Before we dive into Artificial Intelligence (AI) I think it may be helpful to think about Human Intelligence and the similarities and differences there are between the present day ‘western’ concept of Human Intelligence and the conception in North Asian ‘Confucian’ societies (China, S Korea, Japan), or ‘the East’. My intention is not to put one above another, but rather to attempt to go to the origins of each so we can extrapolate the likely developments of AI in their respected cultural realms, from now and to the immediate future.
Firstly, and most importantly, let’s establish some common ground for universal Human Intelligence. According to Karen Armstrong’s epic ‘The Great Transformation’, all Axial religions** settled on subjugating the worst aspects of “self” and ego to a commitment to help other human beings to live fulfilled and happy lives and to wish onto others the best of lives as each individual would wish on one’s self. By her calculation there are over 3.8 billion human souls across all geographical zones presently living within the ambit of an Axial religion:
“..at their core, the Axial faiths share an ideal of sympathy, respect, and universal concern. The sages (Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jesus and Muhammad) were all living in violent societies like our own. What they created was a spiritual technology that utilized natural human energies to counter this aggression…Regardless of their ‘theological beliefs’ – which did not much concern them – they all concluded that if people made a disciplined effort to reeducate themselves, they would experience an enhancement of their humanity. In one way or another, their programmes were designed to eradicate the egotism that is largely responsible for our violence, and promoted the emphatic spirituality of the Golden Rule.”
This is human intelligence at its highest level and it has not fundamentally changed for the past two thousand years. The Golden Rule is perhaps most succinctly articulated by Confucius, but in essence is shared by all the sages: “There is no greater joy for me than to find on self-examination that I am true to myself. Try your best to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself and you will find that this is the shortest way to benevolence (rén).”
I will come back to that word ‘rén’ later when looking at the origins of Chinese Human Intelligence as, while quotes from Confucius and his disciple Mozi of the East and Jesus of the west are almost interchangeable when it comes to beneficial aspects surrounding the concept of the suppression of ‘the self’, that ‘self’ is conceived of in radically different ways between ‘the west’ and ‘the East’.
Regarding ‘western’ Human Intelligence then: one thing to note is that it is in rapid decline. One measurement of Human Intelligence is cognitive testing in maths and verbal reasoning. According to a recent article in the FT by John Burn-Murdoch#, recent research has proven that human intelligence in the west is declining. According to the recent Adult Literacy and Life skills Survey, Human Intelligence peaked in 2012 and is now in decline. This is not only confined to teenagers: adults show a similar pattern, with declines across all age groups in the results from 2024 of the OECD’s flagship assessment of trends in adult skills. What is statistically proven bears comparison to my own generational observations (born 1964) relating to the superior cognitive powers of my late father, Philip Brook Dransfield’s generation (born 1925). Route learning may have its detractors, but my father could recite the whole of ‘Ulysses’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson well into his late seventies and his contemporary from Tibet, the late Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (1931-2022) – who left Tibet in the early 1970s with little more than the robe on his back – wrote the twenty or so spiritual texts published by Tharpa Press using his memory alone. An impressive feat of mental powers that would challenge any human being today.
What has any of the above got to do with the development of AI in the west? Well, at least at this point we can still claim that the ‘intelligence’ of machines is still dependent on the human minds that conceive them and hence on the dyscrasia of those human minds. While I am aware of the danger of reducing the many arguments surrounding the development of AI into a too simplistic dichotomy, I think we can determine two diverging schools of thought related to the expected path of the western development of AI – either leading to heaven, or to hell. And here I can draw on John Milton’s (1608 – 1674) ‘Paradise lost’: “The mind is its own place And in itself can make a heaven or hell, A hell of heaven”.
This concept of ‘heavenly’ machine learning is neatly captured by the west coast counter-culture poet, Richard Brautigan’s (1935 -1984):
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
“I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.”
Brautigan’s ‘machines of loving grace’ are definitely on the side of heaven and will aid men and women to realise their true potential as ‘Renaissance’ individuals, with all the tedious stuff of making a living done by machines. This concept of enlightened humanity is in line with Karl Marx’ (1818-1883) utopian vision of men being released from punitive labour to become artists and poets. But please note that even this vision is rooted in the realization of the ‘individual’ as against the collective and comes from the western enlightenment’s concept of what it is to be human:“All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
This focus on the individual in the west, so fundamentally rooted in our psyche to be almost unconscious, is also echoed in a quote from the late Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011): Jobs, described by a classmate in the California-based Homestead School as “part brain and part hippy”, said:
“You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
I find this quote from Jobs to be most illuminating as it combines both a very west coast nod to Eastern philosophy with its use of the concept of ‘karma’, combined with an unrelenting focus on the ego that is so characteristic of the north American male.
So, is the human condition in the west a human mind looking up towards his interactive maker, God in the heavens? Or is it a human mind looking down into the gutter? Either concept of the western human condition as being in a heaven or a hell is rooted in the primordial faith of Abraham, that we are, according to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’: “…flesh of flesh, bone of God’s, and from Thy state Mine: never shall be parted, bliss or woe”.
There are many that see AI’s potential future to be the devil’s stuff which will delegate us to the gutter, or even worse, to total annihilation. But for some, where there is muck there is brass and money can be made by appealing to our baser nature. It is my opinion that the American entrepreneur Peter Thiel holds a cynic’s view of our individual human nature. Thiel certainly was looking for a mirror that reflected back our worst selves when he invested in ‘The Facebook’. The young and malleable Zuckerberg’s creation was the only potential vehicle Thiel could see that echoed his own view that we are just vain and self-regarding primates wanting to show off to our small tribe. Thiel was drawing his jaundiced view of human nature from late nineteenth and early 20th century French anthropologists such as Paul Rivet (1876-1958) that concluded that our true human desires were vanity exemplified and all we wished for was to be valued and exalted in front of our peers. I firmly believe that results are determined by their origins, and it is my belief that much of social media in the west is exploiting the narcissistic and vulnerable aspects of the very worst of our psyches. Such cynical manipulation has the potential to destroy a whole generation.
But what of China? Far greater minds than mine have devoted their lives to presenting the myriad schools of Chinese thought (Wing-Tsi Chan’s ‘A source book in Chinese Philosophy’ Princeton,1963, being an exemplary example), but the core of Chinese ancient beliefs begins with a non-theistic ‘Prime Mover’ that exists before time and then spontaneously and miraculously brings forth Yin and Yang, and then one hundred thousand things that can aptly be described as universal ‘stuff’. And humans are just ‘stuff’, along with animals, trees, rocks, waterfalls – everything else in the universe that we can conceive of. Even ‘the sage’ is not made in Heaven’s image but is made simply of ‘stuff’. The following comes from Mozi (c.470 BCE – 391 BCE):
“Heaven is generous and ungrudging: Heaven’s understanding is eternal and never declines…Heaven displays its love of all men by giving them all life and sustaining them. If one flouts Heaven, Heaven will inflict calamities. Because the sages made Heaven their standard, all their actions were effective.”
Therefore, the concept of the human being in Chinese society is also radically different from that of the west. I thought the shortest poem in the world with just two words of single syllables was Mohammed Ali’s “Me: We”, (still a great poem) but the Chinese concept of ‘rén’ is even shorter. It means ‘a sage’, scholar, benevolence, a cultivated member of society and derives from the radical for ‘human’ on the left and ‘society’ or ‘two’ on the right. So, by definition a human of great creativity, a sage, is also an integral part of a wider society.
Chinese thought tends not to ponder origins. When asked to describe what happens after we die, Confucius answered: ”Till you know about the living, how are we to know about the dead?” I may be wrong, but the fraught ethical discussions that dominate the future of AI in the west is probably not shared in Chinese society: AI is most likely considered to be simply accepted as a tool, like any other.
What does all this mean in China today? It means that, like much of Chinese scientific development, AI platforms such as ‘DeepSeek’ are open-sourced. As Yanmei Xie noted in a recent FT ‘Markets Insight’ column##:
“The optimisation of processes to drive cost efficiency gains has long been a Chinese manufacturing superpower. This ability has propelled Chinese companies to domestic dominance and then overseas expansion in industry after industry; shipbuilding, solar panels, batteries, drones, electric vehicles, industrial robotics and pharma. Now, it is coming for Silicon Valley and investors betting on US exceptionalism should take note. The US can no longer take comfort believing that it rules software even while China dominates hardware production.”
As many manufacturers in the US have learned, if you make something China wants then that road leads to happiness; if you make something that China can replicate, that road leads to penury. DeepSeek is by no means the only China AI platform: others will emerge. And rival AI platforms of Silicon Valley which all to an application are being jealously guarded by companies that have become synonymous with the egotistical individuals behind them – Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), xAI (Elon Musk), AWS (Jeff Bezos) and ChatGPT/ Open AI (Sam Altman) – are pursuing vertical development where propriety ownership is the only true evaluation of value. Individuals against the collective, however powerful, rarely prevail long term. And on a grander scale, the concept of ‘containing China’, which has been a policy of both the previous Biden administration and the chaotic Trump administration of today, would learn well from the Chinese concept of the equal and opposite forces of Yin and Yang. Pushing a policy too hard and against ‘Heaven’ one way, and the opposite is the most likely result. “As the Daodejing pointed out, violence usually recoils upon the perpetrator, no matter how well intentioned he might be. You cannot force people to behave as you want: in fact, coercive measures are likely to drive them in the opposite direction.” (Armstrong). The more the US pushes against Chinese scientific development, the more China is likely to prosper. Just look at the car industry, where European manufacturers are beginning to collaborate with their Chinese counterparts.
Let’s go back to that verse of Brautigan’s: “…and all watched over
by machines of loving grace”. Is it actually possible in this age of global division and strife to train our own minds to be focused on ‘loving grace’? Indeed it is! We humans have managed it before. The Axial age of two thousand years ago was, according to Armstrong “a time of spiritual genius…we live in a time of scientific and technical genius (but) our spiritual education is often underdeveloped”.
On the western side of the coin, when I look at the men (and they seem to be all men) that are taking a propriety approach to the development of AI, I don’t see much in the way of ‘loving grace’ in any of them. But another conclusion can be drawn. The Axial Age, even in China, was a time of the development of a new ‘individualism’. The old tribal ethic which had developed to ensure the survival of the group was being replaced by a conscious focus on ‘the self’: “The sage demanded that every single person become self-conscious, aware of what they were doing.” (Armstrong). Something for the ‘selfie’-taking TikTok generation to contemplate and improve on, perhaps? I hope that the above may prove helpful and stimulate debate: my next article will attempt to draw some conclusions regarding AI and the development of the legal industry.
*Part of the above formed the comments made during The Legal Innovation Forum organized by ADB Insights held in Dubai in April 2025 – thanks to Andrew Bowyer (pictured) and Gary Kalaci for the invitation, and to Tanya Seajay for the picture of me presenting an AI generated ‘self’ portrait.
**Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Daoist, Jewish, Confucian, Jain and Zoroastrian religions.
# ‘Have humans passed peak brain power?’ John Burn-Murdoch, 13 March, 2025
##China’s superpower of scaling will spur DeepSeek threat”, Yanmei Xie, FT 24, February 2025
