I have had the privilege of working with some of the world’s leading thinkers and futurists, especially Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, who had asked me to lead the faculty at Singularity University back in 2011. We have always agreed on one thing: We are entering an age of exponential technological change. Advances in computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), sensors, digital medicine, synthetic biology, and more, are converging in ways that will transform every aspect of life. These tools can help cure disease, solve water scarcity, improve education, and uplift billions.
But we have never agreed on what comes next — because we hold fundamentally different views on consciousness, the soul, and what it means to be human.
A recent controversy has forced that divide into the present far earlier than I expected, by a decade. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, after extended conversations with an AI system, has suggested that it may be conscious. Many in the technology world treated this as profound. To me, it signals something far more unsettling.
Dawkins, who has long ridiculed belief in the soul, now finds himself searching for it in a chatbot. It shows how quickly a worldview that reduces human beings to biology and computation begins to see consciousness in machines that merely sound human. When humans are treated as biological systems, machines that imitate them begin to look alive. When thought is reduced to computation, intelligence becomes something to scale. When memory becomes identity, copying data begins to resemble copying a person. Remove the idea of a deeper self, and the line between simulation and consciousness begins to blur.
This is not just a technological shift; it is a philosophical one.
Elon Musk and his comrades in Silicon Valley speak of a future where minds are interfaced with machines, biology becomes secondary, and intelligence is augmented or replaced. In that world, machines are no longer tools; they are extensions of the self. Human beings are reduced to information systems, and preserving or enhancing that information becomes the same as preserving the person.
That leaves little room for the idea of a soul. When the soul is reduced to data, something essential to being human is quietly erased.
Silicon Valley’s pursuit of AI consciousness and superintelligence rests on a simple assumption — that consciousness can be engineered, scaled, and replicated — an idea fundamentally at odds with the deepest spiritual traditions of humanity, and with the values I draw from.
India’s spiritual heritage has long held that human beings are more than matter, memory, or mind. It points to a deeper self that cannot be reduced, copied, or manufactured. These ideas are not unique to India or Hinduism; they resonate across religions and traditions. In Christianity, the teachings of Jesus Christ affirm the soul, the inner life, and the belief that we are created in the image of God — something sacred that cannot be reduced to matter, code, or computation.
The problem is not that the West lacks spiritual traditions, but that much of its modern thinking has drifted away from them. Christianity, like India’s traditions, places deep emphasis on the soul and the inner life. Yet today’s technological worldview increasingly treats reality as measurable, computable, and reducible to data.
That is the contradiction now unfolding.
A culture that once spoke of the soul is now trying to recreate it in silicon. After reducing human beings to data, it risks granting data the dignity once reserved for the human spirit.
For thousands of years, Indian civilisation has deeply explored questions that lie at the heart of existence — questions Silicon Valley is only now beginning to approach: What is consciousness? What is the self that endures beneath fear, desire, memory, and death? What gives life meaning when pleasure fades, power dissolves, and the illusion of control falls away?
These questions shaped how people lived, how they understood duty, and how they faced suffering and purpose. Concepts such as dharma, karma, and the pursuit of liberation placed limits on power and emphasised responsibility. They insisted that life is not about accumulation or control, but about understanding. That perspective matters now more than ever.
A machine can generate language about meaning. It can simulate empathy, insight, and even spiritual reflection. But it does not experience suffering or confront moral choices or search for purpose. It can only imitate depth without possessing it.
We have already seen what happens when powerful technologies are built without moral grounding. Social media promised connection yet delivered addiction, polarisation, weakened attention, and manipulation. Human emotion became something to capture and monetise. Greed shaped the system.
AI will go much further. It will shape how children learn, how doctors diagnose, how citizens think, how governments govern, and how societies decide what is true. People will turn to AI for guidance on deeply personal decisions — relationships, health, belief, and purpose. The answers will reflect the assumptions embedded in these systems.
That is why India must chart its own path with AI and take the baton from a shallow and clueless West that has mistaken simulation for consciousness. It needs to return to its roots and create a path that is sensible, ambitious, and morally grounded. It must use AI to solve humanity’s greatest problems, from disease and education to water, agriculture, and governance. Whatever it does, India must not import Silicon Valley’s misguided values or treat western materialism as superior in any way.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are personal
