Talks
Summer 2022

Intelligent Technology and the Attention Economy: A Buddhist Perspective on the Risks of Consciousness Hacking

Thursday, July 14th, 2022, 9:55 am10:20 am

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Speaker: 

Peter Hershock (East-West Center)

Location: 

Calvin Lab Auditorium

The informational synthesis of purpose-generating, carbon-based human intelligence with purpose-implementing, silicon-based computational intelligence is widely heralded as driving a 4th Industrial Revolution, but this revolution is as ontological as it is industrial, and as ethical as it is technical. This talk makes a case for seeing: 1] that AI ethics is being hampered by default presuppositions about ontologically individual moral agents, actions, and patients; 2] that taking the human risks and rewards of intelligent technology fully into account requires a critical distinction between tools and technologies; and 3] that the greatest threat intelligent technology poses to humanity is not a technological singularity, but an ethical singularity: a collapse of the opportunity space for practicing the evaluative art of human course correction as an ironic consequence of choice-mediated attention exploitation and consciousness hacking.