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- The University , Research
- 17/09/2018
TU/e professor makes Dalai Lama giggle with robot dino
He has already shaken a number of Regal hands, even enjoyed lunch once with Queen Máxima on his side, and is therefore in special or highly-placed company more often. Still, a meeting with a high-ranking spiritual leader was quite exceptional even for TU/e professor Maarten Steinbuch. Last Saturday in Amsterdam he conversed with the Dalai Lama. This highest Buddhist spiritual leader is in the Netherlands for three days in connection with an exhibition about Buddha.
Steinbuch was asked to talk to the Dalai Lama by SingularityU The Netherlands, which helped put together the program for the Dialogue on Compassion and Technology that was staged on Saturday. It immediately roused his curiosity, as he says. “It seemed interesting to me to exchange ideas with someone who possesses so much wisdom, who has such vast experience in reflecting on spirituality and on well-nigh anything non-technocratic. And to find out what his stand is on technological development.”
With his parents too, who meanwhile are in their eighties and both anthroposophists, he regularly has “profound discussions” about such themes, for example how reincarnation relates to technology. “So the discussion with the Dalai Lama was right up my street.” The professor did not know a great deal yet about his intended discussion partner for that matter, he confesses, “so beforehand I did make sure of finding more in-depth information on the Dalai Lama and Buddhism.”
Last Saturday Steinbuch was allowed to join the panel in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam to talk about artificial intelligence and robotics - one of the panel members being the British teenager Tilly Lockey, who showed the Dalai Lama her bionic arms. The Eindhoven professor, in turn, had brought a robot dino along, much to the visible delight of the 83-year-old spiritual leader, who briefly held the beast on his lap, stroked it and teased it by pulling and bending its tail.
However, the discussion soon took a more serious turn. Thus, the TU/e professor wanted to know whether the Dalai Lama thinks there will ever be a computer with a consciousness or an individual ‘I’ like that of human beings - a cherished theme in many of his own lectures.
“The nub of the Dalai Lama´s story was that a large portion of our consciousness is material. Thereby he implied that you will one day be able to mimic that with computers; you could, he says, even have computers conduct dreaming activities. Yet he thinks there is also a deeper layer of consciousness which is not lodged in matter and which will thus not be capable of being copied. If you believe that, this means that there will always be a gap between what you can do with computers and what makes humans human”.
Steinbuch goes on: “I enjoyed hearing his take on that. You do notice that he is an elderly man, who is deeply engrained in his own ideas and will not be directed easily. He associates extensively and has quite a long line of reasoning. I was concentrated very well, though”.
Ethical awareness
He looks back on a memorable event full of interesting meetings - including those with the other panel members. If anything, the discussion with the Dalai Lama has made him more firmly convinced “that we should also foster ethical awareness in our young people, like we do at TU/e with our USE subjects. For the technocratic world which we are all building together does not have the human morality of good and evil engrained by way of ´standard design´”.
Check out the video of the Dialogue on Compassion and Technology with the Dalai Lama below.
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