A lay follower asked: as AI plays an ever-larger role in the future, what should people adapt or train in, so as to remain valuable both in the world and on the path of Dhamma?

The subtle comes first, the gross follows

Phra Ajahn gave an example: years ago, when a laser-pointer-like tool first appeared for pointing at whiteboards, he knew as soon as he saw it that meditation was about to spread — because once something appears at the gross, visible level, it means the subtle groundwork was already complete. Not long after, people did indeed grow interested in meditation. It began with research showing that meditation practice could help cure cancer, which led to the founding of meditation-based cancer treatment centers in the West, and research into meditation kept growing from there.

This illustrates a pattern: the subtle level is accomplished long before it shows up in the gross, physical world. Once something breaks through and appears once, more of the same kind follows in sequence. AI is unfolding according to this very same pattern.

The outer knower and the inner knower

AI is an "outer knower" — more capable than any human, because the human mind has limits on what it can hold and remember. But the outer world itself is also limited. The moment a person connects with the "inner knower," however, knowledge becomes limitless. The inner knower has many levels; the more pure and liberated we become, the finer and deeper a level of inner knowing we can reach. AI still depends on data that exists somewhere in the world, and that data is finite. Inner knowledge is not.

What to train

So if we are to adapt, the essential things to train are paññā-vimutti and ceto-vimutti. If we only try to keep up with the world, we will always be chasing it — we need to move ahead of it instead.

Phra Ajahn recalled that early in his monastic life, about thirty years ago, he used to say: when the world lies down, we should already be sitting up; when the world sits, we should already be standing; when the world stands, we should already be walking; when the world walks, we should already be running; and when the world runs, we should already have arrived. In other words, we must not follow the world — we must stay a step ahead of it.

We should train the skill of connecting both with the inner knower, who conveys knowledge, and with the inner power, which — once our practice reaches a certain point — breaks through our ordinary limitations and allows us to create real innovation. If we want knowledge beyond our own, we connect with the knower; if we want capability beyond our own, we connect with the power within.

The story of the Japanese potter

Phra Ajahn told the story of a Japanese potter, an artist devoted to shaping bowls. One of his bowls was sold at auction for a million yen — worth roughly a million baht at the time. A reporter asked him how a single bowl could be worth that much. He said he couldn't explain it, but before he made that bowl he had already made many thousands of others. In that moment his concentration was fully settled; he himself wasn't even aware that the inner power had been present from very early on, because he simply kept making bowl after bowl, his mind staying focused and unified with that inner power the whole time.

This is different from factory workers who paint patterns onto mass-produced bowls, also making tens of thousands of pieces, yet never producing anything like it. Phra Ajahn said the difference comes down to two things: first, having a genuine goal to create a work of art, and second, the sustained absorption that merges the mind with the power within. The artist's goal was to create a single piece capable of producing something extraordinary — and that kind of extraordinary result cannot come from the physical body alone. It requires the inner body of that inner power, cultivated by focusing inward, layer by layer, until it connects with the inner knower, and only then does it fully manifest and bring the work into being.

Training in this way lets merit flow continuously. We need the inner knower and the inner power to help manage that merit for us — much like a universal monarch, who holds such an abundance of refined treasure that ordinary worldly treasures are naturally drawn toward him. If we only train worldly skills without this, it won't be enough — because that only addresses the symptom, not the root cause.