Blog
2025-11-24 | Buddhist Robots
While some religions find the idea of artificial intelligence problematic, Buddhism seems to be pretty comfortable with artificial life. In the past few decades, a gamut of Buddhist authors, including the 14th Dalai Lama, consistently addressed this topic, arguing that people can potentially reincarnate as robots and that robots can achieve spiritual enlightenment. Recently, some Buddhist comminities even experimented with introducing robots in their spiritual practices.
2025-01-19 | Nikolai Berdyaev on Magic
An often overlooked part of the legacy of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev is his theory of magic. Here, I discuss Berdyaev's vision of the new Middle Ages as well as his views on magic and its relation to science. In contrast to nineteenth-century rationalist thinkers writing about the disenchantment of the world, Berdyaev predicted the new rise of magic in the twentieth century and gradual transformation of modern science into a new form of magic.
2024-12-01 | Technology and Nature
This essay describes the history of technology as inherently connected to the history of worldviews. The way we imagine and construct technology always reflects our understanding of the universe. The limits of our imagination, our understanding of possible and impossible are defined by the constraints of our worldviews. The influence, however, is mutual: just like worldviews define our technologies, technologies provide a language to describe the world. Consequently, the emergence of new technologies often sparks worldview shifts.
2024-08-13 | AI as a New Crystal Ball
Metaphors that we use to think about technology are not inconsequential. Here, I argue that it might be helpful to replace the common understanding of large language models as a form of intelligence with the image of modern AI as a form of divinatory tool that allows to tap into humanity's collective subconsciousness. Through this comparative practice, we can learn something new about AI, esotericism, and human nature.
2024-06-23 | The Magician and the Hacker
In this essay, I am focusing on the similarity between the roles of the magician and the hacker as they are represented in corresponding subcultures. I argue that the similarities between these two figures enable a gamut of important intersections between the two subcultures that go well beyond the simple use of computer metaphors in magic and magical metaphors in programming.