Techno-salvationism, as the term has been used in scholarship emerging largely from Western theological and posthumanist debates, describes a cultural imaginary in which advanced technologies promise to save humanity from its own limitations. Thinkers such as Hans Moravec, Raymond Kurzweil and Robert Geraci have described visions in which artificial intelligence offers digital immortality, mind uploading or an algorithmic heaven. This literature has been influential, but it rests almost entirely on Euro-American sources, science fiction traditions and transhumanist manifestos. Wang and Campbell argue that this lens, applied uncritically to Japan and China, produces distorted readings of what is actually happening when Buddhist institutions put robots in robes. The local reality, they show, is shaped by demographic crisis, institutional economics and centuries-old ideas about sacred objects, not by dreams of escaping the body.

The study’s method is distinctive. Rather than conducting surveys or interviewing temple staff, the researchers performed a visual discourse analysis of publicly available YouTube videos featuring three of the most prominent Buddhist robots in East Asia: Mindar, the android preacher at Kyoto’s Kodaiji Temple; Pepper, the SoftBank humanoid that has been deployed in Japanese funerary rituals; and Xian’er, the cartoon-like robot monk created at Longquan Monastery outside Beijing. Drawing on the visual grammar frameworks developed by Kress and van Leeuwen and the critical multimodal approach of Machin and Mayr, the authors examined how these robots are framed through camera angles, composition, textual overlays and narrators’ voices, and how religious authority is visually constructed around them.

The differences among the three cases are striking. Mindar, modeled on the bodhisattva Kannon and built in collaboration with robotics professor Hiroshi Ishiguro’s laboratory, is presented in media coverage as a serious liturgical actor, often framed in reverent compositions that situate the machine inside temple architecture and ritual sequences. Pepper, by contrast, appears in funerary settings as a cheaper substitute for human priests amid Japan’s acute shortage of clergy, a practical response to the declining rural temples and aging population that scholars of Japanese funeral Buddhism have documented for decades. Xian’er, with his childlike, cartoonish design, functions less as a ritual performer than as a communicative mascot, projecting a modern, tech-friendly image of Chinese Buddhism under state oversight. Each robot embodies a different institutional strategy, and none of them, the authors argue, is genuinely oriented toward transcendence.

Instead, the study identifies a pattern it calls succession rather than contestation. In Western accounts of religion and technology, machines often appear as rivals to human clergy, potential replacements that provoke anxiety about authenticity and displacement. In the Japanese and Chinese Buddhist material, however, robots are typically endowed with authority through deliberate clerical investment. Mindar was consecrated and scripted by senior priests; its sermons are drawn from established doctrinal content. Xian’er was developed within the monastery’s own media apparatus, its utterances curated by monastic editors. Pepper’s funerary chanting is authorized by the funeral companies and temples that rent it out. Authority, in other words, does not migrate from humans to machines through some autonomous technological logic. It is lent to machines by existing hierarchies, which position the robots as successors, emissaries or communicative tools embedded within the institution’s own chain of legitimacy.

This finding resonates with a broader literature on digital religion, including Campbell’s foundational work on religious practice in digital media and Philip Chong’s studies of bounded religious automation, which show that AI systems in religious settings are typically fenced in by human oversight. But Wang and Campbell push the argument further by showing how culturally specific histories enable this smooth absorption. Japanese religious culture has long traditions of animate sacred objects, from spirit-filled dolls to the concept of tsukumogami, in which old tools acquire souls. Scholars such as Fabio Rambelli have traced the rich Buddhist materiality of objects in Japan, while Jensen and Blok’s work on techno-animism suggests that attributing agency to machines is not a rupture but a continuity. Meanwhile, pioneering roboticist Masahiro Mori, himself a Buddhist, explicitly framed his philosophy of robotics in religious terms. Against this backdrop, a robot monk is not a category violation but a new entry in an old catalogue of empowered things.

The Chinese case adds a different layer of complexity. Longquan Monastery’s Xian’er emerged from one of China’s most digitally sophisticated religious institutions, which has embraced online Dharma talks, animations and social media to reach a young, urban audience. Wang and Campbell show that in this context, techno-salvationism is inflected by state relations and cultural priorities: the robot’s charm and humor serve outreach and soft publicity rather than ritual substitution. The unevenness across the three cases, the authors emphasize, matters theoretically. Techno-salvationism is not a single global imaginary diffusing outward from Silicon Valley. It takes locally uneven forms, shaped by demographic pressures such as Japan’s clergy shortage, infrastructural disparities between institutions, and divergent cultural priorities about what religion is for.

The implications reach beyond Buddhism. As AI chatbots claiming divine identities multiply, with recent coverage in Nature highlighting Jesus-claiming bots and calls for red lines around religious AI, the study offers a crucial corrective to debates dominated by Western anxieties about deception, autonomy and the singularity. In the East Asian Buddhist material, the central question is not whether machines can save us, but whether institutions can maintain themselves, attract followers and transmit tradition in societies undergoing rapid demographic and technological change. Robots here are instruments of institutional survival. They chant sutras at funerals that human priests can no longer staff cheaply; they draw visitors to temples struggling for relevance; they translate doctrine into forms legible to media-saturated publics. Salvation, in this frame, is less about the soul of the believer than the continuity of the organization.

By demonstrating that succession, not transcendence, is a recurring pattern in mediated representations of Buddhist robots, the study expands the conceptual scope of techno-salvationism itself. It suggests that scholars of digital religion must attend to how different religious cultures configure authority, embodiment and materiality before importing theories built on Western posthumanist assumptions. The android at Kodaiji Temple does not promise to upload anyone to a digital heaven. It promises something quieter: that an ancient tradition, with the help of silicone and servos, will keep speaking. In an era when technology and religion are converging across the globe, that quieter promise may prove the more consequential one, and understanding it requires looking past the spectacle of machine preachers to the institutional hands that guide them. The research, published as a review article on 21 September 2026, is likely to shape future scholarship on AI, authority and religion far beyond the temples where its subjects dwell.

Subject of Research: Techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in mediated representations of Japanese and Chinese Buddhist robots.

Article Title: More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts

Article References: Wang, Y., & Campbell, H. (2026). More than transcendence: techno-salvationism and the reconfiguration of religious authority in Japanese and Chinese Buddhist contexts. AI & SOCIETY. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00146-026-03354-6

Keywords: techno-salvationism, Buddhist robots, religious authority, digital religion, Mindar, Xian'er, Pepper robot, Japanese Buddhism, Chinese Buddhism, visual discourse analysis, AI and religion, AI & Society

The findings come from a scoping review conducted by Rosabel Martinez-Roig, María Aragonés-González and Miguel Cazorla of the University of Alicante in Spain, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research. The team searched Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC-ProQuest and Dialnet for peer-reviewed empirical studies published between the robot’s commercial launch in 2014 and 1 March 2026, following the PRISMA-ScR reporting guidelines. Out of 1,448 initial records, and after duplicates were removed and 345 full texts assessed, only 13 studies met all the inclusion criteria. That narrow yield is itself telling: despite more than a decade of commercial availability and enthusiastic marketing, rigorously documented classroom deployments of Pepper remain rare, recent and geographically concentrated.

The technical appeal of the platform is easy to understand. Pepper is a social humanoid designed for human interaction, equipped with cameras, sensors, mobility, speech, gestures and expressive non-verbal cues such as head movements and eye contact. Unlike tablets or desktop tutoring software, social robots embody interaction; they can be perceived by children as social agents capable of reciprocity, which is precisely why researchers have speculated they might serve as tutors, learning companions or even pupils in ‘learning-by-teaching’ scenarios where students consolidate their own knowledge by explaining content to the machine. But the review found a persistent gap between that theoretical versatility and what actually happens in schools, where Pepper’s effective autonomy proved limited in most documented settings.

Geographically, the evidence is dominated by Europe, with nine of the thirteen studies (69.2 percent) conducted there, particularly in Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. Germany was the most frequently represented country, with work such as Donnermann and colleagues’ long-term study of adaptive robotic tutors supporting university students with exam preparation and motivation. Four studies were carried out in the United States, including an ethnographic project by LeTendre and Gray that followed adolescents through a project-based learning unit, documenting how students themselves came to understand both the possibilities and the hard limits of human-robot interaction. The first qualifying empirical study did not appear until 2018, four years after the robot’s launch, underlining how youthful this research area remains.

The review reveals a striking imbalance in where and with whom the robot is deployed. Five studies focused on primary education, with children aged six to twelve, while four took place in higher education and two in early years settings; only one examined secondary education. Three studies centred on pupils with special educational needs, particularly autism spectrum disorder, extending a line of research suggesting that the predictable, patient interaction style of social robots can support communication and participation in inclusive contexts. Methodologically, however, the field is dominated by qualitative approaches: eight studies used case studies or interaction analysis, three used mixed methods and only two were predominantly quantitative experiments. Eight of the thirteen studies involved fewer than fifty participants, and not a single large-scale longitudinal study was identified.

Three pedagogical configurations dominated the corpus. In six studies, Pepper acted as a tutor or teaching assistant, delivering guidance, structured feedback or gamified quizzes, including quiz-based university learning in Germany. In four, the robot was cast as a learning partner or tutored agent, a role exemplified by Swedish research in which children taught mathematics to the robot and, in doing so, rehearsed and revised their own reasoning. In three studies, Pepper served as a social mediator in inclusive settings, supporting storytelling and second-language learning among migrant children and pupils with special educational needs. Curricular coverage was diverse but thin: mathematics appeared most often, followed by STEM and programming activities, language learning, social-emotional development in early years, and even a sustainability-focused serious game in which the robot improved Italian children’s attitudes toward recycling.

The benefits reported are consistent across the corpus, though the authors caution against over-interpreting them. Twelve of the thirteen studies — 92.3 percent — documented increased motivation and engagement when the robot was present, with pupils frequently showing more enjoyment than with tablet-based equivalents of the same tasks. Five studies recorded improvements in social skills or communicative participation, including greater verbal engagement in collaborative mathematics. Four reported measurable academic gains, from improved university grades in robot-assisted tutoring to more positive attitudes toward recycling. Three studies noted enhanced sustained attention during structured tasks. Yet the reviewers stress that novelty effects, small samples, short interventions and children’s prior expectations may all inflate these apparent benefits, and that none of the outcomes can be attributed to the robot’s presence alone.

The obstacles documented are equally consistent, and in many ways more illuminating. Technical failures were the most frequently reported limitation, mentioned in ten of thirteen studies: voice recognition struggles with children’s voices and ambient noise, software glitches interrupt activity sequences, and programming demands exceed what most schools can sustain. In more than half the studies, teachers had to provide constant technical supervision, stepping in to repair interactions when the robot misheard a pupil or froze mid-lesson. Curricular integration was weak, with most deployments framed as one-off activities, pilots or limited experiments rather than embedded components of standard teaching. Organisationally, cost, device scarcity and reliance on technical staff constrained uptake, and a small number of studies raised ethical questions about privacy, data collection and the risk of ‘robotised’ teaching, as well as classroom competition over limited robot time.

Perhaps the review’s central insight concerns the teacher. In seven studies, educators served as technical supervisors; in six, they acted as pedagogical mediators who structured activities, allocated interaction turns and regulated participation. Only two studies involved teachers directly in designing the intervention from the start, and just three mentioned any specific training in the pedagogical use of the robot — a gap the authors identify as one of the field’s most significant blind spots. Situations of ‘trouble and repair’, where adult intervention rescued collapsing child-robot interactions, recur throughout the literature, and earlier work in a school for autistic children explicitly framed Pepper as a teaching aid external to the classroom rather than an autonomous instructor. The distinction between the robot’s technical autonomy and its pedagogical autonomy, the authors argue, is critical: its capacity for action is always embedded in human, technical and ethical decisions.

The overall verdict is measured rather than sensational. Pepper’s embodiment, humanoid appearance and multimodal interaction can spark initial interest, but they do not by themselves guarantee meaningful learning; outcomes hinge on instructional design, student profile, technical stability and teacher mediation. The authors call for the field to move beyond technological novelty toward longitudinal studies that test whether early enthusiasm endures, deeper investigation of teacher training and design involvement, and direct comparisons of the robot against tablets, virtual agents and hands-on materials to establish where, if anywhere, it adds unique value. Until then, the evidence suggests that the social robot in the classroom is best understood not as a replacement for teachers but as a demanding, engaging and highly dependent teaching resource — one whose success is written, lesson by lesson, by the humans standing beside it.

The scoping review’s methodological choices help explain both its strengths and its boundaries. By restricting the analysis to a single robotic platform, the authors avoided a common problem in educational technology research, in which reviews lump together devices with very different degrees of physicality, mobility, expressiveness and autonomy, blurring the conditions under which each actually functions. Pepper’s specific configuration, combining a wheeled mobile base with a chest-mounted tablet, speech and gesture, makes it a useful case study in how multimodal embodiment is translated into classroom practice.

The timing of the corpus is also noteworthy. Because the first qualifying study appeared only in 2018, the entire body of empirical evidence postdates the robot’s commercial launch by several years, suggesting that early adoption in schools lagged well behind the platform’s availability. The concentration of research in primary and higher education, with secondary schooling nearly absent, may reflect practical factors such as timetable flexibility, curricular pressure and the willingness of younger children to engage with novel devices, though the review does not establish causal explanations for this distribution.

For practitioners, the most actionable finding may be the recurring pattern of ‘trouble and repair’. Since technical interruptions were near-universal, schools considering deployment should plan for adult supervision as a structural requirement rather than an occasional contingency. The scarcity of teacher involvement in intervention design, noted in only two studies, likewise points toward a simple improvement: co-designing robot activities with educators from the outset, and embedding them within existing curricular units instead of isolated demonstrations.

The authors’ call for comparative research deserves emphasis. Without head-to-head comparisons against tablets, virtual agents or conventional materials, the field cannot determine whether Pepper’s embodied presence produces effects that cheaper technologies cannot replicate, or whether the observed gains reflect novelty and expectation rather than any unique pedagogical property of the robot itself.

Subject of Research: A scoping review of the implementation of the Pepper social robot in formal educational contexts

Article Title: Exploring the implementation of the Pepper social robot in formal education: a scoping review

Article References: Martinez-Roig, R., Aragonés-González, M., & Cazorla, M. (2026). Exploring the implementation of the Pepper social robot in formal education: a scoping review. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, 15(1), Article 22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44322-026-00072-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44322-026-00072-1

Keywords: social robotics, Pepper robot, formal education, scoping review, educational technology, human-robot interaction, inclusive education, teacher mediation, primary education, student motivation, autism spectrum disorder, STEM learning