How very zen.
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Well I for one welcome our new robot nirvana!
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The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
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Kannon is supposed to have 10,000 hands…if I remember the statues of her correctly everywhere I saw them. This robot appears to only have 2.
I want a 10,000 hand robot Kannon to deliver my electric mercy
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I’m just going to point out that she doesn’t have nearly enough arms…
Also, maybe we’ll finally get an answer for the question “Does a robot have Buddha nature?” (and since this is a Zen sect, I’ll accept shouting “MU!”, cutting off your own thumb, beating the crap out of the robot, or knocking over pitchers of water as acceptable answers…
(I crack myself up…)
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Speaking of cyberpunk dystopias, I’m surprised the omni chapel hasn’t gotten a nod yet.
My time is yours.
Could you be more…specific?
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I imagine this is done completely seriously, and makes perfect sense in their discipline of religious thought. If it seems easy to make fun of, that might say more about the philosophical sophistication of Christendom than about robo-buddhists.
Tibetan Buddhism has long been noted for the use of prayer wheels operated by wind, water or electric power, on the grounds that if it is good for a wheel to be mindlessly turned, or a rosary to be mindlessly counted, then there’s no reason why it has to be a person doing it. In fact a river or an electrical grid is better at meditating.
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Can’t beat a sympathetic, flat screen looped deity for getting a load off your mind
“My time is yours.”
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Too late, I’m committed now!
And stop your blasphemy of roboGod!
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With the advances in MEMS you could probably get a 10,000 handed diety-on-module into just a few square centimeters; suitably for integration into a wide variety of everyday devices.
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That was my fist thought too.
@generic_name “If you meet the Buddha, you must recharge the Buddha.”
@RandomDude In Masamune Shirow’s " Appleseed" there is a cyborg called Briareos Hecatonchires. His surname refers to his operating system and references the “100 Handed Giant” of Greek Myth. He can interface with multiple systems at once, hence his name. Though he is a couple of orders of complexity behind Kannon.
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Perhaps closer: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, short him out.”
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Douglas Adams predicted Internet and now robot monks/deities… it’s just that he thought they were jokes.
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He was serious about computer networks, if not Electric Monks.
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“Japanese God, Jesus robots telling teenage fortunes
For all we know and all we care they might as well be Martians.”
—Elvis Costello, Tokyo Storm Warning
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