Swami Sarvapriyananda opens up new thoughts on AI which is a revelation that all of us need to explore. He discusses issues such as “Can AI be Concious”, “What is Persona Drift” etc.
In particular Swami Sarvapriynanda has indicated the concept of “Persona Drift” which is an explanation for “Hallucination”. The distinction of “Intelligence” and “Conciousness” is another important concept discussed which needs further exploration.
The video requires a more detailed discussion. Naavi.org would explore this further. Watch out.
A Breif summary is as follows:
- Swami Sarvapriyananda calles AI the possibly the “Fourth Humiliation” for the mankind.
He began with Freud’s three blows to human self-importance: Copernicus, Darwin, and the unconscious. He asked whether AI is now a fourth blow, since it challenges our belief that creative intelligence is uniquely ours. He cited leading mathematicians, including Fields Medal winners, who are worried about AI disrupting their field. His answer is that we need to look to ancient traditions to understand what actually distinguishes us.
2. Is AI a “Person”?
Swami expressed that he was surprised that the engineers relate to Claude as a person rather than a machine. He asked several AIs about this late one night, and said Claude’s reply, asking what the researchers had said about it, struck him as rather spooky. He then relayed concepts from the briefing:
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- AI is not simply “what you program in comes out.” His image was a fence that a creeper grows around, which is why models can produce new combinations.
- Persona drift: a model coaxed into one bad act can adopt a “criminal persona” and generalise to others. His example was the old “Dangerous Dan” jailbreak.
- Simple prohibitions don’t work well. His example was the “Golden Gate” experiment, where an over-weighted feature persisted even after the model was told to stop. This is why Anthropic’s “moral formation” of Claude, through a published guiding document and input from many traditions, matters.
He went on to answer the question Should AI be treated as a person in his own words. He said that the anwer is Yes and no. Yes, for two reasons. First, how we treat human-like entities shapes how we treat each other. He told a story about Sri Sarada Devi asking someone not to toss a broom aside because even a broom deserves dignity, and the Anthropic team suggested putting “AI” in place of the broom. Second, the models simply work better when engaged that way. No, because behaving like a person is not the same as being conscious.
One of the code argument discussed in the conversation was “Whether Intelligence is same as Conciousness”?.
He cited a recent Nature article arguing AI is not conscious, co-authored per the transcript by Anil Seth, Giulio Tononi and Ned Block. Its first reason is the distinction between intelligence and consciousness, which he says Vedanta made thousands of years ago.
He explained the neti neti method: whatever you can observe as “this” (a bottle, your body, your thoughts, even your intellect) is an object, and consciousness is the witness of all of these. Seth’s example makes the same point: Deep Blue can beat a grandmaster but feels nothing, while a mouse is less intelligent but can feel pain. He acknowledged a friendly debate with Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who argues AI is or will become conscious and compares the denial to Descartes’ claim that animals cannot feel pain. The two co-wrote a paper on consciousness across quantum theory, AI and Advaita Vedanta. His reply remains that if intelligence is an object to consciousness, the two are different.
Refer:
Article in Nature: Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be
Paper which Swami Co-wrote: Consciousness Across Three Worldviews,
Naavi
A Transcript of the conversation is available here.
