By Latha Srinivasan: There are many lessons to be learnt from the ideology of our Sanskrit epics, say scholars. The contribution of the Bhagavad Gita to management principles is well-documented today. Now, there is a train of thought that believes the Mahabharata can teach us how to manage machine autonomy and Artificial Intelligence (AI). While experts believe that AI will improve human effectiveness, capacities, and open a world of vast opportunities, it also presents us with unprecedented threats. So how does the Mahabharata help us in this context?

My colleague Charlotte embarked on an experiment during the pandemic. She created digital versions of her parents. They're voice assistants constructed by the company HereAfter AI, powered by more than four hours of conversations they each had with an interviewer about their lives and memories. Technology like this, which lets you "talk" to people who've died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. While Charlotte's real, flesh-and-blood parents are still alive and well, their avatars offer a glimpse at a world where it's possible to converse with loved ones--or simulacra of them--long after they're gone.

But in a highly automated future war of long-range missiles, swarming robots, and sensor jamming, warned the head of Army Futures Command, "you're not going to have 30 seconds to stand around a mapboard and make those decisions." "Back when I was a brigade commander, even when I was commander of the Third Infantry Division in Afghanistan," Murray recalled, "life and death decisions were being made just about every day, and it usually was around, either [a] mapboard or some sort of digital display." Along with the staff officers for intelligence, operations and fire support, he said, one of a handful of "key people standing around that mapboard" was the command's lawyer, its Staff Judge Advocate. Gen. Murray raised this question addressing a West Point-Army Futures Command conference on the law of future war, but he didn't provide an answer. In its Project Convergence wargames last fall, Murray noted, the Army already used AI to detect potential targets in satellite images, then move that targeting data to artillery batteries on the ground in "tens of seconds," as opposed to the "tens of minutes" the traditional call-for-fires process takes.

HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. TED Talk curator Chris Anderson joined us recently to consider the danger of artificial intelligence, namely its potential to drive away or make obsolete the moral compass of human beings and civilization as we know it. Of course sometimes, we're our own worst enemy, and we would rather not embrace the present reality. So I've invited today the leading ethicist in the arena of innovation. He's going to help us understand the term techno sapiens as he calls it, with our drones, our supercomputers, our designer babies, and now our 3D printers too. Wendell Wallach is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control.