Technology helps us look inward
Brain-computer interfaces and generative AI could offer new ways to reflect on our experience.
Our vision for human wellbeing and AI
Human experience in an age of machine intelligence — and how mindfulness, compassion, and the Middle Way can help shape it.
The Defining Question
When carbon meets silicon
The relationship between human minds and artificial intelligence is a defining question for our future.
AI systems process information at extraordinary speed. Human experience encompasses embodied awareness, vulnerability, empathy, and moral responsibility. As these systems become more influential, we must consider both the goals they pursue and the human behaviours reflected in their training data.
The concern is not limited to deliberately harmful machines. Human-generated data can also contain conflict, polarisation, and reactive behaviour. Our proposal asks how a greater emphasis on calm attention and compassion might contribute to technology designed around human wellbeing.
A Guiding Principle
The Middle Way
The initiative draws on the Buddhist principle of the Middle Way. Applied to technology, it encourages progress guided by human wellbeing and ethical reflection — avoiding both technological development that disregards its human consequences, and a wholesale rejection of scientific progress.
Wisdom guides technology
Contemplative traditions provide practices for developing attention and compassion.
Open to all faiths and none
Participation does not require adopting a particular religious belief.
Ethical Data
The Spiritual Stupa Dataset
A carefully governed dataset associated with mindfulness, compassion, and flow states.
Named for the stupa — a Buddhist monument that embodies a repository of contemplative experience — its purpose is to support research on the relationship between experience, physiology, and the design of supportive AI. EEG and other physiological measures would complement participants' own accounts, as research observations rather than a “gold standard” of consciousness.
Whether this work can contribute to safer, more beneficial AI is a question to investigate — not an established outcome.
Our Aspiration
A mutually supportive relationship
Technology helps people understand and develop their inner lives; human wisdom helps guide technology.