“They know what they are making, but they don’t know why they are making these products.” — Kailash Satyarthi
It’s always fun to have Nobel Prize winners on the show. Recently, we’ve hosted the journalist-dissident Maria Ressa, the economist Simon Johnson and the gloomy godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton. Today it’s the Delhi-based Kailash Satyarthi, who won the 2014 Peace Prize for his fight against child exploitation.
He is now trying to globalize the ideal of compassion. But for Satyarthi, compassion doesn’t mean kindness, empathy, mercy, or even pity. In his new book Karuna (a Sanskrit word that loosely translates into compassion), he defines it as a disruptive force. It means feeling somebody else’s problem as your own and then doing something about it. Which is why, keynoting the UN’s AI for Good summit in Geneva this July, he challenged the executives in the room to send their people to witness suffering. To see the 470 million children living in war zones, the 138 million working as labourers and slaves, the 270 million out of school. That, he guarantees, would make do-gooders genuinely compassionate.
Which brings us to artificial intelligence. Satyarthi is no fan of the AI arms race, which he thinks has left Big Tech’s engineers unable to identify the ethical point of their products. But he insists he’s not against the companies themselves and says he remains a believer in their potential humanity. Satyarthi certainly sees the power of AI to change the world. That’s why, last week, he came to Silicon Valley to talk about AI.
Geoffrey Hinton told me that he wants AI to acquire a female sensibility. Kailash Satyarthi, in contrast, wants compassion to define AI ethics. One day, no doubt, a compassionate bot, maybe named Karuna, will win a Nobel Prize. If so, we’ll certainly have them on the show.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. Machines cannot feel, so the compassion has to come from their makers. And the machine is not therefore neutral — it carries its builders’ biases. Compassion has to be a design principle at the foundation stage, not a patch applied after the harm.
2. Compassion, as he uses the word, is not kindness, empathy, mercy or pity but a disruptive force: feeling another’s problem as your own and acting on it. Awareness, connectedness, feeling, action — and the fourth is what separates it from sentiment.
3. “AI for Good” invites one question, which he put to 177 governments in Geneva this July: good for whom? 470 million children in war zones, 138 million child labourers, 270 million out of school. His ask: send the engineers to go and see them.
4. Morality is borrowed from outside and endlessly revisable; compassion is neurological and already in there. Hence his polite quarrel with the responsible-AI vocabulary, and with the Pope: ignite what exists rather than import a code of conduct.
5. The compassion quotient is low by default, caged by identity, purpose and so-called success; exposure raises it. The sharpest line is domestic: the youngsters in his office write better than he could think — and not one new idea in it.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Kailash Satyarthi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, jointly with Malala Yousafzai, for his struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education. An electrical engineer by training, he founded Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) in 1980 and has campaigned against child labour, bonded labour and trafficking for more than four decades; he also conceived the Global March Against Child Labour, served as president of the Global Campaign for Education, and was behind the consumer-labelling scheme that became GoodWeave International. In 2024 he launched the Satyarthi Movement for Global Compassion. Karuna: The Power of Compassion is published by HarperCollins India. He lives in Delhi.
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Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States, hosted by Andrew Keen, author of The Internet Is Not the Answer and How to Fix the Future. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
00:31 — A fourth Nobel laureate on the show
02:10 — The movement for globalizing compassion
02:52 — Hinton, “female values” and compassion in AI
03:41 — Machines, codes and algorithms cannot feel
05:04 — Not kindness, empathy, mercy or pity
06:28 — Karuna, and whether compassion is political
12:42 — The four components
14:01 — Morality from outside; compassion from within
15:48 — Silicon Valley, Altman and the humanists
18:45 — “AI for Good” — good for whom?
19:20 — 470 million children in war zones
21:30 — Send your engineers to the field
25:38 — How would you like to be remembered?
27:20 — Consciousness and compassion as twin sisters
29:32 — The mother in the mine
32:48 — The compassion quotient
34:37 — The case for a course correction
38:11 — What it is doing to young creativity
40:20 — “If not you, then who?”