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.
Tagged: Computing and AI Buddhist Catholic Jewish
Learning systems moved from laboratory to infrastructure in the 2010s–2020s: recommendation, generation, and decision systems now mediate work, worship, friendship, and war. The traditions’ answers are arriving as documents — the Rome Call for AI Ethics (2020), signed by the Pontifical Academy for Life with Microsoft and IBM; denominational study statements; fatwas on prayer apps and automated rulings — and as arguments about what a person is, which this site’s flashpoint on AI and human dignity gathers.
The Stance Register
Each stance is recorded with its rationale in the tradition's own terms and its sources. Where a tradition argues with itself, the register says so.
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)
See this register as a side-by-side comparison
References
- Pontifical Academy for Life, Rome Call for AI Ethics (2020)
- National Academies and Royal Society reports on machine learning (2017–2019)
Related Across the Site
- Artificial intelligence and human dignity Flashpoint — Learning systems that counsel, accompany, and target: the live question is not machine consciousness but what may never be delegated — and every tradition on this site answers that accountability stays with persons.
- Gene editing and the germline Flashpoint — Easy technique, unconsenting subject, speculative benefit: the 2018 edited babies drew one condemnation in many vocabularies, and the line between somatic therapy and germline design is now the field’s governing border.
- The limits of medicine Flashpoint — The ventilator meets the ars moriendi: a working consensus against vitalism, hospice as a shared institution with Christian roots, and the assisted-dying argument proceeding jurisdiction by jurisdiction through every tradition’s courts of conscience.
- Transhumanism and the body Flashpoint — Mortality as an engineering backlog: lifespan, cognition, and the body as a draft to be revised — and the counter-question, asked in every dialect on this site, whether a self indefinitely revisable remains a self.
- Contemporary Science Era — CRISPR, consumer genomics, machine intelligence, and a warming climate: the live questions now arrive as engineering deadlines, and the traditions answer them divided within themselves as much as between one another.
- Evolution by natural selection Technology — The mechanism that reorganized biology: embraced, adapted, and fought over — usually inside traditions rather than between them, from Asa Gray’s theistic evolution to today’s divided evangelical house.
- Germline gene editing Technology — The technology every framework was waiting for: Rome refuses it, the responsa and the fiqh academies condition it, Hindu and Buddhist evaluations run on intention — and the academies of science govern it while disagreeing about whether it should ever be used.
- Organ transplantation Technology — A near-consensus on the gift and commerce refused — and a live, published disagreement about the definition of death that transplantation forced every tradition to state.