A Zen Master told me acceptance is not the same as giving up.

I nodded politely. It took me a few years, and one AI revolution, to understand what he meant.

Roshi Jundo Cohen started out as a Jewish kid from the Bronx. Then he became a New York lawyer. Then he moved to Japan, got ordained, and received Dharma transmission in the Soto Zen tradition. Along the way, he survived cancer. Today he lives in Tsukuba, Japan’s “Science City,” surrounded by supercomputers, research labs, and a particle collider.

And, to my genuine surprise, he had listened to almost every episode of my podcast before we ever spoke.

We recorded this in February 2022. ChatGPT was still nine months away. Yet we spent two hours on questions that hit much harder today. If each of us is a wave on the same sea, what exactly is an AI? Should we edit the human genome to engineer away suffering, as David Pearce argues? Can the world be perfect and imperfect at the same time? And what does #Zen have to say to the #Transhumanism crowd who want to fix everything with technology?

I’ll let him answer that last one.

He is also working on a book provisionally titled Building the Future Buddha: The Kōan of Robots, Genes, Saving the World and Traveling to the Stars. That title alone tells you this is not a monk hiding from the future.

If you’re building #AI, or just trying to stay sane while others do, this conversation is worth two hours of your attention.

Watch or listen to my full conversation with Roshi Jundo Cohen here: [ https://snglrty.co/47w6ZIA](https://snglrty.co/47w6ZIA)

I never imagined that a Zen Master would listen to Singularity. FM The universe is weird, however, and it turns out his name is Jundo Cohen.