about
Contemplative Artificial Intelligence (arxiv.org)
3 points by lucasluitjes on Sep 6, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | 2 comments on HN

In plain words: Four contemplative ideas—watching one's own mind, holding goals loosely, dropping us-versus-them, and caring for all—guide AI to self-correct and avoid rigid, selfish goals. Adding these reflections raised safety-test scores and boosted cooperation and shared reward in a two-player game over plain prompting.

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.

Ruben Laukkonen, Fionn Inglis, Shamil Chandaria, Lars Sandved-Smith, Edmundo Lopez-Sola, Jakob Hohwy, Jonathan Gold, Adam Elwood
arXiv:2504.15125 · cs.AI · submitted Apr 21, 2025 · updated Aug 18, 2025
abstract · pdf

add comment on HN

TLDR: they wrapped prompts with concepts from Buddhism and got better performance on alignment tests. Actual prompts are in appendix D in this PDF: https://osf.io/az59t

I'm curious what effects you would see with secular moral philosophy, other religions, etc. Is Buddhism special, as the paper seems to argue?

The "Boundless Care" concept seems akin to Hinkins' Maternal AI.