Peter Hershock, Ph.D

Artificial intelligence is a new “general purpose technology” that is dramatically transforming everything from education to geopolitics. This talk will draw on Buddhist resources, in dialogue with the TSK vision, to consider how the current data-mediated synthesis of human and machine intelligences places at risk our most basic human rights of freedom-of-attention and freedom-of-intention, and how we might ensure that human consciousness matters in ways that are compassionately humane.

Peter Hershock is an intercultural philosopher who makes use of Buddhist resources to reflect on contemporary issues of global concern. He is the Director of the Asian Studies Development Program and coordinator of the Humane Artificial Intelligence Initiative at the East-West Center in Honolulu. He has written or edited more than a dozen books, including Liberating Intimacy; Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the Information Age; Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence; Valuing Diversity: Buddhist Reflection on Realizing a More Equitable Global Future; and Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future. His newest book, Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis, offers nondualist theory of consciousness and raises ethical questions about machine consciousness, the algorithmic hacking of human consciousness, and humanity’s evolutionary future. He is a daily surfer, a happy cook and explorer of spicy world cuisines, and an enthusiastic but untrained improvisational guitarist.

Wisdom speaker series: “What would the Buddha do about AI?”