kokorozendo.life

When I skipped a Zazen session to catch up on pending tasks, the mists and mountains seemed to come checking in. Instinctively, I tried to take a snap with my iPhone 16e.

“AI (Apple Intelligence) said: “Clean the camera lens.” 😀
AI is quite good. But Nature is a better product designer than humans. Any day, any time. 😀

It’s almost comic, isn’t it — AI urging you to “clean the lens,” while Nature is busy painting with fog, reminding us that clarity isn’t always the point. Sometimes the most truthful image is the one that hides as much as it shows.”

This share drew more responses than usual. One asked me whether Zen is anti‑tech.

I smile at the question. I’ve lived in technology for three decades. From IBM mainframes with TN3270 terminals and 5‑inch floppy diskettes, through Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, C, minicomputers, HTML, XML, Java… I’ve seen the whole parade. Later, I spent another dozen years in Business Change Consulting. And if I look back honestly, much of what was called “transformation” was really just technology adoption masquerading as transformation. Tools changed, buzzwords changed, but the deeper work — how people think, decide, and act — was often left untouched.

What people miss is this: beneath every leap of technology, there was tremendous human endeavour. Nothing came out of thin air. Every so‑called revolution was built on the painstaking work of engineers, researchers, and practitioners who sweated through trial and error.

In those days, before CIOs became a fixture in organisations, users were cautious. Especially when it touched critical functions of human life. No beta versions, please. A few pioneers jumped into the cesspool of changes, but most waited for the defects and effects to surface and be rectified before adopting. There was always a gap — a chasm — between pioneers and early adopters.

And here’s another shift I’ve witnessed: in the early days, technology and industry were about designing and building products that lasted. My father wore a Favre Leuba watch for over 40 years. It worked wonderfully. Newspapers carried stories of Toyota Corollas or Mercedes Benz cars clocking 200,000 km with ease. Durability was a mark of pride.

But somewhere along the way, in the greed of economics, the philosophy changed. Planned obsolescence became the model. Phones that slow down after a few years, software that forces upgrades, cars that are more electronics than engines. The cycle of consumption sped up, and with it came the illusion of progress.

And yet, not all change is regress. Some changes are truly good. They add value to us — individually and collectively. The core question is whether those changes are tested, evaluated, and implemented in such a way that they can be called progress for all, rather than just swelling the bank balances of a few.

Later, when I went back to APU for a full‑time postgraduate course in Education, I took a class on Education Technology. A professor from Finland told us how, after the initial euphoria, Nordic countries were returning to more traditional schooling. She reminded us of Steve Jobs’ own words: when asked if his children loved the iPad, he said, “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” The paradox is striking: the creator of the iPad preferred his children to rely on books, conversation, and presence. The Nordics, too, discovered that tools are useful, but they cannot replace the atmosphere of learning.

This is not new. Back in 1962, Everett Rogers, a rural sociologist, studied how farmers adopted hybrid corn. He noticed adoption followed a predictable curve: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. That became the Technology Adoption Life Cycle. Decades later, Geoffrey Moore — once an English professor — reframed it in Crossing the Chasm. He saw that between early adopters and the early majority there is a dangerous gap. Not because people are too skeptical or cautious, but because visionaries and pragmatists live by different values. The chasm is not resistance. It is a threshold.

And now, AI. A wonderful tool, the culmination of work on neural networks since the 1940s. But some of the claims I read today are extraordinary... Many forget that AI is, at its core, another computer program written by humans.

AI can simulate conversation, generate images, even mimic reasoning. But simulation is not embodiment. AI does not live in a body, carry memory in the marrow, or transmit atmosphere through silence. To confuse fluency with wisdom is to mistake the mist for a dirty lens.

We must remember: AI is not born but made. Its "intelligence" is painstakingly sculpted through training, and its wisdom is fundamentally bounded by the quality and scope of that original dataset. This boundedness is by design—a necessary guardrail, as seen with early systems like Tay, to prevent misuse.

This reveals the chasm between artificial training and human nurture. An AI operates as a closed system; its knowledge is a snapshot, frozen in time, with interactions kept in transactional isolation. Human wisdom, in contrast, is an open system, unbounded by life itself. We learn through wilful, integrated synthesis—constantly connecting conversations, emotions, and experiences in a messy, living tapestry of understanding.

This is why AI, for all its power, cannot be truly spiritual or social. These realms require the very integration and embodied context that its architecture prevents.

And hype is not confined to AI. Remember Theranos? Genny Harrison, who worked in Silicon Valley, wrote of how executives around her canonized Elizabeth Holmes while dismissing questions about functionality. “It was faith disguised as innovation,” she wrote. “The black turtleneck became a costume for credibility. The TED Talk tone replaced evidence. It was never about blood testing. It was about belief.”

Holmes knew exactly what she was doing. By donning the black turtleneck, she borrowed the aura of Steve Jobs, hoping to cloak herself in his myth of genius and inevitability. It was a prop, a costume, a calculated illusion. And it worked — until it didn’t.

Theranos collapsed, but the machinery that made it possible never stopped. Every few months another founder emerges with the same manic optimism and the same empty promises, and we fall for it again.

Zen is not anti‑tech. It is anti‑illusion. The mist on the zendo lens is not a flaw but a teaching. The Theranos story is not an exception but a mirror. The chasm is not skepticism — it is the threshold between vision and proof. And AI, too, is not magic. It is a tool, and its claims must be tested, not worshipped. Education reminds us: atmosphere, presence, discernment matter more than devices.

Zen also teaches us to be in touch with reality. The Buddha, in the Kalama Sutta, urged: “Do not go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture… but when you know for yourselves that these things are wholesome and lead to welfare, then you should practice them.” For Zen practitioners, great faith is always balanced by great doubt. Faith without doubt becomes blind belief; doubt without faith becomes cynicism. Together, they keep us alive to reality.

And Zen warns of makyō — the delusions that arise in meditation, dazzling visions that can seduce us away from truth. But makyō is not confined to the cushion. In the tech world, hype cycles, inflated valuations, and charismatic founders are also forms of makyō. They dazzle, but they are not reality.

From Rogers’ cornfields to Moore’s chasm, from mainframes and floppy disks to AI’s extraordinary claims, from Nordic classrooms back to chalkboards, from the black turtleneck of Theranos to the mist‑covered zendo, and from watches and cars built to last to systems endlessly swapped between Oracle and SAP — the real adoption curve is not about technology at all.

It is about learning to see through illusion, to honor the human endeavour beneath every leap, and to return, again and again, to reality.

I am not a tech hater. I appreciate the extraordinary things AI can do. But discernment matters. Not every wave is worth riding. Progress is not measured by the speed of adoption, but by whether it truly serves human well‑being.

In this era of overhype, it is important to be a conscious practitioner and an aware user. When many confuse simulation for substance, caution is not undue fear but wisdom. Asking “how” and “why” before jumping into the cesspool of “what next” is the only antidote to cynicism and hype.

Questioning is not cynicism. It is clarity.

In recent times, many extraordinary claims have been made by persons of repute. But as Carl Sagan wisely reminded us: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’

AI is neither Frankenstein’s monster, as some fear, nor a divine panacea, as some hope. It is not apocalypse, nor salvation. Like the wheel, fire, or even sliced bread, it is simply another invention — extraordinary, yes, but still human-made. It is a tool — perhaps as consequential as the wheel, fire, or sliced bread — but still a tool, shaped by human hands and human choices. One should never forget the fact that AI is another computer program... Maybe a much better one. Still a computer program.

And the most important founding principle of computers and programs remains unchanged: GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out. However advanced the system, it cannot rise above the quality of its inputs. Only the human mind can discern, in the living moment, what is garbage and what is not.

And so, the mist returns. The zendo lens fogged not to obscure, but to remind: clarity is not always the point. Illusion is not always error — sometimes it is teaching. Technology, like mist, can veil or reveal. The task is not to worship the fog or the lens, but to see through both, to discern what truly serves life.

In the end, Zen is not anti‑tech. It is anti‑illusion. The mountains in mist, the black turtleneck of Theranos, the hype cycles of AI — all are invitations to look again. To pause. To test. To return, again and again, to reality.

P.S. I ran this past Copilot, my partner‑in‑crime, and even from an AI perspective my apprehensions seem valid. While it is important to use a tool, it is equally important not to be used by a Tool.