Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Artificial intelligence
The newest entry and already the most argued: Rome’s algorethics, halakhah’s golem, Buddhism’s attention diagnosis, and a secular governance regime — all converging on one refusal, that accountability may not be delegated to the machine. The full register entry
Buddhist
Contested within the tradition
Buddhist analysis asks what AI does to attention and compassion: systems engineered to capture craving are, on the tradition’s diagnosis, suffering machines by design; systems that relieve drudgery free time for practice. Whether a machine could be conscious divides Buddhist philosophers along the lines of their theories of mind.
- Peter D. Hershock, Buddhism and Intelligent Technology (2021)
Catholic
Regulated
The Rome Call for AI Ethics (2020) binds signatories to transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and privacy — an ‘algorethics’ in the drafters’ word — and Leo XIV took artificial intelligence as a defining concern of his pontificate from its first days, naming AI in continuity with Leo XIII’s answer to the industrial revolution. The refusal point is anthropological: a system may simulate a person; it may not be granted a person’s place.
- Rome Call for AI Ethics (2020)
- Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Antiqua et nova (2025)
Jewish
Regulated
Jewish discussion runs through the tradition’s own categories: the golem as precedent for created quasi-agents, Sabbath law for automated action, and responsibility doctrine for systems that learn — yielding permission for tools with strong insistence that accountability cannot be delegated to the tool.
- Contemporary responsa and essays on AI and halakhah (2019–2025)
Secular and naturalist
Regulated
Secular governance is the operative position: risk-based regulation (the EU AI Act), safety institutes, and an internal quarrel between acceleration and precaution that maps onto no theological line — except the shared refusal, recorded across this register, to let accountability evaporate into the system.
- European Union, Artificial Intelligence Act (2024)