Artificial Intelligence Hijacking Your Spirituality | Swami Sarvapriyananda

„#Bigtech #Artificialintelligence #Spirituality
Artificial Intelligence Hijacking Your Spirituality | Swami Sarvapriyananda
120.971 AufrufePremiere am 18.10.2021“

„Rajiv Malhotra Official
470.000 Abonnenten
Rajiv Malhotra’s Milestone book Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power presented at the united nations conference :Ethics of Artificial Intelligence – Exploring Pluri – Perspectives by Swami Sarvapriyananda ji, resident Swami and head of the Vedanta Society of New York. In this monologue he goes on to explain the biased view of human and human spirituality coming out of AI and Big tech algorithms. Rajiv Malhotra’s book Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power unmasks the inner workings and end goals of AI that stem from a for profit motive, ultimately aiming to engage every human and sell their behavior as a product.

Time stamps:
00:00 – Introduction
02:01 – AI & hijacking your Attention ?
06:31 – Technologies are not neutral
10:22 – AI and Altruism
12:58 – AI and Maximization of Desires
16:06 – Conclusion“

„They provide an enormous amount of free service to us,
but what is being sold there is us more specifically our attention, so
they talk about an attention economy see what propels these uh technologies what
fuels these technologies, it is nothing more than money of course,
it’s profit driven and so what they discovered was it is
not enough to provide interesting content online anymore,
one must also in fact specifically try to grab the attention
of the person the whole idea is that these platforms make money from
advertisement and so that demands our attention,
what they have been doing in silicon valley is designing and fine-tuning
these platforms, so that they kind of train us into distraction,
instead of concentrated and focused attention, we are being trained into
distraction let me give a practical example of what is meant by this, our
phones, I also have one of those, these smartphones have you noticed how once in
a while they buzz or beep or there’s a ting sound and something has come maybe
a notification, maybe a little message or a text or something, it seems innocuous,
but there is something insidious there the idea there is
that it functions on the same same psychology as the slot machines and
gambling machines in Las Vegas, for example, they provide us with some incentive to
keep looking to keep trying and it seems it trains our…
neuropsychology to keep giving giving us births bursts of dopamine once in a while,
so that we get sort of addicted to keep looking at the device at the smartphone
or whatever, the more we look at it once in a while we get a little bit of pleasure
this is the psychology of addiction..“

„It´s a tired old cliche, some technologies are not neutral…“

„internet technologies…the way artificial is coming is a kind of technology like that which is not neutral it can actually and it is already causing some kind of damage
… students, teachers and students are already talking about a phenomenon they call
continuous partial attention…“

„spirituality depends on attention and the training of attention,
what these technologies are doing and will probably do in an exponential
fashion in the near future, is train us in the opposite direction um,
surreptitiously without our knowledge from a very young age children will be
trained to distraction and restlessness, so this is one point,
the second point is community, selflessness, altruistic action,
what one might call, you know the term karma yoga, which basically means
that our instinctive urge is to act for ourselves, selfishly
and if one wants to be spiritual one must extend the boundaries of the self,
include others, so engage in selfless action, in
altruistic action in service activities…now what is the connection to ai, one problem could be and is already is is that these technologies tend to cut us away from our fellow fellow human beings.“

„the third area of concern would be what might be generally called bhakti,
all religions theistic religions it’s about god but, even the non-theistic religions like
buddhism and jainism thefeeling of love and compassion and devotion is to
be cultivated, so what what is the underlying philosophy is that our desires continuously flow out in 100 different channels through to the world
and ultimately these are not satisfying if you really want satisfaction and
peace of mind you have to collect all these desires and sublimate them and
focus them either towards god or you know a transcendent being
enlightened being, an enlightened being like the Buddha or the Jeena or whatever it is and focus it in the love of all beings.
Now, if ai and it’s almost certain that ai is going to be driven by the profit motive
it will even more insidiously more effectively uh seek to fulfill every
little desire and maximize our outward urges our desires for 100 different things in the world it’s going to be market driven profit driven anyway so that’s another area of
concern that our bhakti traditions might be impacted and finally from the perspective of vedanta the path of knowledge there is a curious similarity with uh the way ai functions
and and how vedanta functions also but ultimately they are very dissimilar what
is the similarity both of them they inquire into our self sense of self and
then analyze it, vedanta says that you your apparent sense of self that i’m this limited body and mind this is not true this is a false self and we are shown
by argument arguments and insights how we are we cannot be the body how we are not the mind that we are the spirit of the atman the witness consciousness beyond body and mind
what ai does also is it analyzes our thought patterns and speech patterns and behavior patterns, building up enormous databases and then analyzes it using algorithms so the ideas of an algorithmic self, so it can be analyzed and divided and then focused upon and then micromanaged sort of, but the problem with ai is that ultimately it does not find anything uh higher or transcendent beyond this, so there is a huge philosophical difference
you know the basis the materialistic basis of ai and the spiritual basis of
of all our religious and spiritual traditions the if i were to put it in one sentence it would be the the basis of ai is that consciousness is ultimately material and can be
infinitely subdivided and analyzed and controlled and manipulatedk,
the spiritual approach is consciousness is not material, it is transcendent and it is indivisible and that is where we must find ultimately seek to find meaning and peace and transcendence, so these four areas of concern which we need to look out for and manage in the years ahead the area of attention the importance of focus versus distraction the area of altruistic action unless we are connected with our fellow fellow beings i’m afraid unselfishness altruism might might disappear altogether and the area of devotion into some higher power that is one area that might be impacted and finally the very philosophical idea of what is a human being what is our ground reality fundamental reality there there seems to be a conflict between the ai version of uh of a human being and the spiritual version of of what a human being or what we truly are.“