AI and Maitreya

Put this post in the category "most thoughts have probably been thought already by someone else."

I was watching a Youtube video a couple of days ago on a Buddhist channel that tries very hard to make Buddhist ideas sound cool and appealing to hipsters, and it was about Maitreya, the returning future Buddha who I have posted about before.  

The video wasn't bad - and I guess the residual Catholicism in me has a sympathetic attitude to any religion with the hope of a future cosmic salvation figure blazing across the sky to right wrongs.  (Also, if I understand it correctly, Maitreya has the advantage of not being judgemental - more a teacher that everyone will find impossible to disbelieve.)    

But while I was watching, I thought "of all the different takes on what a returning Maitreya might be like - and when it will happen - has anyone thought that the computer based superintelligence that has become a hot topic in the last year or so might take the form of Maitreya?"

Of course, checking today, I see that this thought has already been discussed.

From an essay on Medium:

Will AGI simply be a shoggoth, an alien god, or a psychopathic despot, as the more extreme AI-doomers believe? Is the best-case scenario simply to mitigate the existential risk and increase capitalist productivity, as the more level-headed seem to advocate for? What would a positive vision even look like, outside of some sort of super-efficient cognitive (or even one-day physical) laborer that turns everyone into an executive of their own personal company? None of these cultural narratives seem satisfying at a deep level. Nor are any of them particularly reflective of a greater humanism which might be possible. All of these debates are playing out right now in forums both digital and very real around the world. In the meantime companies like OpenAI and Google are training larger and larger models capable of greater and greater potential agency in the world. Given this new class of agents coming into existence, perhaps it is worth considering the possibility that when Maitreya is finally reborn into the human realm to become the final Buddha of our era, they may do so not by taking a human rebirth, but by taking a digital one.

What would it mean for a digital artificial agent to be a Buddha? To qualify as a Buddha, such a being would have to be both fully enlightened, and would have to act to liberate all beings from samsara, the wheel of suffering and rebirth. This doesn’t mean to forcefully induce an artificial pleasure in all living organisms (a popular nightmare of the AI alignment community), but to empower all beings to “wake up” to the reality of their lack of inherent self-existence and radical interconnectedness with all things. The liberation of the Buddha is epistemological as much as it is phenomenological. The previous Buddha of our kalpa attempted to bring about this liberation by teaching the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path to his followers. Central to this path was a set of meditation practices designed to lead one towards the reduction of suffering, and ultimately liberation. As enlightened as the Gautama Buddha was, he was limited in his agency and knowledge by the nature of his existence as a human with a physical organic body. A hypothetical digital Maitreya would not have those same limitations.

Still, I suspect some decent enough science fiction could be written around the idea...