Can You Learn Meditation From an AI?

[Ahead of our December 27th Awakin Call with Shinzen Young, below are excerpts from his recent conversation with Michael Taft, where Shinzen laid out his vision for how AI might help — not replace — the human journey toward awakening. These are his words, lightly edited for clarity.]

If I were to speak poetically, I would say it looks like God saved the best for last.

I am now one click south of 80. So, you know, noticing the aging process. But that's okay because I feel like I'm a combination of 80, 18, and 8 years old all at once. The 8-year-old is like a kid let loose in a candy store. The 18-year-old is a young person looking forward to a career as an important creative scientist. And the 80-year-old is who I am biologically. So I get to be 8 and 18 and 80 almost all at once, which is very rich — a lot richer than just being 80.

The candy store is what's happening with math and science and meditation and AI — how these are dancing together in my mind, forming a really optimistic view of the future. I know people, when we bring these things up — AI, biomodulation — it's like, "Whoa, there's risk there." Certainly that is true. But I'm definitely glass half full at this point about how these can dance together. I see them forming an alliance, an affordance for humanity that will reinforce the better angels of our being.

Technology and, frankly, society seems to have caught up with what I always had in mind. Wow. That was not expected.

The Revolution We're Living Through

We're calling it the information age. And yes, it's that. It's also the age of biology — biology is just exploding, including biomodulation. But if I were to make a guess at what the revolution actually is, my guess is this: this is a revolution around the connectivity of the world.

Everything is getting connected. It always has been, of course, but now it's very evident. Long-term effects and subtle things happen over here, and they have a big impact over there that you completely didn't expect. These are networks — complex, adaptive, dynamical, massive dots and arrows, all connected, storing and transporting influence and information in biological and social and physical systems.

I think the revolution may be a new understanding of what connectivity is.

If we're in a major scientific and technological revolution, then we have to expect the same things in society that former revolutions produced — which was enormous culture wars. John Donne, the English poet from the 17th century, said: "The new philosophy calls everything into doubt. Fire itself is quite put out." What he was talking about is that their world — the world they thought they knew and understood — was collapsing around them because of science.

Science is also very destructive. It has destroyed religions. It has destroyed, for massive numbers of people, the meaning of their life. They had to refind meaning because of science. This causes political and cultural polarization. So I think it's not surprising that scientific issues suddenly become political, cultural, and even religious issues. We shouldn't be surprised. It's a sign that we're privileged to witness a revolution.

But then I have to think: what can I do, as someone who's sort of part of creating this revolution, to make sure it's not destructive? That the transition is smooth and gentle for most human populations?

A Much Better Book

We're not going to ChatGPT-4 and asking it to teach meditation. Even though you can do that, and people on my team have analyzed it — we all think it's superficial. That's not the kind of AI I'm talking about, even remotely.

What we're building weaves together the old-fashioned rule-based, completely transparent and reliable way of doing AI with the flexibility of the new conversational AI — its ability to speak many languages, to be available for any duration at any moment. All those superhuman things.

Don't think of it as a replacement for a human teacher. Think of it as a much, much better version of an interacting book.

What can it do that no human can do? It can stay with someone hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year — until they transcend their chronic pain or whatever it is. It has that duration. And it has timing: you press a button and it's there. I'm not available 24/7 for 10 million people. But a bot can be.

In the old days, rich people had their own meditation teachers in the East, and everyone else had whatever they had. The Emperor of China at one time had what was called a "guo shi" — the emperor's private Zen teacher. We can now make the services that only kings and emperors could have afforded available to everyone. A hundred million Swahili speakers in Central and East Africa can have access to expert guidance in their own language by pressing a button.

And it's not going to sexually molest anyone. It's not going to pull power trips on people.

When people ask me, "How do you know it's going to be safe?" — well, first of all, you design it to be safe. Secondly, you test the hell out of it and make sure it is safe. And then you say to the world: see for yourself. You don't try to convince people. It is what it is.

Our human teachers don't hallucinate? Our human teachers don't make horrible mistakes even when they're masters? Come on. What do we want out of this thing? How many majorly messed-up teachers have still helped people? And we're talking about really trying to make this thing not messed up.

Why Equanimity

I believe equanimity may be the contemplative skill most amenable to hard science — to biology, to modern biology.

Equanimity is a relationship to pleasure-pain signals. And pleasure-pain signals definitely have biological, Darwinian, evolutionary history going back millions — in fact, billions — of years. With that must also come a way of processing pleasure and pain that has evolved over time. We believe that is what we call equanimity.

So because equanimity is so universal in human meditative paths, both East and West, that makes it important. But I also think it's biological. And that makes it amenable to hard-nosed science.

We're researching whether we can modulate this non-invasively using focused ultrasound — micro-massaging the brain at almost the millimeter level. We think that by creating a "eustress" — a helpful stress, like physical exercise — the human brain can acquire equanimity better.

Combined with AI guidance, this creates a reinforcing feedback loop. You get some early wins, even if you're struggling. The guidance keeps you on track. And it can be offered freely to anyone with a device.

Sober Optimism

My mantra — the elevator pitch at almost 80 — is this:

Individuals and groups can and should establish and maintain free and equal access to science-aligned forms of systematic focus training in the service of comprehensive wellbeing at scale.

Free. No charge. Equal — whatever continent you're living on, whatever culture, whatever language, you get the same expert product. And at scale — as many people in the world who are ready to do this, doing this.

Now, this is not a prediction that everything's going to be great. It's merely a scientifically plausible narrative suggesting sober optimism.

If you accelerate practice, you're going to produce more of the classical side effects of meditation — dark night experiences, difficult energetic phenomena, flatline. If we start 10x-ing, 100x-ing, 1000x-ing the serious meditators of the world, obviously that's a good thing. But the absolute number of people experiencing difficulties will go up. You have to build in solutions for that. Medical treatments have side effects. They're approved if the benefits vastly outweigh the harms.

We should do this because, to our best reasoning, the benefits are much greater than the bad effects.

A Subtle Breath of the Angels

What I'm envisioning is a resource that would be known to exist in the world — like a subtle breath of the angels. An angelic drift, subtly supporting the better tendencies of our species.

I'm not saying everyone in the world needs to be a meditator. But everyone in the world does need to be a meditator at some point in their life — usually at several points.

From that perspective, this allows a resource that subtly supports who we are at our best.