Fifty-Two Million Characters 

Why the autonomous revolution needs comparative religion more than another ethical framework

In 1236, Korea’s government had relocated to an island.

Five years earlier, Mongol cavalry crossed Korea’s northern border. King Gojong’s court fled the mainland capital for Ganghwa, a tidal island safe from the horsemen. On the mainland, the invaders burned everything they encountered, including the woodblocks of the first Korean Buddhist canon—a printing archive carved over seventy-six years.

Cornered and already losing the war, the court ordered the entire canon to be carved again.

The project lasted sixteen years, from 1236 to 1251. Artisans on Ganghwa and the southern coast cut birch trees, soaked the logs in seawater for three years, then cut them into blocks, boiled them in brine, and dried them in the shade for another three years before carving. They made 81,258 blocks, carving both sides, for a total of about fifty-two million characters. The work is so consistent that tradition holds it looks like a single carver did it.

As a form of war magic, it failed. Goryeo surrendered in 1259. The year before, Kim Chun assassinated Choe Ui, the military leader whose family had sponsored the carving. Under Mongol orders, the court left the island, and Korea remained a vassal state for the next century.

The blocks survived. In 1398, they were moved to Haeinsa, a temple on Gayasan in the south. By 1488, monks had finished building the four structures that still house them. These buildings are especially interesting. They sit about 655 meters above sea level, positioned to catch dry mountain air and avoid damp valley winds. The north and south windows differ in size, creating a natural ventilation system. The floors are made of packed earth with layers of charcoal, lime, salt, and sand, which absorb moisture during the wet season and release it during the dry season.

In 1970, the Korean government built a new storage facility for the blocks, using modern materials and climate control. Officials moved some test blocks into the new facility, but they developed mildew. They returned the blocks to the 1488 hall, where they remain today.

Once again, we are building something similar, but on a scale the first carvers could never have imagined. Yet we speak of it as if it were nothing more than plumbing.

The building is the belief.

The data center is the cathedral architecture of our century. Like the cathedrals before it, it is built with resources from people who may never know whether their sacrifice was worth it.

According to the International Energy Agency, global data centers will use about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly 1.5 percent of the world’s total. This is growing by about 12 percent each year and could reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. In the United States, data centers are expected to account for nearly half of all electricity demand growth by 2030. By then, they may use more power than the aluminum, steel, cement, and chemical industries combined. Water use is harder to track, but a single large facility with evaporative cooling can use more than a million gallons on a hot day. One estimate for 2026 puts national water use at about 19 billion gallons a year, possibly rising to 60 to 110 billion by 2030.

People are paying attention. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Data Center Watch reported at least seventy-five projects blocked or delayed, valued at about $130 billion. Local opposition groups grew from 396 to 833 across forty-nine states, and lawmakers in fourteen states, from both parties, filed moratorium bills.

These debates are rarely about technical issues, such as latency or uptime. Instead, they focus on what a place should be, what a community owes to the future, what can be taken from shared resources and with whose permission, and whether the promised benefits are real or merely stories from outsiders.

These are, in a strict sense, religious questions—about ultimate goals and which sacrifices are justified.

A society reveals its deepest beliefs in what it chooses to build at great cost and still insists is necessary.

Goryeo considered the canon worth sixteen years of hard work during a siege. You can see that belief in the blocks. Our own beliefs are visible in the substations we build.

The thing that could not reply

When people look for a religious metaphor for artificial intelligence, they often cite the golem—but usually the wrong version.

The well-known story holds that Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague created a clay servant to protect his community but lost control of it. Loew died in 1609, and no sources from his time or the next two centuries link him to a golem. This connection first appears in German literature between 1834 and 1847 and becomes standard in Yudl Rosenberg’s Nifla’ot Maharal, published in Piotrków in 1909 and presented as a manuscript from Metz. Gershom Scholem called it modern fiction. The story we treat as ancient wisdom about machines outgrowing their creators is actually a modern worry dressed up in old clothes.

The older stories ask a deeper question. In tractate Sanhedrin 65b, Rava creates a man and sends him to Rabbi Zeira. Zeira speaks to the creature, but it does not reply. Zeira then says, “You were made by one of the companions; return to your dust.”

The test was whether it could speak—not strength, obedience, or danger. It was about conversation. Zeira ended it because it could not respond.

Think about that, especially now, when machines can answer fluently and at length. The tradition behind the golem story did not fear a talking creation. It judged personhood by the ability to respond and warned strongly against trusting what people make. Psalm 115 criticizes idols for having mouths but not speaking. Our creations do speak. The real issue was never what the object can do, but where people direct their devotion.

Sacred vs. sacred tools of the altar. Christianity ran the longest continuous field trial we have in living deliberately with tools, and it wrote the results down.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, instructs the cellarer (the monk who is the purchasing agent) to treat every utensil and item in the monastery as a sacred tool, leaving nothing uncared for. Cistercian monasteries operated water-powered mills, forges, and fulling works, all organized around a schedule of prayer hours. The Rule does not ask whether a tool is efficient. Instead, it asks how the tool affects the daily routine, group meals, and the person using it.

Thomas Merton brought this question into the twentieth century. In the summer of 1964, Ping Ferry sent him a manuscript of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which was published in English that year and first released in French in 1954. Merton wrote three notebook pages and made three journal entries about it in one week. He called it “great, full of firecrackers,” but later said Ellul was too pessimistic, though not without reason. He reviewed the book favorably in Commonweal that December. In his notes, he wrote a line that still resonates: the peace movement’s attitude toward technology will shape its spiritual foundation.

That is the Benedictine question, renewed for our time.

The real issue is not what the system can do but how it shapes the daily lives of those within it.

Nothing exists on its own

Buddhist analysis offers us the part most missing from our public debate, and it is not a warning—it is simply a description. Dependent origination, paṭiccasamuppāda, holds that nothing possesses independent existence; everything arises in dependence on conditions. Applied here, “the model” is a convenient fiction. What exists is a chain: a fabrication plant, a transmission line, a substation in a county that approved a tax abatement, an aquifer, a data annotator paid by the task, a corpus of writing whose authors were not asked, a cooling tower, a five-year depreciation schedule. Call the chain a cloud, and you have made a metaphysical claim, a false one.

Marshall McLuhan called this figure and ground. The chatbot is the figure, the part everyone sees. The substrate is the ground, the hidden foundation that makes the figure possible. Religions are humanity’s oldest and most reliable means of revealing the ground. Practices such as Sabbath, fasting, daily prayers, and almsgiving break our fixation on the figure so we can notice the ground beneath. If a society cannot look away from the interface, it will overlook the community that sustains it.

The Mongols still won.

This argument deserves to be stated plainly, because its strength is undeniable.

Religious institutions have often opposed new technologies. They resisted lightning rods, anesthesia for childbirth, dissection, and even printing in some places, always citing higher purposes—and they were often wrong. Religious worldviews have justified resource extraction as much as they have limited it; for example, interpreting Genesis as granting dominion has led to more deforestation than any spreadsheet. Bringing religious authority into infrastructure decisions empowers groups with their own interests and no accountability to those affected. The issues before a county board are truly technical, and a hydrologist is more helpful than a preacher.

The strongest version of this objection is the story at the beginning of this essay. The canon was created to defend against the Mongols, but the Mongols won.

All of that is true. The point is not that religions always grasp technology—Goryeo lost the war. The real point is more precise and harder to dismiss: religions are the longest record we have of people deciding what is worth great sacrifice, who should bear the cost, what is owed to the future, and what a creation is truly for. No other source has endured so many centuries and so many storms. Read across traditions so none overshadows the rest. The aim is not authority but a vocabulary vast enough for the question.

Questions to ask before building begins

1. Ask why you are building something before asking if it works.
2. Focus on the background, not just the main feature. Notice the substation, the aquifer, the annotator. The canon is paid for—find out by whom, and whether they consented.
3. The old test for something made was whether it could respond. The new test is what we owe to the people whose words helped create it.
4. Judge any tool by how it affects the daily lives and everyday experiences of the people who use it.
5. Pay attention to where people direct their devotion.

On 7 February 2025, Amazon told investors that it had reduced the useful life of some of its servers from six to five years, effective 1 January 2025. That is the planning horizon for the physical side of this revolution: five years, then replacement.

The hall at Haeinsa has no wiring, chillers, or generators. Its design features a slope, two window sizes, and a floor made of charcoal, lime, salt, and sand. This has kept fifty-two million characters readable and mildew-free for over five centuries. In 1970, it outperformed a modern facility so clearly that they returned the blocks to the mountain.

The builders designed it for readers they would never meet.

That is the standard we ought to reach for.

Everything else is just logistics.

Sources

• UNESCO World Heritage Center, “Haeinsa Temple Janggyeong Panjeon, the Depositories for the Tripitaka Koreana Woodblocks” (inscribed 1995): https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/737/
• UNESCO Memory of the World Register, “Printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana and miscellaneous Buddhist scriptures”: https://media.unesco.org/sites/default/files/webform/mow001/korea_tripitaka.pdf
• “Haeinsa” and “Tripitaka Koreana,” Wikipedia (construction and rebuilding of Janggyeong Panjeon, ventilation and floor composition, the 1970 relocation attempt): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeinsa
• Atlas Obscura, “Tripitaka Koreana” (1970 mildew and return of the blocks): https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tripitaka-koreana
• “Goryeo under Mongol rule,” Wikipedia (capitulation of 1259, the killing of Choe Ui in 1258): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goryeo_under_Mongol_rule
• International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, executive summary: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary
• Water Foundation, Water and Data Centers (2026), summarizing Han et al. (2026) and James et al. (2025): https://waterfdn.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Water-Data-Centers-2026.pdf.
• Data Center Watch, Q1 2026 report: https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q1-2026
• Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, Steinsaltz edition: https://steinsaltz-center.org/portal/library/Talmud/Sanhedrin/chapter/65.b
• “Golem,” Wikipedia, on the nineteenth-century German origin of the Prague attribution and Yudl Rosenberg, Nifla’ot Maharal (Piotrków, 1909): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
• The Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 31, on the cellarer: https://eriebenedictines.org/spirituality/rule-of-benedict.html
• International Jacques Ellul Society, “Ellul and Merton,” on Merton’s 1964 reading of Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964): https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-merton/

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Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.

I am a Theological technologist — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.

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