Money Economics, AI, and Learning from Narahari Sonar

In 2010, Dr. Laurie R Santos delivered one of the finest lectures available on the acclaimed TED platform. While everyone else looked at the financial crisis and the collapse of giant banks as a systemic issue and a governance lapse, Laurie asked a far more relevant question??

Are humans designed to make bad decisions? She stated that even though we're brilliant, we can also be incredibly dumb regarding some aspects of our decision-making. She wanted to figure out why a species as intelligent and capable as humans would consistently make bad decisions that lead to one recession after another.?

She took a cue from social scientists and worked with the hypothesis that if we keep repeating similar mistakes, we have a flawed design. Laurie and her team set up a marketplace for monkeys and gave them tokens representing money. They sat back and observed the makes make all the same mistakes humans make in stock markets. The monkeys stole from each other and cheated at every possible opportunity. The seminal moment was when monkeys chose to gamble away their coin with a salesperson who could give them either one or three grapes versus choosing the safe one who always gave them two grapes.?

I highly recommend you watch this video to dive deeper into her research.

The monkeys demonstrated the same behavior as human beings. Let's review Dr. Laurie's concluding points. I have paraphrased it.?

?We started with the hope that we could tweak our financial institutions and technologies to improve ourselves. But we've learned that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that. We know that such biases tend to be hard to overcome. You know, think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things, fatty things like cheesecake. You can't just shut that off. The same thing will be true when humans perceive different financial decisions. When you're watching your stocks plummet into the red and your house price goes down, you won't be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms. The hope is that you all will think about your limitations, not necessarily as fixed, but recognize them, accept them, and then use the world of design to figure them out. That is the only way we will be able to achieve our human potential and be the noble species we hope to all be.

The Challenge in the AI Economy

While Dr. Laurie spoke of the human penchant for risk and bad decision-making in the financial markets, we can see the same behaviors manifesting in the AI research and adoption field. Microsoft clearly feels that they have a winner in Open AI's chat GPT and are moving at blazing speed.?

This has forced Google and other competitors to respond in kind, and we are seeing an existential war play out in front of us every day.?The tragedy is that AI is probably the most critical technology humanity has worked on in the last hundred years. It impacts every single field, from medicine to agriculture. It will also affect the workforce significantly, and we should ideally use tools like design thinking to model out the impact of the technology and do controlled releases for various sectors. After all, no one is holding a gun to our heads to embrace and adopt this disruption today. All these companies are in a hurry to deliver value to their shareholders. The perceived winners in this race will see their stock price multiply and create a new set of billionaires.?

However, the winners will most likely tread over a fractured and broken society trying to figure out how to keep pace with this change while maximizing human welfare. David Shapiro, an AI evangelist, predicts that if we proceed at this pace, we can achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in 18 months. That means that AI will be able to outperform human beings on most tasks that demand cognitive intelligence. You can then combine it with the work in robotics to automate most of the jobs humans perform. Companies would rush to maximize their profits and improve their margins, which has the potential to wreak havoc in society since most of us are conditioned to find self-worth in our jobs.?

The scary part is computer scientists openly admit they have little idea how AI makes recommendations and provides answers. Imagine being denied bail or rejected for a job and the AI being unable to explain the decision. That's a real possibility, and we must ensure we design these systems to work effectively with humans to maximize human welfare.?

To design and implement high-quality AI systems at scale, we may need global organizations such as Microsoft and Google to collaborate with each other and governments worldwide. This seems impossible in today's world. We have created the rules for capitalistic societies and now pretend that these are rules of nature that cannot be changed, and any attempt to tweak them would be catastrophic. The following interview with Jon Stewart and Larry Summers is a short and sharp summary of our current situation.?

Is it possible to reinvent capitalism to make it more inclusive? Can we challenge the existing rules and create a kinder and more compassionate system? The answer is Yes, but to understand how to go about it, we need to learn from the example of Narahari Sonar.?

The Awakening of Narahari Sonar

Narahari was a goldsmith born in the 13th century. He lived in Pandarpur and was a devotee of Lord Shiva. Pandarpur is the home to the famous temple of Lord Vishnu in the form of Vithoba. Narhari was so devoted to Shiva that he only visited the Mallikarjuna temple and would not even step inside the Vithoba temple. However, to truly achieve the end goal of liberation, he needed to learn that Shiva and Vishnu are simply different manifestations of the same divine energy.

One day a merchant approached Narahari and asked him to create a golden waistband for the statue of Lord Vishnu in the Vithoba temple. Narahari refused immediately, stating that he did not even look at the shikhara (pinnacle) of that temple, so how could he design anything for Vithoba? The merchant would not take no for an answer and continued to pester Narahari till he created a golden belt with approximate measurements and handed it to the merchant.?

The merchant hurried to the temple, and when they fit the belt, it turned out to be a little tight. So the merchant rushed back to Narahari and got the belt loosened. This time it was too loose. The merchant ran back and convinced Narahari that he had to measure the statue of Vithoba himself to adjust the size of the belt. Narahari tied a piece of cloth around his eyes because he had made a vow to only see one deity, which was Shiva. He then went to the temple to measure the waist of Vithoba. When Narahari touched the idol of Vithoba, he could suddenly feel the ash-covered body, matted hair locks, and tiger skin of his Lord Shiva. He opened the cloth around his eyes and gazed at the statue of Vithoda, clad in silken finery, smiling down at him mischievously. He put the cloth on again and touched the idol. Again he could feel the form of Lord Shiva. At that moment, he had a flash of insight that there was no difference between Lord Shiva and Lord Vithoba. He then became a devotee of Vithoba and wrote some beautiful Abhangs (Marathi poetry) praising the divine in its many forms.?

I first listened to this story in a beautiful Nagarsagitan (collective chanting as you walk on the road) by Vinay Varanasi and Sivasri Skandaprasad.

Summary

Why did I tell you a story of Narahari Sonar's transformation before talking about how we can reinvent capitalism? It's because social systems can only be reformed when we reform the society that creates them. Today's social systems give too much power and control to a few individuals who control a vastly unequal share of wealth. They do so because we, as a society, have placed the most value on wealth generation. The following video by Nick Hanauer talks about a new kind of capitalism that's more inclusive and prioritizes equitable wealth distribution.?

However, he does not state how we can prepare society and leaders to make that transition. It can only happen when we see a collective shift in consciousness. The shift in Narahari Sonar happened due to grace in his life which elevated his conciousness. We also have access to tools that can help elevate our consciousness.?

One of them is called Sadhana. It's an app created by my Guru Om Swami that helps you perform various acts like Sadhana, Mantra Chanting, and Havans. When you consistently and actively use this application, something shifts within you.

You start looking beyond your immediate needs and are open to making changes to would benefit society. Sanatana Dharma has always talked about Vasudhaiva Kutumbaka, which means that the whole world is one family. When a wave of oneness sweeps the globe, every corporation and government will be automatically incentivized to do their bit.?