Can Compassion Keep Pace With Technology? Amsterdam Talk

Filmed on September 15, 2018 at De Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, this long-form dialogue sets one of the world's most recognizable Buddhist voices against a question most people are only beginning to ask out loud: what happens to compassion when the machines get smarter? Across two panels, one on artificial intelligence and robotics and one on sickness, aging and health, the event moves from the abstract worry that technology might "spin out of control" to the very concrete story of a young woman who has spent most of her life with artificial hands. The talk is less a lecture than a set of open questions, and its most useful material is the human testimony that grounds them.

The scene is a historic church, a building the host described at the opening as one with a "strong historical tradition of being a safe haven for religion and expressions of life." The room holds Buddhists and non-Buddhists, people of faith and non-believers, members of the Dutch royal family, ambassadors, students, scientists and artists. Cameras sweep the pews. The host asks the crowd to look around, then to wave, because the event is being live-streamed to people around the world. Then comes the line that frames everything that follows: "Let's all connect with each other by means of compassion and technology."

Why would a Buddhist exhibition open in a church with a live stream?

The occasion was the opening of an exhibition about the Buddha's life, and the curators' choice was unusual. The host explained (0:191) that the team had chosen to examine the Buddha's life "through the eyes of contemporary artists," placing ancient Buddhist art alongside modern works by artists including Yoko Ono and Ai Weiwei. The exhibition's own organizers, in other words, were already testing whether an old teaching could hold its shape inside a contemporary frame.

The host's argument about why Buddhism belongs in this conversation is worth taking seriously. Buddhism, he said, is "often praised as a matter of mind and reflection, with a focus on analysis and investigation and with great understanding of science and technology." That is a claim many listeners have never heard about a religion, and it sets up the premise of the whole evening: that a tradition built on examining the mind has something to say about tools that now examine and shape ours.

The host also made a subtler point. Technology, he said, "adds something immaterial to the exhibition, something that enables us better to understand Buddha's teaching and Buddha's life." It is a striking phrase. Usually we talk about technology as something that adds weight, speed or reach. Here it is described as something that adds meaning, a way to make a 2,500-year-old story land in a room full of phones.

Can technology actually bring people closer, or only put screens between them?

The moderator set up the central tension before the first panel began (0:365). Technology, she said, is "pervasive" and "very powerful," and it is "here to stay." People, meanwhile, are drawn to meditation, mindfulness and compassion. The real question, she suggested, is whether "technology can be a force for good," and whether it "can enrich human interaction" rather than replace it.

The introductory video that followed (0:451) sharpened the stakes into a list of questions that deserve to be read slowly. It describes technology that "extends us, connects us, brings us closer together," and that "may even become our friend, offering assistance and companionship." Then it turns: "will it spin out of control? What if computers move toward general intelligence, thinking and acting faster than we can? Will we be overwhelmed?" It asks whether we would be able to "pull the plug, saying this is enough," and whether technology "is just human nature" or our "destiny."

What is useful about this framing is that it refuses both easy answers. It does not say technology is good or bad. It asks who is steering. The video's closing phrase, "ethics and technology, a balancing act," is a modest one, but it names the problem precisely. A tool can be neutral in its design and still shape the people who use it.

Who decides what is ethical when machines learn on their own?

The video's most pointed questions were about responsibility. "Who decides what is ethical? Are we making the rules? Are we taking responsibility, or will it be self-learning, steered by values?" Those three questions contain the core anxiety of the AI debate: the shift from systems that follow rules written by people to systems that learn their own patterns and must be given values instead.

Compassion, in this framing, is not a sentiment added at the end. It is a standard for judgment. When a technology is "self-learning," someone still has to decide what it is learning toward. The panel on artificial intelligence was built around exactly that problem, with scientists, technologists and young people asked to consider it together. The Dalai Lama's own responses in the excerpt are partly lost to the transcript, so what can be said with confidence is the structure he was invited into: a conversation about responsibility rather than a verdict on machines.

What does a bionic hand teach about being different?

The most affecting part of the evening arrived when the moderator introduced Tilly (0:553), a guest who had recently had major surgery and insisted on attending anyway. As a baby she had contracted meningitis septicemia; she said that doctors told her she was going to die, and that she pulled through. She lost her hands as a young child and, as she put it, "I can't remember ever having hands, but I just always wanted them."

Her relationship to technology is not the standard story of a machine rescuing a person. She has been working with technology companies to help develop bionic hands, including a company called Open Bionics, and her stance on the design is distinctive. Earlier prosthetics, she explained, were made "to be really realistic," meant to blend in. Her approach is the opposite. "We want to embrace the fact that we're unique," she said (0:664). "We don't mind being different." The hands she showed on stage were futuristic, with her name printed on the side, and she was clear about the purpose: to show the imperfection rather than hide it.

She also gives the company critical feedback, so that the design can improve for other children, not only for her. That detail matters. It is a small model of the relationship the evening was asking about: a technology shaped by the lived experience of the person who depends on it, and a person who treats that dependence as a shared project rather than a private burden. When she spoke about other children who lose limbs, her concern was the isolation. "I just thought it was really important for them to have the support that they need" (0:774). Compassion, here, looks less like pity and more like sustained, practical attention.

What did the second panel take on: sickness, aging and death?

The evening's second half moved from machines in the abstract to bodies in decline. The moderator framed it as a discussion of "sickness, old age and death," and the audience was asked to consider how technology enters those most intimate moments. The excerpt available for this article does not preserve the full arc of that panel, and it would be unfair to reconstruct its arguments from fragments. What the first panel establishes, though, is a method: start with the lived experience of a person, then ask what technology should and should not do for them.

That is also where the conversation returned to a question the host had raised at the beginning. Technology, he said, "connects us, both physically and through technology." The worry that runs under the whole evening is whether connection by screen can ever substitute for contact in the room. The video asks it directly: can technology make human contact unnecessary? The answer the event implies, through its own design, is no. The church was full, the live stream was an add-on, and the most memorable moment was a young woman showing her hands to a room of people who had come to look.

Where to go from here

If you are new to this conversation, start with the questions rather than the answers. Ask who writes the values into the systems you use. Ask whether a technology makes you more connected to the people around you or only more connected to a feed. Then look at the people who live closest to the edge of these tools, as Tilly does, because they tend to see the design flaws first.

The full recording runs nearly two hours and includes both panels in their entirety, along with the discussion that followed. Watching it is the best way to hear the Dalai Lama's own voice in context, and to judge for yourself whether the event's central claim, that compassion and technology can be held together, holds up under sustained questioning. The opening and the bionic-hand story are the places to begin.