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Japan's AI Buddharoid Automonks
It turns out that in Japan, more monks are needed. It being Japan, they are training robots called "buddharoid" to replace them.
"Are the automonks conscious?” Ha asked. Evrim was turned away from Ha, looking out over the pagoda courtyard’s low stone walls to the sea far below.
— Bill Christensen (@Technovelgy) March 29, 2026
“Debatable,” Evrim said. “Like the concept of consciousness itself. Their minds are extraordinarily complex and layered, but they…
In his terrific 2022 novel The Mountain in the Sea, science fiction thriller writer Ray Naylor describes them perfectly; he calls them "automonks":
“Are the automonks conscious?” Ha asked. Evrim was turned away from Ha, looking out over the pagoda courtyard’s low stone walls to the sea far below.“Debatable,” Evrim said. “Like the concept of consciousness itself. Their minds are extraordinarily complex and layered, but they are mostly just routines. They have been placed at about a zero-point-five on the Shchegolev Scale. They would have, with that rating, about the same rights as a house pet: protection from overt abuse, humane decommissioning. But on the other hand, each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived. The Tibetan Buddhist Republic spares no expense. You can ask the automonks questions on philosophy, religion, their views on life. They’ll answer like the dead men they are modeled on. They are walking repositories of memory. Yet they have no apparent will of their own—their present state is automated. If you asked me personally, I would say they are not conscious. They do not progress. They have no orientation to the future—what you might call ‘will.’ They are like encyclopedias of the minds of dead devotees. Or maps of those minds. But the map is not the same as the territory.”
“Morbid.”
Probably the earliest science fictional presentation of this idea is the clericomotor robot from The Clericomotor, written in 1884!
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