Artificial Intelligence and the Coming Spiritual Crisis: The 'New' Avidya

This essay is part of the technology series on artificial intelligence and the coming spiritual crisis.

Let me be clear: I am not anti-technology. I am not even anti‑AI. I believe it will bring many of the wonderful things that the tech leaders claim it will. I already benefit from it immensely, from my profound conversations with ChatGPT, to a regular analysis of 100+ biomarkers (something my actual doctor's 15 minute allotment of time could never allow for). Heck, AI might even save human civilization from it's own self-destruction (since that seems to be the path we're on, regardless of AI).

The problem is not the tool—it’s the unexamined mind holding it. Today’s world is not just experiencing another wave of innovation; we’re in the midst of something far more seductive: avidyā—spiritual ignorance—in which brilliance thrives without wisdom, and capability runs ahead of clarity.

This is not a Luddite screed. It is a plea for discernment.

Vedanta defines avidya as the misapprehension of our true nature—not a lack of information, but a profound confusion between appearance and reality. That ancient confusion now wears Silicon Valley logos and carries billionaire budgets. It’s not the ignorance of superstition or myth. It’s the ignorance of intelligence without insight, of innovation ungrounded in inner maturity.

This essay doesn’t argue for less technology—it argues for more clarity. Because wisdom is the only safeguard when power accelerates faster than our capacity to understand it. And unless we wake up, all our smarter tools will merely automate the same old mistake: interpreting movement as progress.

The Law of Opposites: You Can’t Hack Duality

Vedanta teaches that the world of duality—pleasure and pain, gain and loss, success and failure—is not a bug in the system. It is the system. Within this framework, every up comes with a down. Every light casts a shadow. As James Swartz puts it, duality is zero-sum: you never get more of one thing without paying for it with another. And yet, Silicon Valley is built on the denial of this truth.

Tech culture worships exponential growth, believing that with enough data, code, and ambition, we can finally break the cycle—engineer joy without sorrow, wealth without instability, health without aging, and work without boredom. But what we’re actually doing is refining the game of samsara, not transcending it.

AI may offer us convenience—but it also deepens dependence.

Connectivity increases access—but also amplifies distraction.

Automation frees up time—but hollows out skill and purpose.

In short: for every shiny solution, a new form of suffering arises. Not because the tools are bad, but because they are being applied within the laws of duality, and those laws are ironclad. You can’t fix duality from the inside. You can only see through it.

This is the insight that spiritual traditions have always preserved. But in our time, it’s being overwritten by techno-optimism—the belief that the next version, the next breakthrough, the next moonshot will finally bring wholeness.

It won’t.

Not because the tech isn’t impressive—but because the hunger driving it is still rooted in ignorance.

The Builders Are Dreaming

Among the loudest voices in the age of AI and exponential tech, one man quietly stands apart: Mo Gawdat. A former Chief Business Officer at Google X, Gawdat speaks not with hype, but with gravity. He doesn’t talk like someone trying to predict the future. He speaks with the quiet authority of someone who has seen the future—and didn’t look away.

While others sketch out utopias—brain-computer symbiosis, interplanetary colonies, post-scarcity economies—Gawdat returns to human cost: the erosion of meaning, the dislocation of work, the vanishing sense of agency. He reminds us that tools are not benign when the people wielding them are still asleep.

And that’s the real issue. Most of today’s tech visionaries are dreaming. For instance, many speak of “abundance” as if it were a divine right guaranteed by exponential code. Elon Musk pursues the colonization of Mars with almost mythic fervor—a childhood fantasy he’s trying to materialize, with no irony and infinite funding. These aren’t business plans. They’re personal myths scaled to global consequence. They are no longer designing tools. They are authoring narratives—and casting themselves as the heroes.

The danger isn’t just their delusion. It’s that the rest of us are being pulled into it. With every TED Talk and headline, their dream becomes the default story: that salvation lies in more data, more reach, more speed, more escape.

But as Vedanta reminds us, you can’t wake up by building a better dream. The tragedy of our moment isn’t that we’re lost. It’s that we’re being led by men who don’t know they’re dreaming.

Billionaires as the New Gods

In past ages, people built temples for their gods. Today, billionaires build platforms, ecosystems, space programs, and brain-interface companies. Their ambitions are no longer merely economic—they’re cosmic. They don’t just want to succeed. They want to transcend.

They talk openly of ending disease, defeating death, colonizing other planets, and enhancing human consciousness. These aren’t goals—they’re mythic quests, carried out not with introspection, but with code, capital, and corporate infrastructure. These men are no longer creating tools. They are reshaping the world to reflect their own imagination, their own image.

In Vedantic terms, these are not gods. They are asuras—beings of immense power, driven by ambition and fueled by restlessness, but blind to truth. They mistake scale for sanctity, wealth for wisdom, and control for clarity.

The result is a new kind of mythology—one written not in scripture, but in code. And like all myths, it reshapes the collective psyche. It tells us that death is optional, that Earth is obsolete, that human limitations are defects to be engineered away. The old gods asked for reverence. The new gods ask for adoption, optimization, and subscription.

But what they cannot offer is wisdom. Because wisdom requires surrender. And they are too powerful to surrender anything.

The Amish Have a Better AI Policy Than We Do

Ironically, one of the most spiritually mature approaches to technology doesn’t come from think tanks or tech ethicists—but from the Amish.

They are not anti-technology. They are anti-disruption—not of markets, but of values. Their question is simple: Does this serve our way of life, or does it weaken it? Solar panels? Possibly. iPhones? Probably not. Zoom meetings, biometric sensors, or algorithmic matchmaking? No, thank you.

This is not ignorance—it’s viveka, discernment. And it stands in sharp contrast to Silicon Valley’s obsession with “what’s possible,” where the only guiding metric is often scale or efficiency. The Amish aren’t afraid of innovation. They’re afraid of forgetting what matters.

In that way, they embody something we’ve lost: the ability to say no. Not as fear, but as clarity. In a culture where every tool is seen as progress, the Amish remind us that not every upgrade is an improvement. Sometimes, resistance is a form of reverence.

We, on the other hand, adopt first and ask questions later—if at all. Our only filter is excitement. And when the damage is visible—when we feel more distracted, less connected, more anxious—we blame ourselves, not the system we didn’t question.

New Tools, Same Ignorance

We’ve built machines that can simulate conversation, compose symphonies, and mimic human thought. But none of these tools have helped us understand who we are. The outer world has evolved at dizzying speed. The inner world remains underdeveloped, unexamined, and unloved.

AI is not dangerous because it’s intelligent. It’s dangerous because we are not wise. And we’re handing it more power with every passing week—not as masters of it, but as dependents trying to stay afloat in a world we no longer understand.

The delusion is not in the machine. The delusion is in us—in thinking that new tools will free us from old patterns. That we can escape our ignorance by digitizing it.

But ignorance scaled is not wisdom. It’s just louder illusion.

The same misunderstanding of reality takes on ever-more elaborate forms. It becomes AI. It becomes crypto. It becomes Mars. It even becomes psychedelics and “spiritual” startups. But beneath all of it is the same confusion: the belief that control is the path to freedom, and that refinement of appearance is the same as knowledge of truth.

The Singularity Will Not Be Gentle

Recently, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman published a blog post titled The Gentle Singularity. He describes our current moment not as a dramatic rupture, but as a smooth ascent toward a new era—one of abundance, intelligence, and transformation. His optimism is not naïve; it is well-informed and grounded in real technological progress. And yet, it is still avidya.

Not because he misunderstands AI, but because he misunderstands the suffering it will cause. What looks like a gentle curve from the top of the mountain will feel like an avalanche to those at the bottom. Altman sees infrastructure scaling, productivity growing, and agency expanding. But he does not see—because he cannot see—the inner disorientation this will cause for millions who never asked for this future.

He is not wrong. But his clarity is partial. And partial clarity, when paired with immense power, is indistinguishable from ignorance.

The Myth of Worklessness

One of the promises repeated by today’s tech visionaries is that AI will liberate us from the burden of work. Universal Basic Income will provide sustenance. Machines will handle the labor. Humans will finally be “free.”

But free to do what?

There’s a hidden assumption here—that work is merely transactional, a necessary evil. And that without it, we’ll all naturally fall into creativity, joy, and self-actualization. But history—and psychology—tell a different story.

Human beings don’t thrive in perpetual leisure. We require structure, purpose, and yes, even friction. It’s not that we enjoy drudgery. It’s that the discipline, challenges, and even the small victories of effort give life shape. They force us to grow. They bind us to one another. They place us in time.

Work, in its deeper form, is not just labor. It’s dharma—participation in a world that requires something of us.

Remove that, and what’s left? A kind of open sky that, for many, becomes an existential void. Because not working is only joyful when it is chosen, when it’s paired with abundance, health, freedom, and meaning. Without those, it quickly curdles into boredom, depression, and a loss of self-worth.

Vedanta would argue that we are not the roles we play—but it also reminds us: those roles are not meaningless. The world is a stage, yes—but you still have to play your part before you can transcend it.

There’s No End to Samsara, Only Getting Out

In the worldview of Vedanta, samsara—the cycle of becoming—is not something you fix. It’s something you see through. You can’t engineer your way out of illusion. You can’t reach truth by perfecting appearances. You don’t end suffering by building a smarter version of it.

There’s no end to samsara—only getting out.

You can colonize Mars, enhance the brain, digitize the soul, or simulate consciousness—and still remain bound. Because bondage was never physical. It was never in the tool, the code, or the flesh. It was always in ignorance—in mistaking yourself for what you are not.

This is why no technology—no matter how advanced—will ever lead to liberation. At best, it will amplify the illusion. At worst, it will convince you the illusion is all there is.

Vedanta doesn’t oppose the world. It simply refuses to be fooled by it. It sees the game, plays it lightly, and doesn’t mistake it for home. It invites us to see clearly—not later, not after the Singularity, but now.

Because whatever clarity we’re waiting for in the future is already available in the present. And if there’s hope, it’s in that a few may see through the dream, and quietly, without spectacle or fear, simply choose to wake up.