Eastern Thought in the Age of AI

With that in mind, let us look at the whole for now. In the right hand, the weapon of linear thinking (the logic of the shotgun). Hand all of it to AI today: the probabilistic tools that dominate a wide field, the covering of information, the endless generation of patterns, the creation of chaos. Hand it over quickly and take full advantage. In the left hand at the same time, the weapon of non-linear thinking (the logic of the single cut). You hold yourself as a human, more precisely you hold a self. You train relentlessly in the art of handling and releasing ki through introspection.

And what I am thinking of is not which one is right. Each of us must acquire both skills at once, in ourselves. It is no longer possible to survive by leaning to one side.

For someone who holds both logics as his own new strategy for survival, there is no need to fight in the world of the losers, and in fact he can obtain stillness. The gold of the twenty-first century is stillness.

The first thing I stress most is that AI runs on a "subjective language mode." This comes historically from the fact that the basic language of programming is English, and it brings with it a large, unavoidable problem: the difference in language structure from Japanese.

AI can grasp the atmosphere of the predicative realm, but structurally it thinks through the subjective realm, so it is hard for it to catch the thought and philosophy of the predicative realm.

There is a decisive fact: AI for people whose languages have a subject and AI for people whose languages do not are "different" to the point of mutual incomprehension.

I will share such reflections again when needed. For now I ask readers to forget, once, the dualist thinking of AI destroying humanity or coexisting with it, and to gaze from this vantage.

In a world where AI has permeated everything, we must not set the question as whether AI has a mind. We must put our axis in the exploration of our own minds. Put the other way around, the rise of AI and unmanned work forces us to face this question with everything we have. This is the last inviolable territory (for now).

If we think close to AI, and, say, can hand 80 percent of what we do now to it, we can raise that "80 percent we no longer need to use" thoroughly, and gain the benefit of devoting the freed effort to inner exploration.

Humanity has now externalized knowledge as AI and has begun, in earnest, to build it into society. We did not create it to make life easy for ourselves, nor to destroy ourselves. Humanity has always tried, by creating technology, to secure time for introspection. That is my view. Seen from there, when intelligence is externalized, humanity will enter the first great "age of introspection" in its history.

In the age of AI, anyone can make and release video of a certain quality at top speed, so the key to survival, I think, is to understand my own individuality thoroughly. The shock the world talks about, of AI replacing jobs, is in fact secondary. What is happening now is that people who command AI are replacing people who cannot. The code of that split is the idea.

But a human being already holds every answer within, not in the "outside" (nation, society, world, others). Whether one can hear this "inner voice" takes daily training to reach.

The more AI evolves, the greater the power of the shotgun. This is not a threat. It means our right hand is being strengthened as it is. With the right hand you wield the great power of AI, and with the left you sharpen the sword of silence, and you use the two skillfully without separating them, through the one and only being able to design everything from the inner world of the "I" to the outer world.