Artificial Intelligence and Ancient Wisdom, a Both/And Story

Therefore many plea for regulating, containing, slowing down or even banning the deployment of AI applications and legislators all over the world are working on new regulatory frameworks. Regulation will certainly be needed as we risk to open up a Pandora’s box. The consequences of the introduction of AI applications are hardly known and may be even in principle unforseeable and uncontrollable due to its emerging capabilities. Doing nothing and hoping that it will settle by itself is not an option, as the stakes are simply too high. With new technology also come new responsibilities.

However, one can ask the question if putting a cap on AI is sufficient, and even if it’s realistic or desirable? In a free society you cannot prevent innovation, especially, when it’s clear that it has the potential of great benefits. It feels for example somewhat artificial to let people do a job when a machine can do it much quicker and better, simply to keep them employed and provide them with purpose and identity. Moreover, there is a race for technological and economic dominance going on that no one wants to loose. Therefore loopholes and workarounds will be easily found to bypass any regulations.

Complementary to a possible negative route of slowing down and curbing these developments, one should also invest in building a positive, equally strong counterbalance next to AI. It is the essence of paradoxical thinking not to spend all the available energy on going against the current, but to nurture and optimally use the self-correcting power of the opposite side.

This positive counterbalance is about making people and society more capable and skilled to keep control over this technology by staying focused on what really matters. We should therefore focus on our unique and inaliable human prerogative: to direct this amazing computational power to what we value and find important. This requires a reflection on our purpose and values, also on a moral level.

To build up this counterbalance we can gain great benefit from Ancient Wisdom, or should we call it AW. It is about strengthening the skills and practices that were equally relevant in antiquity as they are now: linking our actions to a deeper purpose, asking the ‘Why’ questions, balancing competing values, making sound judgments in moral dilemmas and conducting a meaningful dialogue. Let’s unpack some of these AW skills and practices.

Can the unique combination of qualities that define us be automized and perfectlty captured in algorithms? Who are we if we cannot refer anymore to our special capabilities, carefully built up by years of study and experience, as a source of identity and professional pride?

The fundamental difference between us and machines is that we can give purpose and meaning, and cherish dreams and ambitions. Machines can help us realize this, but they can never take over our sense making role. For example, an AI application can tell us what we need to do in order to optimize our physical health, but only we can decide how healthy we want to be, and how we want to balance health with other values in our life, such as our ambitions, our need to enjoy and relax, or our desire to be accepted by our social environment.

Therefore our unique human focus should shift from the ‘’how’’ to the ‘’why’’. AI can review a wide range of different options and anticipate their positive and negative effects more quickly than we can, but what we ultimately choose is based on our purpose and values. In other words, we are the ones that ask the questions.

We should therefore strengthen our capability in asking ourselves fundamental questions, on a personal, organizational and societal level: What is important? What makes us happy? What makes a good society? How should we work together? How should we bring all our different views together in a joint course of action? These questions cannot be answered in a purely rational and technocratic way, but require a deeper connection with our intuition, heartfelt feelings and bodily wisdom. All of which is the domain of Ancient Wisdom.

Ancient Wisdom increasingly becomes an essential quality in our work. The big challenges of today are not so much complicated technical puzzles to be solved, but complex paradoxes to be navigated: what is the balance that we want to strike in our society between for example stability and change, between solidarity and own responsibility, beteen climate and cost of living or beween individual freedom and social cohesion? And, even better, how can we realize both?

The same applies to the work of the professional. What really differentiates a great professional is the ability to effectively deal with dilemmas and tensions and to find for each case the right balance between competing values and goals: between commercial opportunities and sustainability, between privacy and security or between technology and personal touch. Balancing requires a reflection on our own values and on what the situation needs, and all the tensions that may arise from this. It calls upon our moral compass and how we can justify our choices to ourselves and to others.

This requires that we improve our skills to have a constructive and meaningful dialogue with others. The skills already praised in Ancient Wisdom are more relevant than ever: being able to listen, to self-reflect, to investigate the question behind the question, to sense what is needed, to build trust, to empathize with people who are different.

One of the biggest AI related challenges that requires plenty of Ancient Wisdom is rethinking the future of work.

Just like offshoring and automation, AI will most likely increase the divide between highly valued creative jobs on one end of the spectrum and low wage, high stress and purpose poor jobs on the other, with not much in between. These earlier transformations have fed feelings of powerlessness, fear, unease and anger with large parts of society. Moreover, AI will also threaten the relevance of high-skilled professional work in middle positions. At least these jobs will need to be transformed and upgraded, for some a great opportunity to get rid of cumbersome nitty gritty work, for others a step too far and a direct threat. This may have a major negative impact on the livelihood of individuals and communities and on social cohesion.

From a purely economic point of view, this forces us to think and implement radically new mechanisms of redistributing wealth, not just for the sake of social and economic justice, but for the mere survival of the western society model.

However, work is more than money alone. It is a crucial source of self-esteem, pride and contributing and being part of something bigger. This will need to review and broaden our definition of what we consider as valued and purposeful work. And if one thinks about re-skilling, what are unique skills that are essential cannot be simulated by a computer? They will probably have something to do with having authentic contact and meaningful conversations with others, showing genuine interest, building purposeful relationships, giving personal attention, bringing people together and building communities. Especially in these times of loneliness and social fragmentation, these should probably be the key areas to heavily invest in, to avoid that this vacuum is filled by technology.

For building our AW capability as a necessary counterbalance to AI, we do not need to rely solely to large-scale policy interventions. Counterbalancing forces will often emerge spontaneously, as people have an increasing intuitive sense of imbalance. There are plenty of examples of this self-correcting mechanism: The more new technology comes in, the more people rediscover old technology, such as the revival of LP records with young people who are grown up with streaming technology. The more life accelerates, the more attention shifts to slowing down. The more virtual it gets, the more people value physical contacts and vintage objects. The more information overload and stress, the more people turn to mindfulness and yoga.

These developments arise from a genuine need for more balance, although they are sometimes also driven by the economic principle that scarcity increases the value. However these spontaneous self-correcting mechanisms are not enough to balance society as a whole. They are often limited to a small minority of financially stong and highly edudated people, increasing the overall gap between haves and have nots.