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

The Problem

Why is there so much discontent with existing the social media provided by the ‘big tech’ companies? One trite answer is simply because social media fosters discontent!

How does it foster discontent? By promoting craving and addiction, which is why paradoxically people continue using these services despite their reservations about them. As confessed by Sean Parker, former President of Facebook:

“The thought process that went into building these applications, … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'” “And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that’s going to get you to contribute more content, and that’s going to get you … more likes and comments.” “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

Mike Allen, ‘Sean Parker Unloads on Facebook: “God Only Knows What it’s Doing to Our Children’s Brains”’, Axios, 9
November 2017

A Solution

To redesign social media from the ground up rooted in the principles of Buddhist ethics and the cultivation of wholesome relationships. This should improve the quality of awareness, enhance human agency, encourage independence of thought, and not foster addiction. This is what the Sigala project is all about.

Why ‘Sigala’?

The name is derived from the name of a follower to whom the Buddha gave the most definitive teachings on how lay people should conduct themselves for human flourishing. Actually the layman’s name was Sigāla (long ‘a’), but the diacritics can easily get omitted. Also, with a short ‘a’, it can be pronounced in the same lively way as ‘Figaro’!

Current status

Research has been ongoing since 2007 and explored various themes. From 2018 onwards, in response to Parker’s admission, special attention has been given to mind and cognition. For descriptions of these investigations, please consult the dedicated Sigala research site: https://research.siga.la/.

The next step is to code a proof of concept, for which I have established Symfony PHP framework as a suitable candidate.

The projects I have been undertaking in the past 25 years or so span theoretical research, software development, policy, implementation and practice. Much is experimental and might not be realized as a product, but in seeking practical benefit, I try to retain what I’ve learnt as it may yet have some application later on. Many problems are recurrent and the approaches (and insights) may be similar at each iteration, albeit with different tools.

My main role has been as a problem solver / developer for/of web applications, mainly for the public sector, in both staff and consultancy roles. At a university, ‘off the shelf’ products are seldom sufficient out of the box: there is usually a considerable amount of customisation required, which motivates in-house solutions.  Thus, I have worked individually and in small teams, particularly the (now closed) Academic Computing Development Team, allowing me to undertake bespoke full-stack development; wherever possible this is in accordance with open standards and using open source components (in the early days, CGI/Perl and then PHP, connecting to SQL databases; then XML and XSLT). These standards underpin the software I am currently developing. Nowadays, apart from Sigala, my development is oriented to customisations of popular systems such as WordPress.  

Whilst most of my experience of development has been small-scale, I have also been heavily involved in an institutional project – WebLearn, Oxford University’s first virtual learning environment, for which I was involved in the procurement and subsequently was responsible for the operational management when it became a centrally-hosted production service. After a while, this involved crunching through tens of millions of event log database rows to generate summary usage figures.

I have also coordinated and managed a few projects, including RAMBLE and, more recently, digital asset management at the History of Science Museum.

For details of past projects, please consult my portfolio. Here, I only highlight the start of current work.

Sigala Research Knowledge Basis (2020-)

Problem

The Sigala project concerns the research, design and development of software systems to support sustainable social networking. There is a substantial body of theory underpinning the software development, but it’s been built up sporadically, initially documented in MS Word, with a few blog posts and the occasional presentation.

To put the research on a more solid footing is a project in itself; it needs to be maintained and disseminated more sustainably, whilst making it easier to manage.  The form in which the research is shared needs to be convenient.

Solution

The references are being managed in Zotero, which not only supports bibliographic standards for records management and import/export, but also has a web-mediated infrastructure that supports shared working.

For dissemination, a WordPress site has been created locally and content migrated from the Word documents.  A workflow enables convenient deployment of a static site on a remote server along with a zip archive of almost identical content.  For added convenience, a WordPress plugin, WP Static Search (based on Lunr.js), has been extended to enable offline searches. Both of these software components will be released as open source software.

URL: https://research.siga.la/

Motivated by essential and critical problems, my research is inter-disciplinary and has spanned many disciplines, including computer science, cognitive science, education, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and religious studies. Some emerging approaches to solutions are intimated below through a question and answer format.

Q&A (slightly expanded)

The pandemic has exacerbated mental health problems and social media appears to be causing even greater divisions. What’s your approach to tackle this?

We start with pure research into the application of normative ethics, especially Buddhist ethics, which establishes a clear link between the practice of moral virtue — through actions in body, speech and mind — and human flourishing. Together with broader interdisciplinary approaches we may determine well-founded theories for long-term well-being.

Can we pinpoint the nature of mental health issues? What techniques can be used to address them that effectively apply an ethical perspective?

The quality of attention has continued to dwindle; people’s senses, especially the mind, are overwhelmed and left numbed or restless, unable to focus well, let alone find stillness and inner peace. They struggle to process the stream of inputs, even to discern at a basic level right from wrong. Therefore it is precisely that stream that we target, the way it affects and especially debilitates the mind, then how to reverse such effects and develop clarity of mind. Drawing on educational practice, we introduce cognitive interventions in systems design across the lifecycle of digital usage, to improve the quality of attention with particular attention to the cultivation of ethical behaviour.

With so much division in society, what about human relationships?

The dilution of the notion of ‘friend’ in social media sparked my exploration of new architectures for online social networking to promote deeper friendship. It has since expanded to consider human safety, locally supported, in such a way as to lessen the need for expensive and arguable counter-productive legislation.

Isn’t there already work applying ethical systems to the design of technology?

Yes, but there remains a chasm between the experts in subjects such as virtue ethics and those who have practical experience of creating the technology. Attempts have been made to gain understanding of, for example, software developer communities, but with only limited appreciation of their own ethical codes of conduct that already exist — a classic example of the insider/outsider problem. I have immersed myself in theoretical work ranging from computer science to anthropology, whilst having implemented and administered quite a lot of software; being mixed race makes the interdisciplinarity completely natural to me.

Theory is all very well, but what about the code? And the developer community?

I’m keen on the development of open source software tools, not least for affirming human agency and autonomy. This site will include links to GitHub projects for software I’ve created or contributed to. The licensing will be liberal (i.e. it will not place infective restrictions on software in which it is incorporated, nor stipulate restrictions on commercial usage).

My focus is principally on the mind’s internal response to the external world, what are referred to by scholars as ‘cognitive’ aspects.  My work aims to protect the quality of one’s awareness and to foster deepening reflections.  Much of the wider impact on society follows from that (and is why I believe that environmental issues won’t be properly solved until we know how to take care of the inner environment of our own minds). Generally, I seek to adopt holistic and inter-disciplinary approaches to gaining knowledge and developing wisdom.  

The main application area concerns the design of social networking sites, which is the focus of the Sigala Project, in which I propose a systems architecture based on the teachings of the Buddha, as expressed in a paper given at the 3rd World Conference on Buddhism and Science.

Social networking is situated in many contexts. One, in which I have been quite heavily involved, concerns personalised learning, where I am particularly interest is in the processes of personal reflection and social engagement around decision-making. I was for a while part of the KEPLAIR core team, contributing to the requirements for a general recommender system.

Many of my investigations are experimental in nature, so the resources on this site may appear eclectic!

On this site you can discover the rationale and approach, with links to various publications, together with timely updates. I take a broad historical perspective in addressing major issues in society, rooted in a unique Buddhist cultural and research background. Many of the signal ideas are contained in Buddhism and Computing: How to Flourish in the Age of Algorithms, which was published by Mud Pie books in April 2021.

For examples of software development work, please see the portfolio. Further information is available from my profiles on LinkedIn and Academia.

Interested? Then please get in touch.