The Coming A.I. Spiritual Awakening
·A long email from Peter Diamandis landed in my inbox this week, and I have not been able to put it down. He calls the next five years a “supersonic tsunami” — Elon Musk’s phrase — a wave moving so fast and so large that by the time you hear it coming, it has already broken over you.
I am not going to argue with his numbers. I have watched too many clever people bet against this curve and lose to do it myself. So take him at his word. Intelligence is getting cheaper fast — on his figures, ten times cheaper every year, genius for less than the price of a cup of coffee. Robots that cost around twenty thousand dollars are coming by the hundreds of millions, running for under a dollar an hour, machines that never sleep. Disease may be largely cured within a decade. The human lifespan could double in five to ten years. The world economy, on Musk’s projection, climbs toward a quadrillion dollars. Abundance on a scale we have never seen.
It is a magnificent vision. And buried in the middle of it, almost in passing, Diamandis writes the one line I cannot stop turning over: when work is optional, where do meaning and dignity come from?
He asks the question. And then — this is the part worth noticing — he does not answer it. He goes straight back to the economy, to cheap transport, to longer lives. The most important question in the whole letter is raised, and then walked past. That silence is what I want to talk about.
Here is what the abundance dream keeps getting wrong about people. Work was never only about money. It was structure. It was the reason to get up in the morning. It was the thing that told a man he was needed, that gave a woman a place in the order of things, the daily proof that your hands mattered to someone. Take away the need to work and the optimists assume you are left with a happy life of leisure. You are not. You are left with a hole the exact shape of the thing that used to hold you up.
We already know what happens, because we have seen it on a small scale many times. Watch people in the months after they retire — not the ones with a purpose, but the ones whose whole identity was the job. The decline can be shockingly fast. Watch the towns where the factory closed and never reopened: the drinking, the drugs, the deaths that economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton named “deaths of despair.” Study after study ties a sense of purpose to how long and how well we live. Remove the purpose, and the body seems to lose its reason to carry on.
Now picture that — not in one town, but across whole countries at once. That is the part of the tsunami the spreadsheets do not show. For a great many people, the first wave of abundance will arrive as a wave of despair. Not because they are poor; they may be better off than any generation before them. Because they are no longer needed. And being no longer needed is, for a human being, close to unbearable. I think we will see it in the numbers: more suicide, more addiction, more of the quiet breaking-down that happens when a person can no longer answer the simplest question — what am I for?
I do not say this to frighten anyone. I say it because it is true, and because naming it is the first step toward the other thing I see coming.
Because here is what forty years of practice has taught me. An empty space where meaning used to be is the oldest doorway to awakening there is. The comfortable and the busy rarely look inward — they have no reason to. It is when the outer scaffolding falls away that a person is finally forced to ask the questions that were always waiting underneath. Who am I, beneath the roles? What is this — this awareness reading these words right now? Why am I here at all, if not to produce?
Every great spiritual path began with someone losing the life the world had handed them. The Buddha walked out of a palace of plenty. The desert fathers walked out of an empire. Comfort has never produced a single moment of real awakening. The loss of a false foundation has produced thousands. I have written about the three phases that awakening moves through — and what strikes me now is that the first phase, the one that precedes everything, is always the same: something the person was relying on gives way.
So let me set a prediction beside Diamandis’s. As the old sources of meaning are automated away, some people will be lost — and we must grieve that honestly, and help where we can. But many will turn. A great number will go back to religion — to the churches and temples, the mosques and synagogues, the old traditions that have carried meaning for thousands of years. They will go looking for what the marketplace can no longer give them: belonging, ritual, a story large enough to live inside, a community that needs them. This is no small thing, and I will not say a word against it. When the ground gives way, people reach for what has held others before them, and faith has held more people through more darkness than anything else we have built.
And some will go further still. Beyond joining a tradition, beyond believing what they are told, they will begin the direct exploration of consciousness itself — the patient turning inward to find out, first-hand, what they actually are. This is the work that can never be handed to a machine: the work of knowing yourself. It is the work the School of Knowing was built around.
This is the heart of it, and it is where everything I teach points. An artificial superintelligence can do almost anything for you. It can write your emails, find your illness, run your business, teach your children, compose music in your own taste. There is exactly one thing it cannot do. It cannot be you. It cannot have your experience. It cannot sit in your seat and meditate on your behalf. Direct knowing is the last thing left that no machine can do for us.
And notice what a world of endless artificial content does to belief itself. When any face on a screen might be fake, when any voice can be cloned, when an A.I. can argue any side better than you can — belief becomes worthless, because anything at all can be made up and made convincing. The only thing that still holds is what you have proven in your own experience. Not what you were told. Not what you read, even here. What you know, because you have been there yourself.
That is what I mean by Beyond Belief — Into Knowing — the thread that runs through everything I write and everything I teach, and the subject I have laid out in full in Truth Centred Meditation. I did not coin the phrase for an age like this, but it turns out to have been made for it. The machine will hand you every answer there is. The one thing it can never hand you is the knower. That, you have to become.
So yes — surf the wave, as Musk says, or be crushed by it. The cheap genius, the robots, the cured diseases, the longer lives: take all of it, with both hands. I am not a man who romanticises hardship or fears the future.
Diamandis ends his letter with a choice: are you on the beach watching the wave come, or out on the board, paddling hard, ready to ride? It is a good question. It is also incomplete, because both answers are about the same wave — the one out there, made of money and machines and motion. There is a third option he never names. You can turn around. You can face the wave that has been rising your whole life and has nothing to do with technology at all — the one that asks who is standing here, watching any of it.
Because there are two waves coming, not one. The loud one — abundance, disruption, a quadrillion dollars — the one everybody is watching. And beneath it, quieter, hidden from every metric in his letter, a second wave: some returning to the old faiths for shelter and belonging, and some going all the way in — a turning inwards of your consciousness, to directly know your Divine self. A return to the only ground that is wholly your own.
When the machines have done all the work that can be done, one task will still be unfinished, exactly as it always has been. To know who is living this life. That was always the real work. We are simply about to run out of excuses for avoiding it.
The tsunami is real. Paddle hard if you like — but the deepest answer to it was never going to be found out on the water. It will be found where it has always been found: within. And a great many people, I suspect, are about to discover that for themselves.