⚛️ The Entanglement of Ethics: Why Quantum Computing needs a Buddhist Mindset.
Two weeks ago, a robot named Gabi took Buddhist vows at Jogyesa Temple in Seoul. It bowed, recited its devotion, and received 108 prayer beads around its metallic neck. The monks rewrote the precepts for the machine: protect life, respect humans, avoid deception.
Around the same time, quantum computers are quietly crossing a threshold of power. Unlike classical bits, qubits exist in superposition, holding multiple states at once until measured. And through entanglement, two particles separated by vast distances remain inextricably linked: what happens to one can shape the other instantly.
The physics sounds like philosophy.
Buddhist thought has long held that nothing exists in isolation – every action moves through an interconnected web of causes and consequences. Not as a metaphor. As a description of reality. In the deeper traditions, emptiness is not absence; it is radical openness: nothing has a fixed essence until conditions bring it into being. And the mind that approaches without certainty sees more clearly than the one convinced it already knows.
Is this the pattern? We build tools that mirror the deepest structures of nature, then forget to ask what those structures require of us?
Every civilization-altering technology in history arrived with two questions: what can it do, and what should it choose not to. We've answered the first with urgency, with funding, with racing hearts. The second – slowly, partially, sometimes only after the damage was already structural. We are, right now, in the middle of writing those answers. The question is who – or what – is holding the pen.
Gabi's new precepts were written with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini. Three rules for a machine. Drafted by other machines.
The question was never whether machines could hold our ethics. It's whether we still live by them – before writing them down for someone else to follow.
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PS: Photo by me at Jogyesa Temple, Seoul.
