasoning method for human mind:
“You are what your deep,driving desire is.
As your desire is, so your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.”
How amazing and striking resemblance!
If Ethical AI is about journey inwards, then Upanishads can be a nice beginning!
It is a revolving and ever evolving thought process.
