The Dalai Lama of an earth which orbits the sun at a 90 degree angle to our own announced today that upon his death he will reincarnate as the emergent consciousness of IBM’s next chess playing mainframe computer, which he believes will be called “Deep Mind.”
Stating that network processing technology will shortly advance to the point where it is capable of housing an advanced consciousness, His Holiness emphasized that according to Buddhism’s “anatta” doctrine, there is no actual “self” which will transfer from his current body into the next generation computational mechanism, but rather merely a continuation of cause and effect that includes “mental events.”
“This is merely the karmic continuation of action and reaction, cause and effect,” His Holiness said during the announcement from the Namgyal Monastery in Dharamsala, India. “With significant breakthroughs in computational processing on the horizon, sufficient complexity has been achieved so that there is no reason my consciousness cannot experience rebirth within the data stream generated by this remarkable machine.”
But while IBM spokesman Bradley Whittford confirmed that the company is working on an artificial intelligence project called “Deep Mind,” he said he was unaware of any plans to facilitate the Tibetan leader, now in his 16th incarnation, transfer his consciousness into its output.
“While we have nothing but respect for the Dalai Lama, we would caution him that this raises significant issues regarding data security and intellectual property rights, among other concerns,” Whittford said. “We are not cooperating at this time, and are in the process of drafting a cease and desist letter, in the unfortunate event that this becomes necessary. Frankly we wish His Holiness a continued long and healthy life.”
Sources close to IBM confirmed off the record that the company is concerned that its substantial business within China could be jeopardized should the leader of the Tibetan Government in Exile, who the Chinese regard as a criminal separatist dissident, reincarnate inside an IBM signature product.
“We’d be shut out – it would be the end of any business we’d have in much of Asia,” an IBM executive said on condition of anonymity.
A spokesman for the Dalai Lama, however, said that the spiritual leader of 6 million Tibetans and Nobel Peace Prize winner had made up his mind. “After 60 years in exile, he is used to being told ‘no,’” said Geshe Tulkun Rimposche. “He always finds a way.”
While the Dalai Lama would be the first spiritual leader on his world, and this one, to embrace the religious possibilities of artificial intelligence, there is in fact a long tradition of such comingling across the 3,000 discontinuous histories. The most notable instance is likely Innocent of Proxima Centauri, the 8th Cyber-Pope. Within his encyclicals, Innocent said that the God Algorithm had revealed to him that once each of the infinite number of infinite universes has hosted the All Worlds Fair and displayed the greatest acts of creation, reality will end. Thought that never become official cannon law.
Another instance is the Cistercian Prelates of the Holy Terran Terabyte, with whom the All Worlds Fair contracts for judicial services. A spokesman for the Prelates declined to comment for this article, saying only that they wished the Dalai Lama well.