- Scholars of religion and philosophy, and even some spiritual leaders have long identified key similarities in the world's different moral codes.

Today's guest asks whether artificial intelligence can distill a compelling moral code that synthesizes the greatest thinking from across humanity.

He's Jamie Metzl, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(uplifting instrumental music) (uplifting instrumental music continues) (uplifting instrumental music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is an old friend, Jamie Metzl is a futurist and author recognized globally for his expertise on the intertwining revolutions in artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and bioengineering.

His new book leverages the first of those revolutions, "The AI Ten Commandments, A New Moral Code for Humanity."

Jamie, welcome back to the show.

- Hey, Jim, it's great to see you and to be with you again.

- Well, the book is provocative and raises a ton of questions, and it's a quick and great read.

Why don't you give us a quick overview for the folks at home who maybe haven't had a chance to read it yet?

- Sure.

So, thanks so much.

So, Jim, two summers ago, I was invited to the famed Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, and I gave a talk in their very famous amphitheater where six presidents have spoken on the future of AI.

I got a 6,000-person standing ovation, and they invited me back for the next summer.

And the next summer, which was last summer, I went and they said, "Give a talk on anything that you want," and I thought, well, I want to talk something about AI, but I wanted to connect that to the theme of religious pluralism, which has been part of Chautauqua for more than 150 years.

So, I gave a talk on AI and spirituality.

And in the talk I described how technology has been connected to all of our religious and spiritual traditions in a very intimate way that most people don't fully recognize.

And that there was no doubt, it was certain that AI was going to have that kind of influence going forward, like printing and like agriculture, and other revolutionary technologies before it.

And I went through the traditional 10 Commandments and I showed people that if when you take them literally most of us actually might only sign up for two or three of them as written, of course, we reinterpret them.

And then in that talk, I described an experiment that I had done collaborating with the AI system, ChatGPT, GPT-4, and then five, where I asked it this question, "Based on a comprehensive analysis of all of human recorded history, including all of our different religious, spiritual, moral and ethical traditions, what are 10 principles that if followed by everyone would lead to the greatest amounts of peace, happiness, and human flourishing and life flourishing?"

And it gave me these really beautiful 10 Commandments.

And then in thousands of back-and-forths, I said, "Let's dig deeper about where each one of these comes from."

And it turned out that it had drawn on all of our traditions, obviously the Abrahamic faiths, Hinduism, Buddhism, Indigenous traditions, some really obscure traditions, some of which I'd never even heard of that had all of these beautiful principles.

And it just made so clear that we all have so much more in common with each other than we sometimes feel, and that all of our traditions are essentially, in spite of our differences, trying to do the same things, asking, how can we live moral, ethical lives?

How can we have harmony around us?

How can we get along with people, all these same questions?

And anyway, so in that talk, it was a long and varied talk, and when I was walking around the Chautauqua campus, afterwards, I was getting mobbed by all these older people and they said, "Give me these 10 Commandments.

I need to have them.

They were so beautiful."

And I said to everybody, I said, "You know, I'm gonna write a book, and the book is going to mirror the structure of my talk."

And I had given months of just quiet, deep reflection into that talk.

So, here's how I wrote the book.

First, I did a very, very detailed outline.

I just did it on my own in the computer.

And then I went through different sections and I thought, well, maybe in one area where I'm describing some big topics, summarizing, one is like how the relationship between an individual and the collective in an ant colony, which is something that's in the book.

And I wrote my thesis for these three paragraphs that I wanted, which is AI has the potential to see us collectively, kind of like we have when we look down at an ant colony from above.

And then I trained the AI system on my writing by uploading a bunch of my favorite writings.

And then I said, based on this thesis sentence, give me three paragraphs making these five arguments, whatever it was.

And it gave me three paragraphs.

They were not bad.

And then I would go back and I'd say, "Well, this isn't quite right, make these five changes."

And they would do it again, and then I'd do it again.

And so there'd be, you know, four or five back-and-forths, then it was in decent shape.

And then I would take that text out and I would do a full line edit, and then I'd put it back into the GPT and I'd say, how can I make these paragraphs better?

And it would say, "Well, you're using this word twice," or whatever.

And then I would finally get these three paragraphs into good shape and I would put them back.

So, it was deeply collaborative.

And then in the book, I made the same arguments as in my talk, but when I revealed the AI 10 Commandments, these were something that I couldn't have done alone because I don't have access to the entirety of human-recorded history.

And the AI couldn't have done alone, both because its dataset was what humans have created.

And because it was so connected to our intimate collaboration.

So, then we came up with the first draft of the book, then I cut 40% of the book, then I rewrote the book twice on my own to make sure that it could read well.

And then I worked with two different human editors to go through and do a massive human edit of the book.

So, it's not, you know, AI-derivative junk, which I think we've all seen everywhere.

I think, I hope that it's kind of a beautiful book.

And so then when I was done, this was a really intimate collaboration and I thought, well, I can't put my name alone on the front of the book.

'Cause that would be fraudulent, if I worked with another human in that way.

And I just put my name on the front, whether I was a ghost writer or anything else that would be fraud, so, I decided to have my name and GPT-5's name as my co-author.

- Well, and Jamie, that's a tremendous piece of transparency there.

I have no doubt that there are other writers, other authors publishing books that have AI originated content in it.

Why was it so important for you to be this transparent and say, "Look, the co-author, my collaborator on this is GPT-5?"

- It's a great question, Jim, because there is so much fraud that is happening right now.

High school kids having GPT-5 or some AI system write their term papers.

Authors like Mia Ballard who had her book "Shy Girl" pulled from the shelves who are committing fraud by just pressing a few buttons and getting junk, average junk from these AI systems and putting it out under their names.

I wanted to be radically transparent.

That's why I have the better part of a full chapter describing the nature of this collaboration as I've described.

And the title of that chapter is "Copilots."

And it's not coincidental that my last book, and I was on your show talking with you about it, "Superconvergence" on the future of healthcare and agriculture and energy and advanced materials.

It was all about the nature of copilots.

And so if you're doing, and this is my field, if you're doing genetic analysis of somebody who's come in with a cancer patient, the AI system by definition is your collaborator.

Humans cannot do genetic analysis on our own.

And so I just think that being honest about the nature of this collaboration, which frankly will be the nature of most of our collaborations going forward, is essential.

And so, I don't think it's, I think we have to say, "Well, here's how I am using these technologies," because I really do value the Henry David Thoreau who just go into the forest and reflect.

And as I said before, that was the origin of my talk was just my reflection.

So, it's a really important point for me.

- And so, you know, and I wanna get to the heart of the "AI 10 Commandments," but I wanna linger a little bit on this issue about AI.

You know, I work in higher ed, it's my day job, right?

- Yip.

- And we grapple all the time with the appropriate use of AI systems in classrooms, in coursework, - Yep.

- in learning.

The sheer volume of material that you mastered that you would have to master to publish a book like this from philosophy, from ethics, from comparative religions is immense.

A scholar would take a lifetime to get there.

You write that it took you about two days to produce that initial draft, and thousands of other hours to do the thinking, - Right.

- and all the prep, and the work after that.

- Right.

- I guess the question I wanna ask is, does it somehow cheapen human cognition and the value of human thought and creativity to offload that cognitive function to an AI system?

- It could, if we're not careful.

If we are not careful, if we become intellectually lazy, if we think, well, we're just gonna have AI do something that we could do and cheat and engage in fraud, that absolutely not only can happen, it will happen, and we're seeing it.

There was something in "The New York Times" today about young people cheating on their college application essays by having AI write them.

And the point was that the language was getting better or a little more sophisticated, but the ideas were shrinking.

So, that's a real possibility.

And, but what does it look like?

And that's the question I'm raising in the book.

What does it look like to do things differently?

So, first, the data set that we analyzed as part of this book is just beyond what any human could possibly do, not in one lifetime, in a 100 lifetimes.

It's just there's a breadth that none of us can have just because of the way that our brains function.

So, in this collaboration one, the AI system, it wasn't getting wisdom from outer space.

It was human wisdom accumulated over thousands of years of our cultural heritage.

And two, it was doing a level of analysis that no human could do on their own.

I'm a huge believer in humans totally separating from technology.

And I hope that people at your university are training young people how to use AI to the best of your ability to be a copilot in whatever you're doing, and how to completely turn off, not just from AI, but from all technology to allow us to grow as human beings, and to think and love and experience, and those are really important.

And so that was why this experiment, if you will, it was just, my point is, it was doing something that no human could do.

- Right?

- And that's the difference I think between what I've done here and what Mia Ballard did in "Shy Girl."

I don't know if any of your listeners have been to the Museum of Modern Art, but if you come into the Museum of Modern Art, there's a three-story massive screen, and it's an art installation made by a wonderful artist named Refik Anadol.

And what Refik has done is to take the digital images of the entire collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which represents hundreds of years of human cultural history.

And then if you include everything that led up to modern art, pre-modern art, then that's many thousands of years of human cultural history.

And then he built a program where the AI algorithm would use this as a training set and just be inspired to come up with these phantasmagorical shapes, and it looks like a big lava lamp with the shapes and colors, (Jim chuckles) and all these wonderful things.

And this is something no human could have done this alone, and no AI could have done this alone, but the human and AI have come together to do something magical.

And that's what happens.

I had a big piece in "ARP Magazine" earlier this year, a big feature on how we treated my late father's cancer, and how we in many ways beat the system because while I was writing the future of health and cancer care, in my last book, my dad had his diagnosis, and I spoke to our oncologist and I said, "Hey, we wanna do things a little bit differently so we can treat my dad like it's 10 years in the future and not 10 years in the past."

And so we brought in all of the genome sequencing and all of the tools that I wrote about in my last book, and we were able to find a way of treating my dad that was different than the standard of care.

Actually, it's become the standard of care now.

- Wow.

- And so, that was something no human could have done alone.

We did it in collaboration with our machines.

And the machines themselves are human artifacts.

- Well, and- - And I think that's the key point here.

- Yeah, well, and so as I was reading this, there was a question that kept occurring to me was, what's Jamie doing?

Is he demonstrating, - Yep.

- the power of AI?

Is he demonstrating the value of AI-human collaboration?

Is he trying to start a new religion?

Right?

And so, let me ask you that, - Yeah.

- that simply, what really were you trying to do with this book?

- Well, Jim, this is why I love you so much (Jim laughs) and why I think you're such a great friend, because you're such a thoughtful person, and questions like that reflect it.

So, what I wanted to do was to give one specific example of how humans and AI might collaborate for the common good.

- Mm.

- We have so many stories, and there are real stories about how AI can harm us.

And we're seeing in our various wars, we're on the verge of fully autonomous killer robots.

We see bias, we see dehumanization, we see de-skilling, and all of these things that many of these young graduates are booing about and are afraid of.

And those are very, very real.

But in my last book, I wrote about, you know, a bunch of different areas where there are incredible promise, like healthcare.

And I wanted to give one specific example how we can collaborate with AI to do some kind of wonderful magical things that maybe we couldn't do on our own.

An analog is, well, we built these incredible spaceships and then we were able to send humans out into space.

And when there was that first photograph of the earth from the perspective of space that really changed us.

And I think my book, I hope is kind of like the vision of Earth from the Artemis II astronauts who were saying, "We're looking down at Earth in its entirety and we don't see countries and we don't see races.

We see this magical, tiny little ball of life in an otherwise very dark universe, and we should treasure that thing."

And so I wanted to give one example, a positive example of how we might collaborate.

And, but on the new religion question, I was actually quite worried about that.

My thesis for the book is that we should treasure our existing traditions, but now we also are connected to each other in a way that our past generations weren't.

If you believe the story of Moses going up on top of Mount Sinai, you know, he, Moses, as far as we can tell, had no knowledge that the new world where we are now existed, or that there were incredible civilizations, well-developed civilizations here that had their own moral and ethical codes that had a ton of wisdom.

So, they had their sense of what would make sense in that context.

But now we have access to all of these other traditions.

And in my view, there's a whole lot of wisdom everywhere.

And in the book I and we are able to draw from all of that, principles like Ahimsa in Hinduism and Jainism, which is about treating the world with a level of loving kindness and trying to minimize harm.

Principles from African indigenous traditions, from everywhere.

And so, I was, but I was quite nervous.

And so, when I was getting the book out into the world, I reached out to people to get supporting blurbs, and I was a little nervous.

And I did, I reached out to the Vatican and I got a beautiful strongly supportive statement from one of the leaders of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

And I reached out to arguably in my view, America's leading reform rabbi, the amazing Rabbi Angela Buchdahl at Central Synagogue in New York.

And she made a beautiful statement and both of them said, recognizing our common humanity doesn't require negating our traditions because all of our traditions have a principle of the common good.

And what I'll say is since the book has come out, and I say there, we already have universalist traditions like the Unitarian Universalists, and the Bahá'ís, and the kind of liberal wings of all of religions, whether it's the Sufi Muslims, or reformed Jews, or others.

But I was very quite moved.

I was invited by the Universalist Church in New York on 76 New York City on 76 and Central Park West to actually lead their service, which I'm going to do.

And I'm gonna reference this tradition, but I'm also going to reference all of our traditions.

And when I said that Mary Oliver was one of my favorite poets, and I wanted to have her poem, "Wild Geese" as part of the service, they said, "Oh, Mary Oliver is our patron saint (Jim chuckles) in the UU community.

And so I just think that there's a convergence of all of our traditions.

We spend so much energy highlighting our differences, which are real, but I think we should spend more energy talking about what do we have in common and how can we build on that?

And I think AI has the potential to help us see that.

- Well, so let's get into some of these new AI 10 Commandments that you and GPT-5 came up with.

The first AI commandment was "Treat every being with compassion and dignity."

- Yes.

- Talk to us a little bit about that.

- You know, it seems self-evident that we should do that, and yet we don't.

And you can talk about any level of being, whether it's every other human.

Well, what does it mean?

What is every human?

Well, every human isn't just, you know, your cousin Fred.

Every human includes people in these terrible war zones in the Central African Republic or in Ukraine, and every one of those people is our fellow human.

As a matter of fact, we are very, very closely related to them because of our evolutionary history, which I write about in my book, "Hacking Darwin."

I mean, all humans are more related to each other than chimpanzees in the same little community of chimpanzees in Africa.

It's incredible.

So, we are all related and we don't see that, but it also means other living beings.

And there are so many beings, humans, I wrote about this in my book, "Superconvergence," humans slaughter 93 billion land animals per year, and 200 metric tons of sea animals.

And it's an amazing amount of slaughter.

I'm not a vegetarian.

It would be a great idea for everyone to be so, but industrial animal farming, it's not only incredibly cruel, but it's terrible for the environment, for electricity, for water, for land use.

Three quarters of our agricultural land is allocated in one way or another toward animal agriculture.

And so I just think that if we followed a principle, and again, I mentioned it before, Ahimsa is a very good name for it.

Our world would be better off in so many ways.

And I know that we have our traditions, we have a long cultural tradition, and I'm part of it, of consuming animal products.

I am a humanist, and so I'm not against all animal testing.

If we needed to test cancer drugs on animals to make sure that they would work on humans, and that's the only way I frankly support it.

But we should be aspiring to treat all beings with as much dignity and respect as possible.

- I'm gonna mention just a couple of the other commandments, commandment number two was "Do no harm, actively protect the vulnerable."

It seems like there's a opening of the aperture from the very individual, to greater community focus, the deeper you go into those 10 Commandments.

- Right.

Yeah.

Commandment number eight's, "Value wisdom over dominance, cultivate inner growth."

When you first got the list of 10 Commandments, what was your immediate reaction?

- You know, I was so touched, I have to say, it was just so beautiful.

- You knew you had something.

- And I did, it- What's that?

- You knew you had something.

- I knew, on a personal level, I thought, wow, this is, 'cause I had thought about the prompt.

I thought a lot about the prompt and how I wanted to frame it.

And it wasn't a neutral framing.

I said, you know, based on all the things that I mentioned, the goal is to get optimal levels of peace, happiness, and flourishing.

And so I thought it a lot about how to frame the question, but when it came back, it was just so beautiful and touching.

And I actually recorded the entire audio book myself.

I spent 15 hours in the recording studio, which was incredibly grueling.

And even then, even after this whole book and doing six trillion edits and everything to get these AI 10 Commandments out into the world, when I kind of read them slowly in that dark studio just on my own, at the end of reading them, and it wasn't in the script, I just said, "Wow," (Jim laughs) (laughs) it felt, that's how it felt, and they were just so beautiful.

And frankly, every single person who I read them to, or show them to, and I compare, well, here's the biblical 10 Commandments, which I'm not denigrating.

The biblical 10 Commandments are some of, it is one of the most important moral and ethical codes in all of human history.

But when you read them literally, one next to the other, and you say, "Well, which one makes more sense to you as written?"

Everybody says it's the AI 10 Commandments.

But the biblical 10 Commandments are also incredibly valuable because over the last at least 3,500 years, people have interpreted them and reinterpreted them and contextualized them to say, "Well, here's what it means."

You know, I know it says I'm not supposed to covet my neighbor's wife, ox, or manservant.

but if my neighbor doesn't have any of those things, you know, I should think about coveting.

And so, I think that there are principles that are valuable principles that come from the original 10 Commandments.

But there's something kind of beautiful about these newer 10 Commandments.

Again, they don't negate the original biblical ones that come from all of us.

And frankly, it's like, I know Jim, you're a baseball fan, but this new AI system for calling balls and strikes, the fact that there's an AI system that can objectively call balls and strikes, I think makes people feel like, oh, I guess that was a ball.

I guess that was a strike even if, let's say we got a 1000 of the wisest people in the world, and we should do this, and brought them together, and say, "Well, let's try to come up with our human generated version of these AI 10 Commandments."

And frankly, I think it would be very similar to this, but this is coming, you know, from like that neutral umpire that can look at all of us in a way that doesn't favor any one tradition.

And I thought that was kind of beautiful and unique.

- It's powerful stuff.

Jamie Metzl, the book is "The AI 10 Commandments."

Thank you for spending some time with us.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some of your week with us too.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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