A Buddhist's Guide to the AI Landscape

Jodi Bush shares helpful resources for orienting in a space that can often feel overwhelming.

This post was written by Jodi Bush, a Buddhist Ethics researcher and volunteer with the Buddhism & AI Initiative.

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If you find yourself reading this blog, it’s fair to assume that, like me, you are a) Buddhist (or at least Buddhist adjacent!) and b) interested in AI (and probably ethics). Also, like me, you might be trying to navigate through the numerous publications, podcasts, technical updates, policy decisions (or indecisions), alignment questions, frontier lab releases etc. etc… all while wading through a heap of jargon. This can be intense, if not overwhelming.

Having recently gone through this myself, this blog unpacks how I’ve set about orienting myself in the AI space and provides links to specific resources I have found helpful – particularly as a Buddhist.

Photo by Lv Bowen on Unsplash

First things first - what’s your interest in AI?

Before diving down the AI rabbit hole, it is important to be clear about your own interest in artificial intelligence. For me, the entry point came through my study of Buddhist Ethics as part of my Masters program at Nan Tien Institute in Australia. The Head of the Humanistic Buddhism Program, Venerable Juewei Shi, has a specific focus on AI ethics, and we found a common interest in the topic of machine learning and Buddhist principles.

Like many, I quickly found myself feeling equal parts impressed and nervous about where the AI juggernaut was heading. Stories of rogue AI, human annihilation, machine-led terrorism and other terrifying scenarios started seeping through, and I felt a strong need to understand what it would take to achieve ethical AI.

Why should Buddhists care about AI Alignment?

A second thing to be clear about is why you think AI matters for Buddhists and whether (or how) Buddhist principles and practices might contribute to AI alignment. After all, there’s no shortage of technologists, ethicists, thought leaders and policy experts already invested in this goal.

I’ve come to the conviction that Buddhism has unique offerings that can and should help set the course for the development of AI and our engagements with it as persons and societies.

As a way of sorting out your own stance, I would encourage you to read the blogs already posted by our team on this topic, starting with – What 100+ Buddhists Think About AI, 4 Ways I’m Thinking About AI from a Buddhist Perspective and Why Buddhism and AI.

The way I look at it, for alignment to be effective, it has to be bidirectional: AI to Humans, and Humans to AI. The first direction aims at ensuring that AI acts in accordance with human interests. The second aims to ensure that humans adapt effectively to AI.

Buddhism offers unique perspectives into both.

For example, as Ruben Laukkonen and others suggest, it might be possible to build AI that has a conception of mindfulness, non-duality, emptiness and care. Or as Thomas Doctor proposes, to develop AI beings that ascribe to the Bodhisattva ideals of compassion and wisdom. Buddhists like these are exploring whether it is possible to develop LLMs that naturally seek to stay aligned by being infused with Buddhist principles.

On the challenge of humans adapting to AI, Buddhism offers a distinctive perspective. Most AI safety work focuses on ensuring that intelligent systems are safe, interpretable, and will not result in catastrophic outcomes. Undoubtedly essential. But taking a unidirectional approach assumes that humans can serve as a fixed reference point: stable entities whose capabilities, interests and values are unchanging. Buddhism offers a fundamentally different starting point. For example, the concept of dependent origination reminds us that nothing exists in isolation and that, consequently, humans are not separate from AI. The AI we build will necessarily shape the kind of humans we become, and the humans we become will then further shape the AI we build. We are co-evolving.

Consider how recommendation algorithms are already reshaping attention, how AI-generated content is shifting how we engage both with information and each other, or how automated decision-making is disrupting where we invest effort. These aren’t just technical trends or optimisations, they represent changes to the conditions in which we live, make decisions, and act.

Buddhism can contribute to bi-directional alignment by helping people manage AI’s impacts on their own minds, and by strengthening the capacity of those developing and overseeing AI to make better decisions. That’s because Buddhist traditions don’t just offer philosophical perspectives but also systems of practical, embodied training based on thousands of years of experience. These trainings are designed to develop exactly the cognitive, emotional, and volitional capacities that meaningful human oversight of AI requires, and that the attention economy is designed to exploit.

Finding Reliable Resources

So where should you start? I personally began by identifying the key researchers, policymakers, safety organisations and technologists examining AI alignment - Buddhist and non-Buddhist – which led me to a blend of sources covering ethics, philosophy, technology, cognitive science, and AI safety.

Step 1: Get Grounded in the Basics

Depending on how new you are to this space, and how technical your background, you may still be grappling with what is really meant by AI, AGI, alignment, reinforcement learning, transformer models and so on. Some of it you’ll organically pick up as you get deeper in, but I found spending time understanding key terms genuinely valuable.

The following resources will provide you with a comprehensive foundation in AI alignment, along with up-to-date research and analysis.

General Grounding

• BlueDot Impact - The Future of AI Course - I highly recommend Blue Dot in general, and this free 2-hour course is an excellent starting point. It covers the core concepts in AI safety and alignment without assuming a technical background and is very well-structured. You can then apply to some more intensive courses if interested.

• Iason Gabriel (Google DeepMind) - “Artificial Intelligence, Values, and Alignment” - a clear, accessible overview of the key alignment challenges including what it means for AI to be aligned with human values, and why it is so difficult. This paper helped me understand the landscape of alignment approaches (value alignment, scalable oversight, interpretability, corrigibility) and see where Buddhist perspectives might contribute.

• The Last Invention Podcast - a documentary-style podcast series that explores the 70-year journey of machine learning and how what began as a fringe project could be the last invention humanity ever creates.

• The Intelligence Curse - an essay series that makes the core claim that when AGI can out-compete humans at everything, the social contract breaks, and regular people lose leverage.

Buddhist-Informed

• Lions Roar interview with Randima Fernando - a good interview with the co-founder of the Centre of Humane Technology, where he talks about the promises and pitfalls of AI and how Buddhism is uniquely suited to addressing them

• Tricycle panel on “Exploring Right Relationship with AI” - a recent panel discussion with leading Buddhist thinkers in the AI space

If you are seeking additional Buddhist perspectives, these are some of the key individuals contributing to the space:

• Peter Hershock - works at the intersection of Buddhism, technology, and global ethics. Recommend his works Buddhism and Intelligent Technology, A Middle Path for AI Ethics, and AI, Consciousness, and the Evolutionary Frontier.

• Shannon Vallor - her book Technology and the Virtues examines how digital technologies affect character development and ethical capacities.

• Ruben Laukkonen - a cognitive neuroscientist studying contemplative AI and the potential for a Wise World Model in AI systems premised on mindfulness, emptiness, care and non-duality. See Contemplative Artificial Intelligence.

• Thomas Doctor - head of the Center for the Study of Apparent Selves and consultant to the 84000 project. See Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence.

Step 2: Going Wider

Once you’ve got a basic orientation, you might want to go deeper on a particular aspect of AI and Buddhism, including technology, philosophy, policy, and contemplative science.

Research and Academic Literature

Even if you aren’t part of a university or research institute, you can access a wealth of peer-reviewed articles online. While academic rigour tends to make these sources reliable, the peer review cycle means they’re most useful for understanding longer-term trends, foundational concepts, and established arguments rather than breaking developments.

• Google Scholar – a good starting point using keywords like AI, machine learning, ethics, AGI, Buddhism, alignment, contemplative science, cognitive offloading, and then branching from there. Crucially, check the reference lists of papers you find compelling.

• AI and Society Journal, Journal of Buddhist Ethics, and Minds and Machines - all good academic journals featuring relevant work on AI and ethics.

Think Tanks and Policy Organisations

The policy landscape around AI is shifting rapidly, and several organisations are doing essential work translating technical AI safety concerns into governance frameworks. Tracking these will help you understand not just what the risks are, but how institutions are (or aren’t) responding:

• Future of Life Institute - publishes accessible content on existential risk from AI, including articles, podcasts, open letters, and policy briefs. A good entry point for understanding the “big picture” risk landscape.

• 80,000 Hours - focused on helping people find careers that make a big positive impact - useful if you are looking at how to reorient your career into AI Alignment

• Centre for AI Safety (CAIS) - focused specifically on reducing societal-scale risks from AI. They are known for publishing a statement on AI risk, signed by hundreds of researchers.

• The International Center for AI Ethics and Governance (Mila/Montréal) - examines international and non-Western approaches to AI governance.

• The AI Safety Institute (UK) and NIST AI Safety Institute (US) — government-backed bodies working on safety standards and evaluation. Worth monitoring for policy developments.

AI Alignment Organisations

Several organisations are working directly on the technical and conceptual challenges of making AI systems safe and beneficial:

• Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) - one of the earliest organisations focused on long-term AI safety, with a more technical and theoretical orientation.

• Center for Human-Compatible AI (CHAI) at UC Berkeley — Stuart Russell’s research centre, focused on building AI systems that are provably beneficial to humans.

• Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind - the major frontier labs each have safety teams and publish research on alignment. Following their publications gives you a window into how these organisations are thinking about safety - though it’s of course worth remembering that commercial incentives shape how they approach risk.

Step 3: Connect With People

This might be the most important step of all, and the one most easily skipped.

In each of the spaces above, I’d suggest it’s valuable not only to follow people or organisations you find engaging, but to connect with them. Or at least some of them. My most enriching conversations and learnings have come from speaking with people who have been working in the space longer than me, and it’s remarkable how willing people are to make time or help you find your footing.

From a Buddhist perspective, orienting yourself in this space shouldn’t just be about accumulating information - it’s about entering a community of inquiry. The principles of sangha apply here, encouraging us to deepen understanding through relationships, embracing the friction of different perspectives, and engaging even when you feel uncomfortable. If Buddhism teaches us anything, it’s that the effort of engagement - not just the outcome - is where growth happens.

Orientation as a Practice, Not a Destination

One thing I’ve taken away from the process of orienting myself within the AI landscape is that engaging with AI alignment needs to be an ongoing practice. The field is moving extraordinarily fast, the questions are genuinely hard, and nobody - not the technologists, not the policymakers, not the ethicists - has figured out the right approach.

As Buddhists, we’re trained to sit with uncertainty, to examine our assumptions, and to understand that the observer and the observed are never truly separate. These capacities are not peripheral to AI alignment, they may be the most important thing we can bring to the debate.

So, start where you are. Read something. Reach out to someone. And trust that the effort itself is doing the work.

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Jodi Bush is a culture and strategy consultant focused on developing conscious leadership and a volunteer with the Buddhism & AI Initiative. She is currently completing a Masters in Applied Buddhism at the Nantien Institute in Australia.