AI poses challenges to religion. Yet AI theorists (and practitioners) are more interested in religion than most religionists are aware. This colloquium considers a possible range of Buddhist responses to AI, as well as highlighting questions that Buddhists might wish to ask about the AI landscape. There is a deep and immediate importance to these questions. For the questions we wish to ask, now — about AI — are almost certain to impact its development and, therefore, our future.
Bringing together key voices in ethical philosophy; in social and moral psychology; and in the Buddhist investigation of technology, we will hear from leading theorists about what to expect across all these fronts, and about what salutary influence religions such as Buddhism might bring to bear.
Speakers and Chairs
Tom Angier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cape Town. His research focuses on Aristotelian and Neo-Aristotelian ethical and political theory. Prof Angier’s latest monograph is Human Nature, Human Goods: A Theory of Natural Perfectionism, to be published by Cambridge University Press this year.
Paul Condon is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Southern Oregon University. His research examines the relational basis for empathy, compassion, wellbeing, and prosocial action, and the influence of compassion training on those capacities. His research also examines how scientific theories can inform engagement with contemplative traditions and meditation practices of compassion, mindfulness, and wisdom.
Kate Crosby is the Numata Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Oxford. She works on Sanskrit, Pali and Pali-vernacular literature, on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods, and on Buddhist ethics. Her books include The Bodhicaryavatara; The Dead of Night & The Women; and Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, Identity; Traditional Theravada Meditation and its Modern Era Suppression and Esoteric Theravada: The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia.
Charles Goodman is a Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Department of Asian and Asian-American Studies at Binghamton University. He is interested in ethics, metaphysics and epistemology in South Asian, Tibetan and Chinese traditions. He is the author of Consequences of Compassion: An Interpretation and Defense of Buddhist Ethics (2009) and a co-author of Moonpaths: Ethics and Emptiness (2016). His translations from Sanskrit include The Training Anthology of Śāntideva (2016) and The Tattvasaṃgraha of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters (2022). He has also published articles on Buddhist philosophy and applied ethics.
Soraj Hongladarom is currently Professor at the International Buddhist Studies College, Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University, and Research Fellow at the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He is the author of The Ethics of AI and Robotics: A Buddhist Viewpoint (Rowman and Littlefield), The Online Self (Springer), and A Buddhist Theory of Privacy (Springer). His articles have appeared in The Information Society, AI & Society, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, and Social Epistemology, among others.
Andrew Skilton was awarded his first degree at Bristol in 1988 and completed his doctoral thesis on the Samādhirāja Sūtra in Oxford, 1997. He has taught at Cardiff, McGill, SOAS, King’s College London, Dongguk University Seoul, and now teaches Buddhist Studies, Pāli and Buddhist Sanskrit texts in Oxford. He was editor of Contemporary Buddhism for 10 years. His books include a translation and study of Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra, How the Nagas Were Pleased, a translation of the Buddhist drama Nāgananda, plus A Concise History of Buddhism. Currently, he is writing an introduction to the study of Pāli, and researching aspects of the boran kammathan meditation tradition, the vīthicitta in Jie tuo dao lun 解脫道論 (*Vimuttimagga), as well as revising the Dīpavaṃsa from new manuscript evidence. He has recently been writing on surgery in the vinaya, coercive control in the Jātaka, and monastic waterbottles.
Matthew Spencer is a Pali scholar. He writes on the interface, both possible and actual, between moral psychology in the western secular tradition, on the one hand, and contemplative approaches to this same kind of psychology — such as those of Buddhism — on the other. His work has appeared most recently in Philosophy East and West and, earlier on, in Buddhist Studies Review and Theology. His travelogue on the monastic life of Mt Athos, in northern Greece, came out in 2000.
The event is kindly funded by the Yin-Cheng Network for Buddhist Studies.
