This session is part of Reflective Meditation’s Daily Online Meditation practice at reflectivemeditation.org/dailyonline.
Coming off several weeks of teaching on present and impending death, Linda and Nelly found themselves wondering where to go next. And then, almost naturally, they landed on the other side of that pairing: present and impending life. This week the topic is artificial intelligence.
Not a position — an investigation
Linda is clear from the opening: this isn’t a pro-AI or anti-AI week. It’s an invitation to bring Buddhist practice to bear on something that has become part of the conditions of our lives, whether we chose it or not. Discernment, ethics, curiosity. That’s the approach.
AI is an umbrella term for an enormous range of things — search engines, medical diagnostic tools, facial recognition, self-driving cars, software that writes emails and summarizes meetings, algorithms shaping what we see and read. It’s not one thing. It’s a whole ecosystem of technologies, and one that is now reshaping how we work, communicate, create, learn, and — this is what strikes Linda most personally — how we think about thinking. That last part is especially interesting to her, because Reflective Meditation is a practice that invites thinking into meditation rather than trying to suppress it.
A reality worth relating to well
Linda draws an analogy from her own life. She’s in a cross-cultural marriage. It’s genuinely interesting and sometimes delightful; it can also be confusing, and occasionally there are real clashes in values, communication styles, and expectations. But she doesn’t wake up every morning wishing it weren’t true. She’s learning how to live well within that reality.
AI, she suggests, has a similar quality. Whether we welcome it or resist it, it has become part of the conditions of our lives. The Buddhist teachings don’t tell us how things should be — they invite us to investigate how things are, how they come to be, and how they change. So the practice here is not to overlay an opinion about AI, but to begin with what’s actually present and look carefully at our own experience of it.
Fighting reality, she observes plainly, is a battle we lose.
Two personal examples
Linda has been preparing for eye surgery — lens replacement following a diagnosis of narrow angle glaucoma, with a real risk of vision loss if a pressure event occurs. Before each appointment, she used AI to research the anatomy of her eyes, the risks of the procedure, and the questions worth asking. It helped her become a more informed participant in her own care. She didn’t substitute it for her doctors’ expertise. She used it to have a more meaningful conversation with them. That, she says, feels like a right relationship.
At the same time, she’s been fooled more than once by AI-enhanced ticketing scams — sites so convincing she couldn’t tell they weren’t legitimate, and ended up paying nearly three times face value for concert tickets. She was relieved it wasn’t a complete scam. She also found it humbling. And it left her with a sharper awareness of how much AI has complicated the ordinary business of trusting what we see online.
A middle way
Her relationship with AI, she says honestly, is not simple enthusiasm or outright rejection. It’s curiosity, caution, and uncertainty. Which — she finds this interesting — feels a lot like a middle way. Not believing something simply because it’s new. Not rejecting it simply because it’s unfamiliar or threatening. But continuing to examine our experience carefully.
The questions she thinks belong to a Buddhist inquiry into AI aren’t is it good or bad, but: how are you relating to it? Who benefits? Who’s harmed? What values are guiding its development? How do we preserve human dignity while making use of these new capacities? These aren’t questions with fixed answers. They’re ongoing practices of reflection — and ones, she closes, that each person will come to differently.
