Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)
Tibetan Buddhist Leader
The 14th Dalai Lama embraces science and technology as essential to humanity’s future, engaging AI researchers through his lifelong dialogue with science — while insisting a machine can never possess consciousness or the warm-heartedness that makes us human.
In his words
Without technology humanity has no future, but we have to be careful that we don’t become so mechanised that we lose our human feelings.
Biography
Tenzin Gyatso (born 1935), the 14th Dalai Lama, is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a Nobel Peace laureate. For decades he has been one of the world’s most prominent religious champions of science, hosting sustained dialogues between Buddhist contemplatives and researchers through the Mind & Life Institute. His engagement with technology is genuinely welcoming — he treats human progress and the machine as compatible with a compassionate life.
Machines without minds
On AI specifically he draws a firm line at consciousness. Speaking in Dharamsala in 2023, he argued that awareness cannot be manufactured, because “for a moment of consciousness to arise, it must be preceded by a previous moment of consciousness” — a chain, in his view, that only living beings possess. However capable AI becomes, he holds, it remains a tool rather than a mind, and cannot generate real warmth or compassion.
That caution is not opposition. His consistent message is that technology combined with warm-heartedness can serve humanity, and that the danger is not the machine itself but people becoming “so mechanised” that they neglect the inner qualities — kindness, attention, compassion — that no algorithm can supply.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/dalai-lama