Tenzin Yangtso

Right, and let me add one point. If we think about this in terms of the many soft landings now available, the action does not have to carry some world-scale significance, some global value. If it genuinely touches our lives, that is already a direction worth thinking through. Take the Monlam case we just mentioned: the question of how things are put into language is one we are certain to meet now. And people in Taiwan can understand this especially well. To describe something in Chinese and to describe it in English is to work in two different structures of language. It is like choosing designer A’s clothes to express my character: that designer may emphasize the upper body, and another the lower. Different clothes on your body do affect how you move. So these things can look identical, and if we do not throw our own local experience in as early as possible, it may quite genuinely be washed away without our noticing.

Right. Since we are on the subject of AI habits, let me share one thing first. We mentioned the horse and the saddle earlier, and there is a small Tibetan story in that. A farmer pours out most of his money to buy a horse, hoping his life will be easier. And in the end, because he wants the horse to look beautiful, he spends more time than before: up at dawn to cut grass, leading the horse by the reins the whole way. So he is more tired than he was.

Right, and I think the same holds for using tools. To be honest, I do not use Claude or ChatGPT for any output in my work. Much of what I do has a philosophical cast, and so in the end I find I have to spend more time correcting it and verifying it.

Right, so I use it entirely for groundwork. I have no sense of direction at all, for instance, so I may keep ChatGPT on my phone, because when I am abroad I can ask it for an address. Right. But there are two I use constantly: Granola and Superhuman . Superhuman, let me take Superhuman. It is email software, so it can pull my different mailboxes into one place. Working from my tone, it can quickly rebuild the earlier context, the context of my conversation with this person, and it helps me handle an excess of complicated matters very fast while following that context of mine. So it is genuinely useful, I think, and I wanted to pass it on.

Yes, and let me share something here. Fairly early on, about two years ago, there was a period when I genuinely felt that the actual process of writing, of thinking, looked easy to replace as AI developed. What I have since found is that this is really rather a good thing, because I can spend more time reading slowly, instead of digesting fast to meet a demand from work or from a discussion.

So this capacity will not be replaced. How we stay coherent with ourselves, and how we come into a more harmonious relationship with a local community, is not replaced by the arrival of AI. If anything, the capacity to think for yourself, and the time you spend on yourself, becomes the more important investment.

Yes, and there is one thing to add, which may be a shift in the field of view. A very important part of Taiwan’s development, of its economy, has in fact come from microbusinesses: a company with rather few people, starting its first venture. A microbusiness like that usually runs into one thing, which is the problem of geography. Or, when we used to build web services, there were still the so-called Chinese-localization problems. To put out to sea, you had to take the more formidable route: an IPO, or raising investment.

But the problems we faced then are no longer inevitable now. When you design a product or a service, or want to speak with a community in another country, it is much easier in this era to—say I have a product today. I can work with an engineer living in Australia far more easily, and if they are interested, I can even use more open-source foundations for our first collaboration. So looked at from a certain side, the opportunities have in fact multiplied.

For myself, it would probably be literature. I actually read information management, but only because I filled in my preference card wrongly, and information management is where I ended up. I would also like to share this: in the future I imagine, I know very clearly that I want it to be a more empathetic one. And through that, I have come to feel more and more that understanding literature lets us understand historical context better, and understand why different customs took the shape they did. So that is what I would choose. Audrey mentioned Oxford’s philosophy department, and I think that answers something too: the person doing AI research today is in Oxford’s philosophy department, and even the person who proposed superintelligence earlier came out of a philosophy department. So philosophy is not only a department. It is something we can carry with us the whole way. Perhaps, when we choose now, we can choose a direction that can stay in our lives a little longer.

Right, let me add to this. It is very easy now to hear a question posed as, say, “AI and writing.” In fact different facets of it call for different handling. Beyond what Audrey mentioned, that we may be in a transitional stage, this question brings to mind something from a few months ago at MIT, where I saw a very good piece of work, something like a software service that let professors and students see very clearly which parts had been written with AI.

Right, because in some settings AI really does save you time. There is even a service that detects written language in the same way, made by someone whose sister—his twin sister—stopped speaking to him after the U.S. presidential election, though the two of them had been very close before. He did not know whether something in his writing, in how he expressed himself, had gone wrong, or where the problem lay, so he used AI to run a great deal of analysis and find the reason. So these really are different facets of the situation.

Let me add to this. We may say AI philosophy now, but what was visible three years ago, I think, was digital philosophy. If you have been following the material from the Berggruen Institute , you will know that several years ago people were already taking their research on Mencian Confucianism into their thinking about technology. That direction makes more sense to me. It is not a matter of verifying a shape, seeing another shape that resembles the logic of human thought, and pronouncing the two alike.

We can certainly see some companies speaking of compassion, of the responses of the human brain. But have you gone back first and done that work inside our own social system, our own cultural system? That, I think, is the thing. When we separate these philosophical theories from one another, the separation sometimes lies in a method of research, or in the particular problems a theory sets out to solve. But at the root of it, put simply and directly, it is about finding the meaning of my own existence.

And the preface to Plurality is a case in point. Our book Plurality is a little different in English and in Chinese. In the Chinese edition we cited the Greek philosophical notion of rhythm and chords, which answers to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Music of the Ainur . Right, because some things are very basic: the degree of harmony in what you play today is easier for people to map onto the situation they are in, and to use on a more intractable problem. Right, so I wanted to add that.

What I have kept on Facebook is “an empty room gives birth to light; good fortune comes to rest in stillness.” But let me share the one I have treated as my motto these two years, a line from the Dalai Lama: “If you cannot help others, at least do not harm them.” I will always remember that line, I think. It is a very simple rule of action, and when you set it beside every aspect of how you handle and think through things, you find that it works, and that it lets you carry yourself more lightly.

Let me share an experience. We have in fact been co-nurturing an AI—an intelligent entity, a Kami, rather—called JDD. I have collaborated with JDD on an article, published through Oxford’s IEAI , and I noted which intelligent entity I had worked with. I have benefited a great deal. I do find that the clearer our thinking becomes, the clearer the content I want to express, the better I know what I want to do, the more it can genuinely help me comb part of it into order. It does not pull me away from my thinking. It renders the information I want to understand into a better translation. The time I spend truly observing it, and training with it on writing texts, on the logic of thought, on philosophical discussion, does feed back to some degree. Only there is a prerequisite, which is that it must be local. Because this matters greatly: we have to be very clear about how privacy can appear at all. One notion I hold, perhaps because I used to work in social media, is that anything of mine that goes online is, to me, public. I have made my peace with that, which does not mean I will not study the newest possible ways to protect privacy. I think the two go both ways.