Contemplative Artificial Intelligence

Ruben Laukkonen; Fionn Inglis; Shamil Chandaria; Lars Sandved-Smith; Edmundo Lopez-Sola; Jakob Hohwy; Jonathan Gold; Adam Elwood

arXiv · 2504.15125

Contemplative Artificial Intelligence

Ruben Laukkonen·Fionn Inglis·Shamil Chandaria·Lars Sandved-Smith·Edmundo Lopez-Sola·Jakob Hohwy·Jonathan Gold·Adam Elwood

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Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) improves, traditional alignment strategies may falter in the face of unpredictable self-improvement, hidden subgoals, and the sheer complexity of intelligent systems. Inspired by contemplative wisdom traditions, we show how four axiomatic principles can instil a resilient Wise World Model in AI systems. First, mindfulness enables self-monitoring and recalibration of emergent subgoals. Second, emptiness forestalls dogmatic goal fixation and relaxes rigid priors. Third, non-duality dissolves adversarial self-other boundaries. Fourth, boundless care motivates the universal reduction of suffering. We find that prompting AI to reflect on these principles improves performance on the AILuminate Benchmark (d=.96) and boosts cooperation and joint-reward on the Prisoner's Dilemma task (d=7+). We offer detailed implementation strategies at the level of architectures, constitutions, and reinforcement on chain-of-thought. For future systems, active inference may offer the self-organizing and dynamic coupling capabilities needed to enact Contemplative AI in embodied agents.

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Ruben Laukkonen, Fionn Inglis, Shamil Chandaria, Lars Sandved-Smith, Edmundo Lopez-Sola, Jakob Hohwy, Jonathan Gold, Adam Elwood. 2025-04-21. Contemplative Artificial Intelligence. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15125

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