2025 marks the happy occasion of Buddhistdoor Global’s 30th anniversary year. It also marks the release of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) “Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI.” Buddhistdoor Global, along with several columnists and contributors began publishing about the significance of AI some years ago, while its ascent was only beginning. There is a global consensus that has consolidated as tech companies race ahead with innovation: that AI is here to stay. By and large, tapping into the beneficial, benevolent side of AI is a matter of choice and morality-driven decision-making. For Buddhists, like the core issue of karma (action) itself, AI is an inherently ethical concern. We are interested in asking how the technology and functions of AI will be applied as compassionately as possible, and for the benefit of all beings and the Dharma.

Take the most obvious divergence in opinions about AI, which concerns how it can be used in a 21st century economy. While a future centered around AI is seen as negative, even dystopian, in the West, it is viewed more positively in East Asia. There are policy reasons for such a difference in opinion. On the website of The Diplomat, Rajiv Kumar writes how industrial policies in South Korea and China provide good examples of embedding AI across the entire economies. In contrast to the idea that stereotypically cheap Chinese workers can be tariffed into sending back manufacturing jobs to the US, much of manufacturing in China is already done by robots, with multinationals like Xiaomi operating “dark factories” that allow it to produce one smartphone per second. This is a rate surpassing Apple’s output. Such automation has, “significantly reduced costs by cutting manpower and energy use,” and allows China to further scale up its work force into the high end, information and digital space. (The Diplomat) 

As of February, there are 30,000 such smart, AI-powered factories in China. Kumar summarizes that what makes China and South Korea different is that they have “mission-driven strategies, robust state-business coordination, and societal support combine to enable rapid implementation.” This “goal-oriented approach to AI manufacturing” is influenced by international competition and domestic priorities, while governments elsewhere do not have a coherent long-term strategy for the sector. (The Diplomat)

China and South Korea demonstrate that how “helpful” or “dangerous” AI is seen to be depends on the motivations driving it. The UNDP report suggests:

Whatever new algorithmic feats are in store, there will always be spaces, however in flux, where humans shine—where humans do things that machines cannot do or are bad at, where societies value people rather than machines doing things and where people and machines go farther and faster together than separately.

Evolving overlaps and complementarities between humans and AI-powered machines land societies at inflection points, after which trajectories will depend largely on two factors: what access societies have to AI and how they view and use it. These are choices, by the few or the many. (Human Development Report 2025, 6)

The report suggests several principles for “AI-augmented human development,” which effectively means making AI work productively for the better of humanity rather than walking down a dystopian route in which human beings unwittingly become enslaved to their creations, which some might cynically say is happening already. The threefold strategy entails: Building a complementarity economy; driving innovation with intent; and investing in capabilities that count. (6) Much like Buddhist perspectives on AI, the report urges that we move beyond extreme and cliched narratives of utopia or dystopia and empower people to reimagine choices and expand autonomy and agency with AI.

This brave new world of AI can be shaped by Buddhists, but it is also influencing Buddhist philosophy and contemporary thought. Columnist Asa Hershoff wrote that AI goes to the heart of Buddhism’s self-understanding in the 21st century. Buddhism’s encounter with the pre-AI age of neuroscience and quantum physics has been a mixed bag, with positive overlaps but also unintended problems, some of them epistemic and high-stakes, for Buddhist thought. He noted:

The thing is that, from the start, Buddhism has struggled to enter the “psychological age,” departing widely from its recognizable Eastern profile, so how can it move forward into the digital, artificial intelligence age, without completely losing its essence? . . .

Buddhism has tried, in vain, to fit into the contemporary world, but that world is wholly shaped and contained by a whole group of psychological belief systems, accepted concepts that are as rigid as the most dogmatic, suppressive religious or political system that has ever existed. And in trying to fit into that world, a genuinely dysfunctional one, it distorts itself beyond real recognition. (BDG)

It would seem counterproductive, and even condescending, not to admit the obvious. Given the current direction of the world, including geopolitical turbulence between the US and China, extreme economic inequality and the corresponding capture of democratic institutions in industrialized democracies by technology and special interests, as well as the climate crisis, we are in for a great deal of suffering. It is in this context that Buddhism can actually have much more to say: the fundamental question Buddhism grapples with is dukkha, and it is so much more than simply wanting things, or being discontent with what we have. Dukkha is the existential question of sentience itself and is indeed translatable as suffering, specifically, the “the sort of frustration, alienation and despair that arise out of our experience of transitoriness.” (Stanford) And everything is of the nature of suffering.

As the entire Himalayan Vajrayana world celebrates Saga Dawa—which began on 28 May—this month, we should remind ourselves to the fundamentals and elevate them, to the point that rather than trying to fit into every scientific and modernist box, the entire cosmos and the entire spectrum and richness of human society fits into the “bodhisattva playbook.” Dukkha, suffering, is akin to a fundamental mathematical problem for Buddhism. AI could augment the Buddhist algorithm to solving this conundrum, with the supercomputers of now and the future able to endlessly extrapolate into infinity, to solve infinite problems and stressors for endless beings, just as the bodhisattva vow promises. 

For Buddhism to ride the age of AI authentically and seriously, it must return to the most basic thing, the unease and discomfort that Buddha Shakyamuni himself first felt when he encountered the Four Sights. AI needs to help sentient beings transcend dukkha.

References

UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). 2025. Human Development Report 2025: A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI. New York.

See more

Human Development Report (United Nations)
The Rise of AI Manufacturing in China and South Korea (The Diplomat)
Buddha (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

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Building Bodhisattvas: Toward a Model of Powerful, Reliable, and Caring IntelligenceConsciousness, Attention, and Intelligent Technology: A Karmic Turning Point?Atoms of a Thought: Emotional Intelligence in the AI Era

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