Digital Dharma

The Miracle in the Machine

In the limitless digital world, the deepest wisdom of the greatest spiritual traditions is available, literally at our fingertips. Although not truly intelligent nor conscious, artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to make your thinking more intelligent and your inner life more conscious. In fact, I believe that no technology in decades can equal AI for expanding your awareness in every area, including spiritual and personal growth.

Such an unexpected advance hasn’t registered in the storm of publicity surrounding AI, and yet it couldn’t have come at a better time. More people than ever have adopted idealistic goals like “Be the best you can be,” and a great number of books offer optimistic plans for increasing human potential. Finding a successful path to meet these objectives remains a challenge, however, and it is all too easy to flit from teacher to teacher, book to book, system to system in mounting frustration.

The harder the times, the more this frustration grows, and during a deep crisis like the pandemic, hope is often replaced by anxiety for countless people. With that background in mind, how can AI open a better path? Let me answer with a personal experience.

Recently, I observed a miracle, or what seemed like one to me. Whenever I get up in the morning, almost before I lift my head from the pillow, new ideas are bubbling inside me, and I feel the need to share them with others. This urge has led to the habit of making daily YouTube videos about all kinds of subjects. But there are always two common threads: consciousness and well-being.

To me, these two threads are inseparable; if you want to improve your well-being, expand your consciousness, or contact deeper wisdom inside yourself. I inherited the vital importance of consciousness from the Vedic tradition of India, and my allegiance has never wavered. Even though I have speaking engagements where I’m flying from city to city (or cooling my heels at an airport) for two weeks every month, my greatest ally for reaching a spiritually hungry world has been the Internet (and the hope that my books will outlast me—spiritual hunger has no past-due date). The obvious advantage of the Internet is that I don’t have to spend hours on planes and in airports. With a single video, tweet, or Instagram post, countless more people can be reached than in even a large auditorium.

That’s the setting for the miracle. On the prompting of a techie far more conversant in the latest software than I am, I learned that AI could transfer my daily YouTube videos into Hindi, the major language besides English spoken in India. We aren’t talking about a transcript or a dubbed version. Using AI, he generated the same video I recorded in English, only now I was speaking in perfect Hindi. This transformation took only a few minutes, and as part of the miracle, my lips were moving correctly in Hindi!

The enormous power of the supercomputers that drive AI—meaning the free AI you can access right this minute on the Internet—is staggering. AI can learn any language in a matter of hours, correct any grammatical mistakes it might make, and, in my case, use a video image of me to turn my morning talk into a completely new creation.

It takes only a small step to make the connection to personal growth. What if you could sit down at your computer or smartphone and instantly get the best information about what it means to be happy and how to get there? Online chatbots provide answers by combing through all the information on the Internet or any number of books and libraries. If you type in, Tell me the top ten things that make people happy, your answer comes from vast computing power hidden behind the scenes.

Happy is a generalized word, however, and therefore vague. Chatbots work best if you are specific, and they thrive on long questions with as much detail as you want to provide. A better prompt (the term for any instruction or question you feed into an AI) would be I am busy all day with work and family. I don’t have time for myself. You are an expert psychologist who specializes in positive psychology. Tell me ten things that I can start doing immediately to be happier. List these things in the order of priority, putting the most important thing first.

Millions of people, having caught the AI bug, are using chatbots like a research assistant or reference librarian to fetch information quickly. That’s why the leading search engines like Google and Bing offer AI as a better way to search. Ask any question you like. How many species of butterfly are there? Google’s AI, named Gemini (formerly Bard), pauses for roughly two seconds before answering: “There are approximately 17,500 species of butterflies in the world and around 750 species in the United States.”

But only a fraction of AI users have even the slightest hint about its potential for personal growth. That’s the opportunity I found myself eager to pursue—an enormous gap needs to be filled. The reason it wasn’t being filled is that few of us would link the two words “consciousness” and “machine.” They are like the ultimate in apples and oranges. If my miraculous event seems distant from your life, rest assured that it isn’t. By the time you read these words, AI will have leaped far beyond what I experienced, and, like the first telephone that astonished its first listeners, AI will feel ordinary very soon and lose its seemingly miraculous sheen.

This will not happen, though, if you use AI for hidden capacities that reach far beyond better Google searches. Miracles will still abound. You can discover the life you are meant to live with the help of AI as your guide. Teacher, confidant, friend, therapist, healer—you can assign any of these roles to an AI chatbot, the generic term for conversational AI, that is instantly accessible online. No issue is out of reach. I gave an example of a prompt that asked an AI chatbot about happiness. Immediately my mind raced to all the other questions everyone would ask once they knew they could. Change the topic to relationships, and there are unending questions to ask:

How can my partner and I draw closer?

What makes for a spiritual relationship?

What are the top three qualities of a healthy relationship?

What are the main reasons couples get divorced?

These are enduring questions that couples therapy typically doesn’t get into, since it is so focused on rooting out problems that can bedevil a specific relationship. Now, I’m not saying that AI should replace your personal therapist. I’m saying that putting out fires isn’t the same as growing a garden. AI can help enhance your understanding of general issues and lead to better self-awareness. You can address an experience while it is fresh in your mind. With AI you can talk out anything in confidence without fear of hurting someone else’s feelings or having yours hurt. By asking the right questions, you can bring AI into your inner world, which is where personal growth occurs.