How can we design technology in the way that is of most benefit to humanity in the long-term? Especially in terms of human agency? What to make of Artificial Intelligence? What is the nature of the human mind and can machines think in the same way? What criteria might be appropriate to evaluate AI? Where should we look for wise guidance?

Buddhism and Computing: How to Flourish in the Age of Algorithms, published by Mud Pie Books (2021), marks the culmination of investigations spanning more than a decade, focused on these kinds of questions. It encapsulates many of the ideas explored on this site. The enquiries have been primarily from the perspective of Buddhist ethics, but are substantially interdisciplinary, brought together in a way that I hope will foster much-needed dialogue involving everyone.

I very much welcome feedback – comments, reviews, emails, etc. Please spread the word!

Table of Contents

Chapters

Prologue

1. Numbers and Computation
2. Buddhist Ethics
3. Computers and Intelligence
4. Modelling Mind and Processes
5. Designing Sustainable Social Networks
6. Ensuring Online Safety
7. Are We Here Yet?

Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgements
About the Author

Introductory Articles

I’m pleased to have shared a taste of the book in an introductory piece in the Daily Alternative, in which I try to bring attention to essential needs and from that basis assess technology. I’m also grateful for the publication of an article, Designing Software for the Present Moment, inspired by the late Ninian Smart, which seeks to broaden engagement. This appeared in Inter-religious Insight, the journal of the World Congress of Faiths, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 65–67, 2021

Social media are touted as “a good thing” in that they bring people together, promote sharing, and generally provide convenient means of facilitating online interaction. They are thus considered a public benefit that fosters well-being. Numerous scholarly studies investigating the effects of their systems on people’s lives appear largely to support this claim. And while a substantial body of literature has come from research teams employed by Big Tech companies like Meta (formerly Facebook), the general tone among the wider academic community seems to resonate similarly.

Yet it has been readily apparent for a long time — to anyone with common sense — that these systems have also fostered many ills such as increased social divisiveness, reduced cognitive functioning, addiction and general restlessness. So why have the evaluations been so lop-sided?

Social Capital

The evaluation of social media with respect to well-being is often expressed in terms of social capital. Having studied this for a few years now, I think we need to be asking more keenly the following questions.

• Where does this term come from?
• What does or did it really mean to those who originated it?
• What were the contexts in which the term was applied? What made the term valid?
• Is it valid and helpful to apply it the present contexts with particular attention to online engagement?
• Are more recent uses and application of the term in conformance with the original meaning of the term? If not, what are these new senses and are they more or less helpful?

The answer to the first part would appear to be straightforward because it is very frequently and widely quoted definition of social capital as:

the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance or recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group…

Pierre Bourdieu (1986) The Forms of Capital, page 21, or page 247 in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Richardson JG, editor)

But Bourdieu developed his ideas and theories in French and it was typically several years before they appeared in English. Thus, le capital social had been defined in 1980:

Le capital social est l’ensemble des ressources actuelles ou potentielles qui sont liées à la possession d’un réseau durable de relations plus ou moins institutionnalisées d’interconnaissance et d’inter-reconnaissance, ou, en d’autres termes, à l’appartenance à un groupe …

Pierre Bourdieu (1980) Le capital social: notes provisoires (Social Capital: Provisional Notes), which appeared in Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales. 1980; 31(1): pp. 2–3.

But what was the background context in which Bourdieu originated these theories? It was his initial fieldwork in Algeria in the late 1950s that proved pivotal and one of the key methods his used to help his reflexive approach (which, seems largely lost in SNS studies), is the deliberate use of photography. By spending time with people and examining closely the images he took of them going about their daily lives he could discern a great deal about the society and culture. The metrics-laden methods used to analyze online social networking sites are very shallow in comparison.

One of the main observations Bourdieu made was that colonisation had uprooted people socially and culturally. I’d argue that the Internet, in providing a very lean environment in which to interact is a phenomenon that uproots us all from our cultural backgrounds. Bourdieu talked a lot about le déracinement (uprooting) of peoples in Algeria.

Blog post, 15 January 2022: Bourdieu and Social Capital: Methodological Challenges.

It was also bound up with the term le capital culturel (cultural capital), which is not so prevalent in these analyses, though it has risen to prominence in mainstream education since being included in Ofsted’s inspection framework:

32. As part of making the judgement about quality of education, inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Ofsted’s understanding of this knowledge and cultural capital matches the understanding set out in the aims of the national curriculum. [i.e.,] It is the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said, and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

School Inspection Update: Education Inspection Framework, Ofsted, January 2019

The last sentence is quoted from the statutory guidance on the National curriculum in England: framework for key stages 1 to 4.

I’ve highlighted in bold the basic rationale. Whilst ‘success in life’ is a very broad term and the quote from the national curriculum would appear to support that, there are inevitable suggestions of the ‘knowledge economy’, from which cultural capital may be seen as instrumental for economic capital. Indeed, if we look at some commentarial literature, we see discussions around how the transmission of culture from generation to generation among the well-to-do gives their offspring a certain advantage that leads to positions of power and wealth. The reflection on culture as a good in and of itself can get neglected.

Hence, the achievement of material outcomes is implicitly the key driver for well-being. Yet, being replete in economic capital merely provides assurance of not suffering deprivation and doesn’t provide assurance of well-being, as made abundantly clear in Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence.

Buddhist capital: meritorious deeds

None of economic, social or cultural capital are guarantees of well-being, but the Buddha taught that happiness can surely follow from good deeds, which generate their own store of capital called merit (Pali: puñña). The generation of such capital arises through wholesome actions.

There is in fact a whole body of teachings on this kind of capital in the context of social relationships, which is the subject of research for the Sigala project.

Ever since I was a child I have tried to explore mind in a subjective-objective manner, that is, in a way that feels right, helps me to really know what’s going on, not just having logical, rational consistency. So, I naturally became interested in meditation (or mental cultivation) quite early on whilst also studying formal methods in computer science. I have explored numerous avenues as a result, trying always to retain coherence of an overall picture. In some cases, I have not got very far.

Just a few glimpses on this page, with further reading in the respective sections.

Mind, Brain and Education

Advances in neuroscience, aided by ever-higher spec’ed imaging equipment, has led to ever-finer neural correlates being established between human behaviour and well-being and observable phenomena in the brain. In recent decades, a particular area of research has been emotional development, especially among children. It is an area that I first learnt about through the work of Antonio Damasio, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and colleagues at the University of Southern California, who observed in the context of online engagement that nobler instincts take time.

I then learnt about the International Mind, Brain and Education Society (IMBES) and was encouraged to submit a poster proposal for their 2018 annual conference, my first consideration of the use of cognitive interventions — in the form of thinking routines — in the design of systems. But whilst the selection panel found it interesting, they considered that it didn’t meet the conference remit. Nevertheless, I decided to continue the research and shortly after posted a couple of articles on my blog

• Blog post, 27 August 2018: Pause for Thought: The Use of Interventions in Social Networking Sites
• Blog post, 4 September 2018: Pause for Thought: The Use of Interventions in Social Networking Sites (Part 2)

There is a lot of talk in academic circles about interdisciplinary research, but based on my experiences at Oxford University, whilst there continue to be some wonderful discoveries across boundaries, it is more normal for activities to be specialist and compartmentalised, at the expense of being holistic.

In the case of mind and education, the assumptions about mind are objective/materialist. From this the research inevitably becomes heavily dependent on machinery and thereby prevents a vital broadening of inter-disciplinary dialogue to encompass other methods in cognitive science. There are indeed many approaches to study the mind, and their proper appraisal should lead to a fuller, more holistic understanding its nature.

Mapping Mental Processes

The Buddhist approach to studying mind is epitomised in Abhidhamma, an exceedingly detailed and systematic analysis of the processes in which our minds are caught up. The technical term is citta and it may be broken down into many kinds of cetasikas (thought moments). I believe it is useful to study Abhidhamma to create mind maps and thereby learn more about how processes become variously wholesome and unwholesome. It helps to establish the right basis on which to introduce cognitive interventions, but the study is not for beginners — a general understanding of basic teachings is a prerequisite.

Mind and Artificial Intelligence

How do humans think? And what about machines? We may approach this from an orientation of cultivating more discerning awareness, as intimated above. There are many useful applications of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in the field of education and personalised learning. However, unrestrained development is likely to be disastrous and where it is used there needs to be transparency in the methods and processes.

We may also gain clues by studying historical figures who displayed extraordinary creativity, particularly in the field of mathematics. One such figure was Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematical genius, who displayed extraordinary intuition. I have spent some time exploring his approach by reference to recollections from contemporaries. He features prominently in my book, Buddhism and Computing: How to Flourish in the Age of Algorithms.