Between Buddhist ‘Self-Enlightenment’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence’: South Korea Emerging as a New Balancer

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) outpaces the human brain, it is invoking wide-spread fear that men and machines are moving into a conflicting zone. Some even suspect that AI machines may one day consider human beings as slow and sloppy, and thus worthy of subordination or elimination. A growing challenge to mitigate the looming crisis requires science to expand its artificially augmented intelligence by incorporating elements from the ethical–spiritual and human universe. Our endeavor to bridge the prevailing gap between science and spirituality focuses on Buddhism, which stands out in its ability to achieve a rare fusion between natural, spiritual and human worlds. This unique synthesis is specifically mediated by Buddhist ‘causality’, where one aspect explains reality based on a scientifically proven cause and effect paradigm, but the other aspect interprets it by compassionate humanism. It argues that the missing human–spiritual dimension in artificial intelligence can be remedied by the Buddhist concept of ‘causally’ linked to the idea of ‘self-enlightenment’. Being an integral part of Buddhist heritage and a leading player in cutting-edge science, Korea demonstrates abilities to emerge as a new balancer to incorporate the best of science, spiritually and humanism to build next-generation AI machines with distinct human qualities.