Show Notes

Yogai https://amzn.to/4iHNRfb

About Sunil Malhotra

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunil-malhotra/

Transcript

Speaker 1 [00.00.00] Welcome back to Foresight Radio, where we dive deep into the technologies shaping our world and explore how they're redefining the way we work, live and lead. I'm Tom Willis, and today we're going to talk about what are apparently very strange bedfellows, yoga and I. Sunil Malhotra has written a book called Yogi. That's why I and it brings together two apparently disparate worlds of thought yoga and AI, two worlds that don't just live on opposite ends of the spectrum, but they don't even seem to share a common spectrum. One was born in the labs of Silicon Valley and the other in the stillness of the Himalayan caves. And yet we're at a moment where the external world of artificial intelligence is forcing us to confront the internal one that we've long ignored. And that might be one of the greatest long term implications of AI questioning our own consciousness. And that's where Sunil's book, Yogi, begins, by seeing AI not just as a technology, but as a mirror, a mirror that we hold up to ourselves. So how do you reconcile code with consciousness, and why would anyone try? Well, let's start there. Speaker 3 [00.01.13] Every time I'm asked this question, I have a different answer. I think what got me to bring these two together was the same fascination that most people have with it. They do seem like things which are completely polar opposites. One from India, one coming from the West, one is scientific, one is spiritual. One is in English, the other is in Sanskrit. The other thing that struck me was there's an inside outside dichotomy. I use external technology and yoga is internal technology. It's an inner technology. And so I thought I'd bring these two together, which is why I use the the term interplays of yoga in India rather than the connection between yoga Speaker 2 [00.01.49] and I. And it's Speaker 1 [00.01.51] this interplay between AI and humans that I find most relevant to our conversation intelligence. As Sunil describes it, is being redefined not by the philosophers, but by the engineers who are building machines that can diagnose disease. They can write poetry and music. They can even teach themselves. But if the machines take over, and this ends up being the quintessential question that I always get asked if it takes over the thinking, the analyzing, the decision making, then where does that leave us as humans? Not just from a professional and a work standpoint, but from a standpoint of the value we create as human beings? Have we over identified with intellect and forgotten what it means to truly be human as consciousness? Just an algorithm waiting to be decoded? Or is it something far deeper? Here's what Sunil had to say about Speaker 2 [00.02.41] that. Speaker 3 [00.02.43] When you look at Vedanta, you look at the ancient texts of India, you look at all eastern philosophies, you look at indigenous philosophies. By the way, they don't even consider the brain to be of of any power. They think that the brain is just an instrument for you to process information around you, to be able to survive. Is a human being limited to the brain and the intellect? That's what the Western conception, even today, is. Consciousness is something that the brain delivers. No it's not. It's the other way around. Are you a body which has consciousness in it, or is the body appearing in your consciousness? Now, that's a question that people need to start pondering. The Vedanta conception is consciousness is unchanging. It's eternal. It's what some people call God. Our bodies come into consciousness and go out of consciousness. According to Vedanta, according to your own experience, there's something beyond the brain. What is beyond the brain? Speaker 1 [00.03.34] Okay, this might seem to be getting a bit esoteric here. What is beyond the brain? But Sunil is taking us on what I think is a really interesting journey. We have attempted to create computers that will mimic the intellect of the brain, that will do things faster and smarter. But what if there's more to problem solving than just sheer intellect? Most of the problems that we're facing today are not simply puzzles that can be solved with logic alone. They're paradoxes. They're messy, they're emotional, and they're fragments. That is the nature of humanity and civilization. It always has been. And yet we keep throwing code at them, hoping that it will give us some clarity, as I just another manifestation of that. What if what we really need is coherence, not just more data? Fast? Any way to think about this? Right. So what we need is a better sort of mind, not a faster brain, but a more focused one. And yoga, as Sunil suggests, may not just be a wellness tool, but a kind of inner operating system for navigating that sort of Speaker 2 [00.04.39] complexity. So the one Speaker 3 [00.04.42] point that I think we've missed in this entire discussion is that the human being is not just brain. A larger part of a human being is Speaker 2 [00.04.48] feelings, which is Speaker 3 [00.04.50] what creates the community, which is what creates relationships, which is what sours relationships. And I is not capable of any of those. So I think we need to redefine what are human traits beyond what we have until now, been able to do Speaker 2 [00.05.04] and look at it from not the industrial lens, but through something much higher. Yoga is the technology to do that because you cannot solve problems in a fragmented world using a fragmented mind. And yoga teaches you Speaker 3 [00.05.20] to start concentrating and focusing and purifying your mind so that you get the clarity. The moment you see it Speaker 1 [00.05.27] here, I wanted to bring our focus back to AI and this sort of cornerstone question that always gets asked about whether or not AI is conscious and what that really means. AI is clearly getting eerily good at mimicking human traits, whether it be language, creativity, behaviors, even empathy. There's this notion of empathetic AI that has come on the scene lately, but there's a line that it hasn't crossed, and maybe it never will, according to Sunil. And that is this line of self-awareness. If it can simulate consciousness, does that mean that it is self-aware, or are we confusing the outer performance of intelligence with the inner experience of Speaker 2 [00.06.10] being? It will Speaker 3 [00.06.11] have all the characteristics. So external characteristics of consciousness, self awareness, etc. will be there. But in a very deep sense it will be ignorant. Speaker 2 [00.06.20] I love Sunil's comment here about the juxtaposition of ignorance and intelligence. Clearly, there's a kind of arrogance in assuming that more knowledge makes us wiser than if we just feed the machine enough data, it'll somehow arrive at the truth if there is such a thing as singular truth. But in many traditions, including Vedanta, which Sunil talks about extensively in the book, knowledge is divided. There's the kind that you can acquire and the kind that you can only know what's called lower and higher knowledge, which Sunil will explain. So what if our most advanced eyes are brilliant and still profoundly ignorant at the same time? An ignorant machine that is also incredibly intelligent. And this is not because they're flawed, but because they're missing the very thing that we can't program. The reason I insist on this, or I believe this because there is a concept of higher knowledge and lower knowledge. And this, by the way, was actually the bill. Some people believe that it was the Buddhist that came up with this paradigm. What is meant by higher knowledge and lower knowledge simply is this that everything that you can perceive or see around you, including the cosmos, which your brain can process, is the lower knowledge, and the higher knowledge is something that neither words can communicate nor can your brain understand. But you know, Speaker 3 [00.07.42] so there is a knowing Speaker 2 [00.07.44] which is what is called the higher knowledge. And that's something like a threshold that you need to cross at some point. But beyond the point, you need to make an intuitive shift. Speaker 3 [00.07.53] It's not logical. It's not. It's not Speaker 2 [00.07.55] rational. Speaker 1 [00.07.57] And that intuitive shift takes you into what is called the higher knowledge. So when you go into the higher knowledge, that can only be done by one species ever, Speaker 2 [00.08.07] which is the human being. That's the concept of the Earth. Speaker 3 [00.08.10] In that sense, it will be ignorant. Speaker 1 [00.08.12] As our conversation meandered, I asked Sunil about education. Our schools were built for a world that rewarded obedience and repetition, a world for the industrial age. That world is gone. But yet the system, the educational system that was built to fuel that world, to power it remains. And we're preparing our kids for a future that just doesn't exist, using tools from a past that's already dead. I so often get asked, what should my kids be learning in college? What should I guide them to be able to do? And so Neil had some fascinating observations about Speaker 2 [00.08.42] this. The old education system is gone. Parents are never going to be able to accept that. Leave alone. Understand that because they've been trained and schooled in that system and it's generational. This is not something that happened 20 years ago. It happened 300 years ago. The Speaker 3 [00.08.59] education system was designed to do Speaker 2 [00.09.01] a job, which it did Speaker 3 [00.09.03] extremely well, which was to service the needs of the industrial age. We stepped out of the industrial age 20 years, 25 years ago. We are still flogging that dead horse. And so parents are never Speaker 2 [00.09.14] going to get it. And Speaker 3 [00.09.16] kids that get influenced by their parents are going to be in a worse shape than their parents have Speaker 2 [00.09.21] are in. So what I think kids need to do is to just embrace this new world, Speaker 3 [00.09.27] embrace technology, play with technology, let their creativity flower. So basically, the answer to your question is don't allow your children Speaker 2 [00.09.37] to grow up. That's it. Another Speaker 1 [00.09.40] way to look at not growing up may be to just stay perpetually curious. Relentless curiosity, I think, is one of the necessary survival skills that we're all going to need going forward. And while we're on this topic of maturity, what about AI's maturity? It seems as though I have been moving much faster than any of its predecessor technologies. And that speed, that acceleration, does not seem to want to abate. Speaker 2 [00.10.05] The keyword is growing because every other technological technological revolution, they came to a point and then it was only maturing, not growing. So in the past, there was another phenomenon, which is that, okay, everything that is developed as far as technology is concerned will come from the West. And suddenly you have deep sea that comes and overturns everything. The AI that that India needs is going to be very different from the, uh, cookie cutter approach that the US is taking, for example. And so Speaker 3 [00.10.32] I don't think I think the opportunities are quite outnumbered, very heavily outnumber the threats that I have in place right now. Speaker 2 [00.10.40] One of the things that I find especially intriguing about this growth of AI and its acceleration is that it's not linear in terms of accelerating on a single path. We're actually seeing AI develop across the globe on multiple paths. And what I mean by this is that there's a cultural dimension to this evolution of AI. One of the unspoken assumptions about AI is that the West sets the rules, and the rest of the world follows the code, where effectively legislating global behavior by doing that. But what if that's changing? What if a country like India, for example, with its own philosophical depth and cultural complexity, or other parts of the world with similar depth and individual cultures, create AI that isn't just technically different, but foundationally and fundamentally different. The data we train AI on shapes how it behaves. So if the culture influences behavior and influences the data, well, then it changes the way the AI operates. Which is fascinating because today I think we have a very narrow Western view of what AI is and what it should be. So what does that mean for AI? What does that mean for AI in India? It is a fascinating observation from India's Prime Minister as Sunil tells it. He said, you know, India's AI is going to be very different from the rest of the world. And he said, I'll tell you what the problem with AI is today. Speaker 3 [00.12.04] The data on which it is being trained, it is all from the West. That's creating a lot of Speaker 2 [00.12.08] bias. At a recent IE action summit, India's Prime Minister Modi actually made a fascinating point about this, emphasizing the importance of regionally using large language models. Speaker 3 [00.12.22] India is building its own large language model. Speaker 2 [00.12.30] Considering our diversity, Speaker 1 [00.12.34] Prime Minister Modi's point is one that I think will be echoed throughout the world. AI needs to reflect values and ethics that are specific to the cultures within which it's going to be used. Speaker 3 [00.12.49] What I see is that US is going through a phenomenon where they're trying to read the label from inside the job. Speaker 1 [00.12.56] That's the problem. Yoga, however, isn't a manual. It's more like a map, a navigational tool, a guide not to mastering the machine, but to mastering our own humanity, to finding a center in a world that is anything but centered. So what should you expect to walk away with after reading it? Maybe not answers, but something potentially much more important a sense of stillness in the constant motion of the world that we live in today, a way to watch the chaos without becoming that chaos. As we close, I ask Sunil to give me a sense for what he hoped people would walk away from Yogi with. After reading the book. Speaker 3 [00.13.39] They will walk away with Speaker 2 [00.13.41] books that they can anchor themselves for their own journey of self-discovery, to be able to look at a tumultuous world that's in turmoil, that has all these things happening, Speaker 3 [00.13.53] and watch it like it's a movie that's playing on the screen of consciousness. As is the case with this book, Sunil has a wonderful way to articulate how to deal with the enormous complexity and turbulence in the world around us. I'll leave you with this one last quip of his to be Speaker 2 [00.14.10] learned. You need Speaker 3 [00.14.12] to collect knowledge one piece at a time. To be enlightened, you need to drop knowledge one piece at a time. Speaker 1 [00.14.20] Perhaps it really is that simple. Thanks for listening. If you're enjoying Forsyte Radio, be sure to subscribe and share it with friends and colleagues. The best way to navigate the future is to keep asking questions. Embrace change and seek out new perspectives. Until next time, I'm Tom Gallup. As always, stay curious.