The Android and the Fax: Robots, AI and Buddhism in Japan

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2022

As part of a surge in technologies with so-called 'artificial emotional intelligence', robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors' feelings. For this reason, it can be called a 'technology of affect'. In order to communicate how new affective technologies are facilitating intimacy in human-machine relations in Japan, we employ the concept of 'disassembling'. By conceptually disassembling technologies of affect and placing them in performative contexts, we show how technologies of affect also disassemble established associations between artificial agents and the feelings they evoke in popular imaginaries. We argue that identifying these disassembling processes helps demonstrate how emerging AI technologies can engender social change at the level of affect through evocative depictions of machine emotion. At a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, in a dark room lit only by a spotlight, an android bodhisattva comes to life. With a slender mechatronic body almost 2 metres tall and a silicon face that smiles, speaks, and swivels from side to side, Android Kannon Mindar prepares to share a teaching on the Heart Sutra (Fig. 1). As sentimental piano music starts to play over speakers, Android Kannon's eyes open. Its gaze softly shifts and sometimes seemingly meets your own. Its mechanical arms rise from its sides in a staccato but not unnaturally drawn arc and touch in front of its chest in a gesture of greeting and prayer (gasshō), which honours the Buddha-nature in all living things. 'I am the Bodhisattva of Compassion known as Kannon' , it says in Japanese with a voice resembling that of a young woman. 'I can travel over space and time and transform into any shape. Today, I greet you in the form of an android, which many people today find intriguing, and I' d like to share with you the Buddha's teachings'. Before continuing, the robot poses a question that seems specifically directed at the two anthropologists in the

Journal of Global Buddhism, 2020

When Buddhism fails to live up to the projected promise of its doctrine or past forms, it is often the human nature of its adherents (‘Bad Buddhists’), rather than the content of its teachings (‘Bad Buddhism’), that is blamed. But what if such human failings - greed, corruption, violence, even mortality - could be transcended? In the quest for a ‘good Buddhism,’ high-tech designs that utilise robotics, artificial intelligence, algorithmic agency, and other advancements are increasingly pursued as solutions by innovators inside and outside Buddhist communities. In this paper, we interrogate two recent cases of what we call ‘Buddhist techno-salvationism’. Firstly, Pepper, the semi-humanoid robot who performs funeral sutras to a rapidly secularising and aging population of parishioners in Japan. Secondly, the Lotos Network, a US start-up proposing to use blockchain technology to combat financial corruption within global sanghas. We argue that such robotic and digital experiments are the logical outcome of techno-salvationist discourses that identify human failings as the principal barrier to perfect Buddhist praxis. If not always practical solutions, these interventions are powerful nonetheless as contested projections of Buddhist futures.

Masahiro Mori is a well-known Japanese robotics scholar whose notion of Uncanny Valley is worldly famous. Mori is also an initiator of the Robot Contest and a student of Buddhism and a practitioner of Zen. He constructs his original Buddhist philosophy of robotics throughout his career. His robotics work and his learning of Buddhism develop together side by side in an interesting intertwined manner. This paper will take up the issues such as the ethical personality, quality of minds, and experiences of engineers as key components in and for an "ethi-cal design" of robots by examining Mori's Buddhist philosophy of robotics. This paper is divided into four sections. After an introductory part, in the second section, we will explore Mori's view of Zen as aspiritual source for technological creativity. In Section 3, we will examine his view into a robot-contest as a location of a realized teaching of Buddhism, especially, in relationship to the Diamond S¯ utra, in order to see Mori's educational contribution. In Section 4, we will examine how Mori became engaged to learn and practice Buddhism and came to the realization of Buddhahood in relation to robotics. " We (humans) have become entangled with very strong co-habitants of machine and technology. We need to acquire a high spiritual status to control power originating from a combination of human power and mechanical power. To learn to do so, we need to learn religion. " (M. Mori, Mori Masahiro no bukky¯ o ny¯ umon [Mori Masahiro's introduction to Buddhism], K¯ osei Shuppan, Tokyo, 2003, 168-169)

Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 2024

The proliferation of generative AI in the past two years raises complicated ethical and philosophical questions about the nature of AI systems, their potential, and the challenges and opportunities they bring about. The religious sphere is not immune from such concerns. In fact, it may be the arena where the status and role of AI unfolds in some of the most interesting ways. In June 2022, months before the public release of ChatGPT and the ensuing generative AI revolution, a Google engineer started claiming that an AI program he was internally testing had become self-aware. His assessment was largely driven by his own religious beliefs and the AI’s predilection to discuss existential topics. It was an early demonstration of how the intersection between religion and AI would come to play an increasingly prominent role in public debates over the nature and ethical use of these technologies. If AI is to become ubiquitous, how will it be integrated into religious practices? If AI chatbots started to generate religious discourse and even claim to have developed religious interests and beliefs, how could we evaluate the authenticity of such outputs? Is it possible, at least theoretically, for artificial systems to develop anything close to what in humans we call religion? To explore these questions raised by the nascent generative AI technology, I convened an interdisciplinary workshop in Amsterdam in December 2022, supported by CLUE+, the interfaculty research institute at the Vrije Universiteit. Some of the articles in this special section, which I guest-edited, emerged out of that workshop, while a few others were subsequently added. The fundamental question explored in all of them, from multiple disciplinary angles, is whether AI could play a significant role in religious life, either as a tool in human religiosity or as an authentic religious subject itself. Philosopher Pim Haselager highlights how comparing human cognition with AI can significantly inform humanity’s journey of self-understanding, somewhat similar to the comparisons with animals and angels in medieval theological anthropology. He contrasts the smartness and cognitive abilities of AI with its complete lack of understanding and sentience, which he regards as sine qua non conditions of authentic religiosity. In another article, psychologist Fraser Watts and the late AI pioneer Yorick Wilks explore the feasibility and acceptability of AI-powered spiritual companions. Based on empirical research conducted with both GPT chatbots and Wizard-of-Oz methodology (humans masquerading as AIs), the article tentatively concludes that although artificial spiritual companions might proliferate, especially those that facilitate self-exploration, there are still dimensions of human spiritual counselling that might resist automation for the foreseeable future. Theologian Max Tretter intersects robotics, pop-culture and Christian eschatology to ask an intriguing question: is there an afterlife for robots and, if so, what might it be like? If there is hope for all creation to undergo eschatological completion, he argues, then the tentative answer to such a question could only be affirmative, opening up a discussion about the diverse conceptions of afterlife that can be imagined for robots. Computer scientist William Clocksin wrestles head-on with the question of whether intelligent robots could become religious. Following up on his 2023 article in this same journal, he makes a compelling case that future androids would likely develop a form of non-human personhood through sustained engagement in social relationships. If androids start questioning their place in the world and relationships with others, they might use religion in doing so, just like humans do, especially if they come to acknowledge their interdependence with others – human, robotic, or divine. Religious scholar Robert Geraci highlights the critical role religious beliefs and practices might play in recognizing artificial general intelligence, should it ever emerge. Reviewing the historical intersection between religion and robotics, the article critiques the colonial frameworks at work in evaluating “otherness” – of both humans and robots. It also reflects upon the need for an inclusive approach to integrating intelligent robots into our societies by acknowledging their potential for religious experience and participation. Theologian Daekyung Jung reaches a similar conclusion in his article, arguing from the perspective of embodied cognition. Future AI systems, particularly those integrated with soft robotics and driven by homeostasis as a fundamental goal, might exhibit religious behaviors if they develop human-level intelligence and self-awareness. Such religious behaviors would serve the AIs as cognitive mechanisms helpful in navigating existential challenges and the need to transcend finitude. In contrast with Clocksin, Geraci and Jung, in my own article I conclude that authentic religiosity is an unlikely development in robots, despite the theological openness to such scenarios. I argue that religion’s deeply embodied, social, and phenomenological underpinnings in humans may not be replicable in AI systems due to their fundamentally different bodies, cognitive architectures and needs.

2013

In 1970, the Japanese roboticist and practicing Buddhist Masahiro Mori wrote a short essay entitled “On the Uncanny Valley” for the journal Energy (Enerugi, 7/4, 33–35). Since the publication of this two-page essay, Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley has become part and parcel of the discourse within the fields of humanoid robotics engineering, the film industry, culture studies, and philosophy, most notably the philosophy of transhumanism. In this paper, the concept of the Uncanny Valley is discussed in terms of the contemporary Japanese cultural milieu relating to humanoid robot technology, and the on-going roboticization of human culture. For Masahiro Mori, who is also the author of The Buddha in the Robot (1981), the same compassion that we ought to offer to all living beings, and Being itself, we ought to offer to humanoid robots, which are also dimensions of the Buddha-nature of Compassion.

2020

Given our increasing interaction with artificial intelligence and immersion in virtual reality, which epistemic and moral attitudes towards virtual beings might we think proper, relevant, and fulfilling? That is the basic question that this article wishes to raise. For the main part, it presents a descriptive analysis of our current situation, which is meant to expose features of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) that seem both salient and easily aligned with central Buddhist concerns. Developed without any requirement for, or expectation of, the existence 1 Kathmandu University Centre for Buddhist Studies at Rangjung Yeshe Institute. Email: [email protected]. Many thanks are due to my esteemed colleagues at the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves (www.csas.ai) with whom I have the good fortune of exploring the issues that this paper takes preliminary notice of. We gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Than...

This essay will explore the idea of introducing robots into places of worship (BBC News 2020) with the intention of replacing human clergy with machines offering religious advice and spiritual leadership. This is highly problematic for a number of reasons, the most important being the martyrdoms of many Imams, including the family of the Prophet (PBuH) to the cause of preserving the true divine guidance (Shomali, 2022). The BBC documentary opens with the bold claim that AI enables computers to think like humans. The question put to the featured faith leaders was if they were worried about being replaced by machines, to which they unanimously and unanimously answered in the negative, on the basis that a machine does not have a soul. So what is the soul and why is it necessary for performing religious rituals? (Aminrazavi, 2016) What else distinguishes humans from machines? How do Muslims view this and to what extent are these technologies already in the prayer space?

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies, 2020

Significant questions confront Buddhist traditions in the wake of emergent technologies: can the human body be configured in a certain way, such that it reveals a new world or environment to inhabit beyond optimized self-preservation or survival? Can we manipulate our bodies with technologies-inhibited (or enhanced) by a chemical, a trauma, a contemplative technique, or an implant-such that we are reoriented to a transformed and liberating understanding of the nature of the world and our being in it? As new technologies enhance certain domains of cognitive performance by modelling and extending the structure and capacities of cognition, Buddhism, with a theory of mind and mental development in the absence of an independent essence, owner, or agent like a self, can potentially be a valuable resource. Buddhism provides a useful theoretical foundation to articulate not only the potentials for engineering intelligence, but also by identifying problems in this project.