AI Can Only Replace the Functions of the Simple Mind Consciousness.

It is said that some people have lost their jobs because AI has replaced them, and some graduates find their skills useless upon graduation. So under such circumstances, how can one avoid being replaced by AI and stay ahead of it?

The disciple said: What AI replaces are jobs involving statistics, summarization, and analysis, where its efficiency is extremely high. But when it comes to complex communication between people, human beings are still needed to come forward and communicate. Likewise, things such as cultivating practice and seeking realization must be done by oneself.

Assessment: AI is entirely a function of the mind consciousness; it cannot invent or create, cannot innovate. It can only follow behind innovative people, copying and pasting, organizing and summarizing, then engaging in emotional speculation and intellectual interpretation, never stepping outside the framework of its programming, unable to surpass the wisdom of innovative people. What does not exist in the world, it cannot produce. Therefore, if humanity wants to avoid being replaced by AI, the only way is to innovate and develop one's own potential.

As for development and innovation, the mind consciousness absolutely cannot accomplish this. Even if the mind consciousness can imagine freely and boundlessly, it cannot create the things it imagines. The function of innovation and creation belongs uniquely to the manas, with the six consciousnesses cooperating. AI can copy, paste, and imitate written language, speech, and bodily movements; it can organize, summarize, classify, and arrange texts. But human thoughts and emotions cannot be copied and pasted by AI; perhaps it can imitate them, but what it imitates is not the real thing. Thoughts and emotions come from the depths of the mind—the manas—which is extremely hidden, secret, and subtle. AI can only imitate coarse, superficial things; completely replacing human beings by passing off the fake as the real is impossible. Since the manas possesses thoughts, emotions, and moods, it must also possess various afflictive mental factors and wholesome mental factors, endowed with all the mental factors that a conscious mind should have.

Of the four steps of the Buddha-dharma—hearing, contemplation, practice, and realization—AI can replace and even surpass humans in hearing and contemplation, but it can never have practice and realization. This is because hearing and contemplation are functions of the mind consciousness, relatively simple, and can be copied, imitated, and substituted. But the function of practice and realization is something AI can never possess. A metal machine has no mind; without a mind, how could it cultivate practice, let alone attain realization? When Māra Pāpīyas originally entered the assembly of the Buddha's dharma, he heard an extremely large amount of Buddhist teachings—he could hear and contemplate, could memorize, and had abundant knowledge. But because his greed and desire were blazing, he had no mind for practice and realization. He was thus comparable to AI, perhaps even surpassing AI, but without practice and realization. If Pāpīyas had had practice and realization, he would not have gone to such lengths to destroy the Buddha-dharma, would not have gone to such lengths to obstruct sentient beings' cultivation, would not have craved the various things of the desire realm so intensely, and would not have committed such great evil karma.