Chad Woodford: 0:00

I'm in Bhutan this week with a group of experienced, wise, and diverse innovators for a collaborative week-long listening and brainstorming engagement with Bhutanese leadership to study and iterate on Bhutan's unique approach to natural resource use, bio-regional development, urban planning, sovereign AI innovation, and consciousness science. What makes this visit so exciting is not just Bhutan's mission to modernize without cultural erosion or mindless resource extraction, but its historical and ideological freedom from the conditioned limitations of modernity. As one of the few countries that has never been colonized, it has retained its uniquely elevated worldview. One example of this is Bhutan's emphasis on gross national happiness. With this unique alternative to GDP, they measure the overall well-being of the population of the country as a sovereign nation. Another example of its radical vision is this city of the future that it's designing Gelifu Mindfulness City. This will be designed around gross national happiness and integrated fully with nature. Its living infrastructure will form a mandala of human scale neighborhoods, but to be clear, Bhutan's approach to collective happiness is not an oversimplified notion of always feeling the superficial emotion of happiness, but more about having a through line of contentment in your life and setting individual and collective priorities, so that work is designed around life, a life well lived. Also, having this kind of policy does not guarantee collective contentment. Bhutan struggles with the shadow side of rapid socioeconomic transformation, including a devastating national crisis of alcohol dependency. When Bhutan looks at human metrics like spiritual practice, emotional literacy, work-life balance, social trust, mutual aid, and family harmony, they are trying to focus on the lifestyle factors that will actually combat these kinds of mental health and the general kind of social fracturing that we see in the country today. The scope of discussions during our visit this week is actually quite broad, but I am most interested in how Bhutan's leaders are thinking about technology innovation and artificial intelligence with mainstream general-purpose artificial intelligence acting as both a worldview entrenchment machine and an accelerator of the human costs of AI, including cognitive offloading, the atrophy of human agency, and epistemic decay. We desperately need a conscious approach to technology innovation from a radically different direction. Welcome to Cosmic Intelligence, a podcast where we explore the intersection of philosophy, cosmology, consciousness, and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. If you're new here, I'm Chad, a philosopher, technologist, product manager, yoga teacher, and attorney based in Los Angeles. As I like to say on this channel, technology reflects the mindset or state of consciousness of its creators, which then influences the consciousness of users of that technology, so the mindset of the innovators and builders really matters. So, what do I mean by AI being a worldview entrenchment machine? As I have suggested in the past, many of the challenges facing humanity today arise out of the European legacy of coloniality, extraction, exploitation, hyper rationality, materialism, and even utopianism. As a result, because it is trained primarily on Eurocentric data and knowledge, the way AI is being developed in Silicon Valley is a deeply techno-deterministic, techno-utopian project without mindful and discerning development and training, mainstream AI is merely an extension and concretization of the materialist European worldview, which is only one worldview among many. When it comes to AI, to paraphrase feminist African American poet and activist Audre Lorde, I don't see how the tools of the master's house can dismantle the master's house, I think any attempt to address the harms of the modern mindset must necessarily involve a dismantling of modern conditioning and the incorporation of other ways of thinking and being, whether that's Asian, African, or indigenous American. In other words, a machine created exclusively by the conditioned modern mind will only further entrench toxic ways of living and relating, but an AI system and innovation ethos that is free of that baggage is really exciting. Moreover, the modern emphasis on cognitive intelligence over other human faculties like intuition, imagination, emotional intelligence, and body intelligence, and wisdom fails to recognize the. Limitations of both AI and cognitive intelligence itself. When AI is built and used with this blind spot, it only exacerbates the global societal and mental health crises. In short, we need fresh ideas from outside the monocultural, mechanistic thinking of Silicon Valley, and we need truly radical ideas that go beyond the thin veneer of quote unquote conscious technology innovation that's popular in Silicon Valley, where secular Buddhism and so-called mindfulness is less about true liberation from societal conditioning and more about spiritual bypass and the commodification of dissent, as I talked about in my last post. So, where better to germinate these ideas than a remote mountain region that's never been colonized, and the reason this is exciting to me is ever since I finished my work at Google as an AI product council a few months ago, I've been searching for innovators and deep thinkers who are interested in finding a way to use technology in service of a better future for humanity, not a utopian future, but a messy earth-based human future, where we let go of colonialist ideas about utopia and perfection, where technology isn't seen as the solution to anything or messiah, but merely a powerful tool, a normal technology, and a slightly tarnished mirror for our own consciousness. The fact that Bhutan has never been colonized is significant, because it's crucial that the data sets being used to train AI models and the minds of the people building the AI models and systems be decolonialized. Now, decolonialization is a $10 word, of course, and I'm not trying to give an academic lecture here, but it's an important concept. So, decolonialization is different from decolonization. The latter is physical and structural, while the former involves mental conditioning and states of consciousness. So, let me explain a little bit more. Decolonization is the process by which formerly colonized countries gain independence. So, for example, when India gained its independence in 1947 after the British withdrew, this independence that Gandhi had worked so hard for was decolonization, but as Latin American scholars first pointed out in the 1990s that's not enough to undo the ongoing harms of that, of that colonization. So, decolonialization is the more subtle intellectual, cultural, emotional, and even spiritual process of dismantling the invisible, lingering structures of Eurocentric power, knowledge, and identity that linger long after physical and governmental independence. Decolonializing minds is not easy in most industrialized countries. A Eurocentric worldview is baked into the education, mass media, and government institutions. Whether you are in the United States, Brazil, or India, because of the long-standing colonial history and influence, it is so difficult to remove this Eurocentric conditioning, in fact, my talking about this in a critical way right now might be triggering that very conditioning in you. If it is, I hope you approach that with curiosity. Decoloniality is intensely relevant to artificial intelligence, because where AI is trained on what is primarily a Eurocentric knowledge system, it is the ultimate coloniality machine, as the Pope talked about this week. Actually, consequently, to the extent that the problems facing humanity are rooted in European thinking, extraction, exploitation, division, hyper rationality, and even capitalism itself, it is absolutely essential to design technical, epistemological, and even cosmological alternatives to address this. When a general-purpose large language model vacuums up the entire internet to build, quote unquote, super intelligence, it is performing an extractive maneuver, flattening 1000s of years of distinct human traditions into a single dominant hyper-rationalized worldview. even if you were to train AI models in all the world's knowledge, traditions, and wisdom, you still wouldn't arrive at anything that subverts the dominant monoculture. In fact, this very impulse to sort of mush everything into one giant blob mirrors the monocultural thinking that's behind Eurocentric modernity, wisdom is not an emergent property of a massive, large language model. A general-purpose AI model cannot develop discernment or the capacity to understand which pieces of its training are more true, more relevant, or wiser than others. So, for the foreseeable. Future discernment is a deeply human, albeit rare quality, and this is why it's so important to train AI models with the right data sets and the right mindset as tools that aid discerning humans. Granted, the European monoculture and Enlightenment reason have brought us many gifts, including modern medicine, air travel and the internet, but the possibilities of an evolution of humanity offered by this narrow European mindset would be artificially limited were we not to consider other ways of approaching and relating to the world. The unimaginative idea that nature is a machine can only take us so far. It's entirely possible, and even likely, that a relational reciprocal society would be far superior to one full of isolated, rational, self-interested actors in a so-called free market. A machine built exclusively by a mindset obsessed with optimization will only further entrench our collective crisis of disconnection and our loss of agency. If we want technology that serves human evolution rather than human replacement, we have to design an alternative rooted in epistemic pluralism, and what does that mean? It's the idea that there's no single universal way of knowing, instead there's a rich tapestry of localized wisdom traditions. This is why Bhutan and places like it are such a unique opportunity. Although they are obviously not immune to modern Eurocentric influence, they at least have a head start relative to the United States, Europe, or even China. Although China was never colonized in the way that Africa or the Americas were, its government, economic goals, and contemporary culture have been deeply shaped by European thought, from Marxism to scientific materialism. In short, I'm not describing just a romantic, philosophical sort of fantasy. I'm talking about an entirely different software architecture and set of ethics. This is precisely why the near to medium term future of AI that excites me is not a singular universal super intelligence, but rather a network of quasi local domain specific and sovereign models. When the goal is not super intelligence, then there's no need to drastically ramp up scaling and resource use. Specialized targeted AI models are more efficient, use less energy and water, and do not flatten the knowledge or worldview of the community using them. In addition, they can be run on quasi-local cloud infrastructure and easily made compliant with local laws, ethical guidelines, and norms. Sovereign AI isn't just an eco-friendly or convenient design choice; it is a vital act of jurisdictional infrastructural and cognitive containment to protect a culture's data and legacy from digital digestion and dilution. Furthermore, Bhutan is building their own data centers, which are powered almost entirely by their abundant hydroelectric power, and they stay relatively cool due to their temperate climate, so the energy that their AI models would use is entirely supported by their natural resources. Now, I should say it's very early on in the exploration of Bhutan's own kind of hyper-local AI models, but this is the direction that they want to head. It's very much a work in progress for Bhutan, and alternative energy sources are not as reliable as traditional energy sources, of course, even if it's hydropower, it kind of comes and goes based on the season here. So, Bhutan has to figure out how to address the intermittent nature of hydro, solar, and wind. I think they're looking into geothermal as well, but you know, they're also looking into flexible or seasonal computing, which is another kind of innovative approach to this, again, it's all very early stage, I so although general purpose AI models like Chad GPT or Claude are useful for generic conversational tasks, they are structurally designed for boundless scale. Selling the promise of super intelligence requires vacuuming up the entire world's data using vast computing resources to provide semi-reliable answers and flattening cultural nuances into generic statistical weights. In contrast, when you start with distinct real-world problems rather than an obsession with scaling, solving all diseases, as Demis Hassabis said recently at Google I/O, or discovering all physics, as Sam Alban likes to say a country like Bhutan can train and fine tune lean, efficient, and targeted AI models, and so can everyone else. EU countries can create sovereign AI systems that are EU AI act compliant and solve EU problems. China can use their sovereign domain-specific AI systems to counteract the. Graphic shifts manage massive industrial infrastructure and secure resource independence, and India can use sovereign AI systems that use satellite data to evaluate crop health, soil moisture, and weather impact for individual smallholder farms, as well as overcome the language barrier in a country with over 121 languages. In any case, Bhutan is inspiring because Bhutan does not see technology as an end in itself, but rather as a subservient tool to preserve its culture, protect its pristine ecology, and enhance human well-being. In contrast with most other countries, its goal is wisdom and contentment, not efficiency. If we want an AI system that doesn't simply entrench Silicon Valley's monoculture, we have to change the scale and source of the data. Instead of aiming for a universal superintelligence, Bhutan's unique position allows it to build targeted AI models designed to solve specific local problems using curated data sets rooted in Tibetan, Bhutanese, and Sanskrit sources, and the global national happiness principles, this isn't just a pivot in software design, it's a total reworking of the ideologies that underlie the design, making it inherently less constrained in its capabilities. Lean, agile models that reflect the consciousness and culture of their creators is the most promising path forward. I think Bhutan has the mindset, political will, and resources to build precisely these kinds of AI models and systems. However, I should note that, despite its inspiring GNH ethos, its Gross National Happiness ethos, Bhutan is currently facing an existential demographic crisis since the pandemic, nearly 9% of its population, predominantly its educated youth, have left the country in search of economic opportunities abroad. So, Bhutan is also hoping that building these sovereign AI models and infrastructure and its mindfulness city will reverse this trend. So, just to wrap up, the Silicon Valley future that's on offer today is a mechanistic future of biohacking, merging with machines, and then quickly being replaced by machines that then solve all the problems that are worsened by this very process, including mass economic disruption, decimation of natural environment, and pollution of the information ecosystem, as well as the erosion of a shared reality, in contrast, as a Buddhist and Hindu country in deep relationship with the land, Bhutan recognizes the inherent evolutionary potential of the human and emphasizes technologies of the sacred, like meditation, sacred rituals, and mantra, which can be augmented with material technologies, but the starting point is a grounded, interconnected humanity, not a robotic future utopia. In other words, Bhutan offers a promising alternative to Silicon Valley's techno-deterministic, techno-utopian innovation ethos, one grounded in wisdom, decoloniality, and interconnectedness. So far, AI has proven helpful and reasonably reliable in medicine, finance, supply chain logistics, software development, and cybersecurity, and customer service, with important caveats in each case, but what else could it do when the innovation happens within a diverse international garden of AI innovation, one that's hyper local. The decisions made now about AI development will shape humanity's future for generations. Bhutan is a testing ground for a completely different approach that can become a replicable model for other nations, sovereign, non-extractive, non-exploitative, domain-specific AI systems that prioritize well-being over growth at all costs. Again, where technology reflects the mindset or state of consciousness of its creators, Bhutan is positioned to create a truly conscious and humane set of tools for a human future driven by reciprocity rather than endless voracious expansion for its own sake. The question I will be sitting with this week is, how the lessons Bhutan offers in its approach to technology innovation can be brought back to the West and specifically to Silicon Valley. Anyways, I'm sure this week will surprise me, subvert my expectations, and leave me with a whole new set of questions. So look for more from me on the things that Bhutan is doing when I come back from my trip. And thanks for listening.

Unknown: 19:22

Bye.