Just last week, I had a meeting with a monk at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Honganji (Hongwanji) Temple.
In 2023, it will be the 800th year anniversary of the birth of founder, “Shinran Shonin”, the great Master Saint Shinran and the monk at local temple where I live, is the organizer of the youth members Hongwanji Laboratory (Kenkyujo), where they study Shinran Shonin and his teachings.
He came to me asking for any advice where they can recreate his teachings using the artificial intelligence.
My answer to his problems was easy and hard and there are many steps to be taken.
800 years ago, the language was a bit different. They way scripts were written back then, people would need to re-evaluate and teach AI. AI need to be taught in a correct way, otherwise it would cry havoc like many other world beknown AI that ended up shutting down.
Deep learning and self learning are different characteristics of AI.
We can teach and there is a way to self learn without being taught. (We call that GAN — Generative Adversarial Network).
I’m not going to spell everything out here in my blog.
Their goal was to use AI to create new teachings of 21st century, what Shinran Shonin would have said and recreate new sutra and wise teachings. They know it’s not the real McCoy but they need to experiment on what they have now.
Would that be a real teaching? I don’t want to answer that.
I know that we can recreate the dead people by filling in their knowledge but it would take time.
We can have the computer read all the manuscripts and let them understand and then let it logically deduce and bring out new ideas and manuscipts to the world.
We do not have the voice pattern and how he was back then so we would need to “create” a voice pattern according to his age and gender as well as life style (what he ate and how he slept) and deduce how he sounded like.
We can’t just make him out of “Vocaloid” character or anything like that.
But it would be very interesting idea since I am an advisor of a company in Tokyo that develops AI and trying to implement it to ending industry.
We are already working on such idea of many celebraties to live forever.