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We have officially entered the age of AI and are in for a long haul. As generative AI creeps into most parts of our personal and professional lives, an inherent danger is the algorithmic biases and models that shape the decisions and actions of individuals and businesses . 

Over the years we have seen the ugliness of these algorithmic biases from search to social media platforms, from curtailing freedom of speech to mis-information to shaping the results of election outcomes, the wrongdoings are many. For example, shorts from TikTok, YouTube , Instagram are literally causing serious mental health issues among kids and teenagers. These algorithms are designed with profits in mind. 

AI ethics and morality won’t be sufficient to curtail these problems because it is many times misunderstood and applied wrongly even by the people who have intentions to do the right thing for the world. Moreover ethics and morality has to be tailored to different cultures and it is not universal, it is man made. For example, killing animals to satisfy hunger is moral in one culture but immoral in another culture. There are countless dichotomies like this in this diverse human landscape.

The law of Karma (cause and effect) is universal and  ‘supersedes’ ethics and morality. Unfortunately the western philosophy don’t take this seriously and rather stick to their versions of ethics and morality and blanketize it for the world. This is not right. The law of Karma is generational , not only for individuals , but also applies for businesses, societies and nations. The actions taken at a certain time, good or bad will see the results at another time. As they say, what goes around, comes around. It is indeed an inescapable law.

Companies can perish because of their own Karma accumulated overtime. We saw what happened to Twitter when they curtailed freedom of speech of people who wanted to tell the truth during pandemic. Google is doing this as well to some extent, for example: curtailing viewership of independent voices in India on their youtube platform through algorithmic manipulation. We also saw in the recent past when Google released Bard AI that had embedded bias of ideologies that had crept into algorithms. Many people revolted against the responses that Bard was spilling out. As a result, we are seeing the state of Google as the time unfolds.

A deep insight into how the law of Karma works can help incumbents and startups to adjust their course of action in how they build AI models that has the potential to impact the human society.