Is the AI Future Here? If So, Whose Future Is It?

A quarter century ago, in an interview on National Public Radio, the sci-fi writer William Gibson claimed that “the future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Today, I’m in Shanghai, gathering my thoughts as I make my way home from the Tzu Chi Forum—a two-day event that was hosted in Hong Kong by a Buddhist non-profit to foster collaborative imaginations of pathways to “Technology for Goodness.” The future is here.

I’m waiting for a robotaxi ordered through Alibaba’s ride-hailing app to take me to the Pudong International Airport. This isn’t anything unusual. Shanghai has robotaxis operating on over 750 square miles of its urban landscape, and China is embracing autonomous vehicles as vigorously as it has electric cars and rooftop solar panels. Over 300,000 robotaxis are expected to be operating in major cities across the country within the next few years. In contrast, Goldman-Sachs estimates the US robotaxi force to reach just 35,000 by the year 2030.

That is very uneven distribution. And it aptly reflects a significant difference of perspective on AI between the populations of China and the US. In sharp contrast with the US, where roughly three-quarters of the people think that AI will not have an overall beneficial effect on society, 78% of the Chinese people believe that it will. This positive assessment of AI was very much in evidence at the Tzu Chi Forum.

The Tzu Chi Foundation is a broad-based Buddhist aid and relief organization that was founded in Taiwan by a nun, Dharma Master Cheng Yen, in 1966. Compassionately troubled by seeing an indigenous Taiwanese woman refused emergency medical care during childbirth, Venerable Cheng Yen began Tzu Chi as a lay movement to offer aid and relief to all in need, especially those living on society’s margins. Since then, the Tzu Chi organization has grown to include a medical school and hospital in Hualien, Taiwan, and a worldwide, donor-funded network of aid/relief centers and volunteers that now number in the hundreds of thousands.

This background is useful for understanding the distinctive complexion of the Forum’s speakers and audience. The Forum featured nine keynote presentations and six panel discussions. These included talks by Tzu Chi board members (many retired from the IT business/engineering space) and a handful of academics, but also business leaders, AI and tech entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and media specialists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China.

From mainland China, there were two relatively high-ranked speakers from Huawei and Tencent—two of the premier tech companies in China: Sean Zhang (Head of Operations for Tencent Sustainable Social Value) who spoke on behalf of scaling up corporate charitable commitments, and Water Su (Former VP of Huawei and Senior Lecturer of Huawei Corporate Culture) who referenced the six paramitas (or relational perfections) of Mahayana Buddhism as benchmarks for human-centered AI. From a more technical angle, Yong Hua Lin (VP and Chief Engineer at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence–the premier institute in the PRC for cutting edge AI) offered a keynote talk focused on developing AI “software” capable of operating on a very wide range of “hardware” infrastructures as part of China’s effort to operationalize an “open access” approach to AI. The “goodness” of AI, she suggested, will ultimately depend on the adaptation of AI systems to understand and address local needs.

Several speakers from co-host Hang Seng University of Hong Kong (including Siu Sai Cheong, professor of translation at the Centre for Humanistic Buddhism) focused on “AI for good” in very practical terms and recommended engaging with AI as a “partner,” and not only as a “tool.” But Kenneth Kwong, Associate Director of the Institute for Knowledge Exchange at Hang Seng, riffing on management guru Peter Drucker’s claim that “the best way to predict your future is to create it,” argued that partnerships are not merely instrumental arrangements and that AI should be seen as a catalyst for reimagining the future of education and the creative purposes of knowledge.

This stress on purpose was amplified by Dr. Rey Her, CEO of the Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, who distinguished between three kinds of rationality (or intelligence)—instrumental, value-articulating, and purpose-generating—and called for AI development in which considerations of purpose being primary: a shift from the pursuit of immediate practical goals in isolation from their broader and longer-term societal ramifications to fostering morally appropriate trajectories of change.

Consistent with this focus on purpose, an interweaving theme across speakers and panels was a concern that too much emphasis has been placed on the desired and measurable output of AI systems, rather than the qualitative dimensions of human-AI interaction as an open-ended process. A second major theme was a shift away from competitive edge seeking to collaboration. In contrast with the usual invocation of collaboration in business/tech circles as the means to instrumental outputs and market consolidation, the emphasis here was on the potential for open-ended creativity that is afforded by diversity-rich collaborations.

Finally, there was a general and hopeful sense that AGI is coming (and coming soon), and that a major step in that direction will be taken as humans begin managing teams of narrow AI agents, with a coordinating AI agent learning individual human managerial styles and values. A demo of a such a narrow AI agent was given by Anthony Sar (CEO of Finoverse): an amazingly witty and natural AI relationship-broker that, via smartphone, engages conversationally with participants at major tech/VC/business conferences (meaning 5K to 45K participants) to arrange fruitful meetings based on one’s own interests and orientations.

As an American, I couldn’t help listening to this demo and thinking how impressive and depressing it was. Another step in the direction of supplanting—not just supplementing—intelligent human services: a “great leap” forward toward human obsolescence. But as several speakers made clear, including Bernard Charnwut Chan (President, Asian Financial Group), this needs to be seen in the context of East Asian demographic trends.

While it would be natural from a critical American perspective to see the East Asian emphasis on AI and robotics as a rooted in seeing workers and their rights as expendable in the pursuit of productive efficiency, lower costs, and higher profit margins, in East Asia, AI and robotics are seen as a way of addressing the mounting need for worker-replacement, not a path to job-displacement and human redundancy. It’s now expected that by mid-century, more than 40% of the region’s population will be over 60 years old. In the most concrete ways imaginable, that will bring about intensifying needs to address issues like elder care.

As the non-working population begins to exceed that of the working population, and as living children come to be far outnumbered by aging parents, can robotic AI systems take up the relational slack? Can care robots engage the elderly in ways that are consistent with the cultural values of those in need, and that are perceived as empathetic? And can this help those aging into their 70s, 80s and 90s to do so without suffering the emotional and intellectual costs of relational atrophy that would otherwise be an increasing factor in their wellbeing?

That soberingly pragmatic approach to addressing the challenges of elder care does not signal blindness on the part of those at the Tzu Chi Forum to the very real risks of job-displacement by AI. Far from it, concerns were clearly voiced about how people will derive a sense of meaning and purpose if work is taken out of their lives. But the consensus seemed to be that meaning resides in relationships and that collaborative relational dynamics should have priority over competitive dynamics.

For me, the most interesting talk was by Peter Ka-Kit Lee, Chairman of the Henderson Land Group and apparently a very hard-to-get elite shaker and mover in the Hong Kong business scene. His talk in many ways summarized the general slant of the Forum’s various speakers: 1] there are real concerns about AI-instigated job and meaning losses, and while a universal basic income might help in the short run, it will not suffice in the long run since the demographic transformation taking place will prevent governments from acquiring the resources for supporting it; 2] from a Buddhist perspective, our perceived reality is an “illusory construct” and we are prevented from penetrating it due to habitual formations; and 3] AI can be a part of addressing both 1 and 2, if it is directed to advancing humanity’s spiritual growth. For Lee, a major point is that human and chimpanzee genomes vary by only 1.23%. Human distinctiveness is about taking that slight difference and maximizing its impact. For him, AI will best serve humanity if it is seen as an evolutionary engine—a means by which to boost humanity into higher order and ultimately collaborative pursuits of meaning.

That puts the onus of realizing ethically exemplary AI squarely on us—and that means all of us, not just the AI developers and engineers who craft algorithmic codes of AI conduct. This got me thinking.

I’ve spent a lot of time in East and Southeast Asia, and I don’t think that this relational emphasis on collaboration is merely rhetorical, or that it amounts to a bias toward some subordination of the individual to the collective as in old Cold War depictions of the “Eastern mind.” To be sure, much use was made of Buddhist, as well as some Daoist and Confucian vocabulary in articulating this focus on relationality. But there also seemed to be a readiness—exemplified by Peter Lee’s keynote—to embrace the present as an evolutionary turning point and to insist that what matters most is not “what’s going to happen in the next five years to us humans?” but rather “what kind of truly creative, coevolutionary partnership are we capable of realizing with AI?”

This runs directly counter to a prevalent doomsayer scenario in which AI, AGI or ASI proves to be an existential threat to humanity and steers us over an evolutionary cliff into extinction or irrelevance. The mindset—as affirmed in the Chinese classic, the Yijing—seemed be that change is basic, everything is in flux, that change is naturally patterned, and evolution is a creative (not merely competitive) process. We can shape the dynamics of change by shaping our interdependence with AI, just as we have and should better shape our interdependence with the natural systems that constitute our planetary relational ground.

But rather than carrying humanity in the direction of a Kurzweilian singularity and the possibility of biology-transcending “transhuman” futures, there remains in the East Asian context a valorization of human embodiment and all that goes with it. This echoes the claim in the Confucian Analects that “it is not the Dao (or cosmic/natural order) that extends the human; it is the human that extends the Dao.” But it also recalls Buddhist valorizations of the human realm as the birth realm that is most suited to the pursuit and attainment of enlightened and enlightening liberation.

So, while there was some concern about the exact interface between human agency and AI agency—an agential and evolutionary frontier along which there is lots of data-mediated push and pull—the bottom line seems to be that we need to think of AI alignment issues as being kin to the issues we encounter when we’re raising our children. Our children start off knowing very little about the world, but are immensely capable of learning. As we interact with, guide, and correct them, our children are gradually enculturated into appropriate (or inappropriate) ways of being present, making decisions, and acting. The same is true of AI.

This view of so-called alignment contrasts sharply with the now typical approach that presupposes the necessity of directly coding ethical principles and rules into AI systems. It means engaging with AI systems in ways that foster their emulation of human moral sensibilities, rather than “programming in” some preset and presumptively fixed moral rules. Rather than being the result of faultless coding, productive, creative, and ethical human-AI attunement will be the result of appropriately shaped and reshaped commitments to truly virtuosic—that is, both practically effective and morally exemplary—human-AI partnerships.

At least from my Buddhist perspective, among our possible human-AI futures, that is one that merits more even global distribution.

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Peter Hershock is a co-founder of the Buddhism & AI Initiative and an intercultural philosopher who reflects on contemporary issues of global concern. Past Director of the Asian Studies Development Program, he is currently Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu, where he has been the recipient of significant grants, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Academy for Korean Studies, and the Freeman Foundation. He is the author of more than fifty peer-reviewed papers and eight books, including Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (2021) and Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis (2023).