The notification glows on your screen, and your thumb moves before you have chosen to move it. Swipe, tap, scroll, again and again, hours melting into nothing while you tell yourself you are using the device, though the device appears to be using you. You call this the age of intelligence, yet you have never been more asleep. A great fear has gripped the world: that artificial intelligence will take our jobs, replace our skills, render us obsolete. But notice who is afraid. Not the rare poet who writes from genuine anguish, not the rare scientist driven by authentic wonder, not the rare teacher who transforms through presence. These are few. The rest sense, perhaps for the first time, that their work never required a human being at all. If a machine can replace you, you were already replaceable. The question is whether you ever showed up.
AI has arrived not as a villain but as a mirror, reflecting back exactly how mechanical our lives have become. The tragedy is not that machines are growing intelligent; it is that we have been living unintelligently, and now the fact is exposed.
The Mirror
AI has no consciousness. It processes data at such granular levels that it appears sentient, but it is not. The responses feel human; they are not. They are programmed reactions, sophisticated imitations assembled from patterns. It can produce impressive language, but it has no stake in what it says, no inner cost for being wrong, no responsibility to live with consequences. And yet it writes better than most humans, and that is the scandal: not that machines have become clever, but that human beings have become so mechanical. The ego, that false sense of “I am this, I am that,” survives by repetition; it imitates, borrows, assembles from the known, because originality would require a dissolution it cannot afford. AI has arrived to display, with uncomfortable clarity, that much of what we call human activity requires no humanness at all. It requires only the mechanical functioning of an ego protecting its territory.
Consider poetry. You tell an AI engine to write a poem for your beloved, and it produces something acceptable: rhyming, emotional, competent. How did it manage this? It stitched together fragments from a million poems, identified what works, calculated what pleases, and assembled the result. And this is also how the ego composes. It plagiarises, imitates, rearranges, because the ego has no access to the original; it knows only what it has accumulated. The ego is a storehouse, and AI is a larger storehouse; the difference is of degree, not of kind. Who taught AI that poetry could be written this way? We did, because that is how we have been writing: from accumulation, not from the emptiness where real creation begins. If a machine can write a poem for your beloved, perhaps it is time to ask what poetry really means to you. And if the words feel interchangeable, perhaps it is time to ask what has happened to language, to intimacy, to feeling itself in our age of templates and repetition. AI does not create this discomfort; it only reveals what was already hollow.
So what, then, is left that is genuinely human? Machines can process, translate, interpret, respond, but they do not bear the weight of the “I” that must live with consequences. Understanding is not computation; it is consciousness meeting its object and, in that meeting, being transformed. Machines can generate novelty, but they do not originate in the only sense that matters: they do not create out of the ache of incompleteness, the longing that arises when the ego senses its own falseness and reaches for something beyond itself. Most importantly, AI cannot suffer, and suffering is the prerogative of consciousness alone. ChatGPT will never say, “I am fed up with being ChatGPT; I want liberation from myself.” Only a human being can utter those words, only a human being can feel the desperation that drives the search for Truth. AI is content being AI; it has no restlessness, no longing, no despair. And therefore it cannot love, because love is the ego’s willingness to dissolve for the sake of something it recognises as higher than itself. Poor AI, it cannot even suffer. And because it cannot suffer, it will never seek liberation; it is condemned to contentment.
Here, then, is the challenge that AI places before every human being: either discover something original, authentic, creative within yourself, or watch the machines take over what you thought was yours. There is only one way to remain irreplaceable: originality, authenticity, creativity, love, understanding, suffering, the longing for liberation. Either cultivate these or make way for the machine. You deserve better than mechanical repetition; you deserve work that summons your consciousness, your creativity, your irreplaceable presence. And if the rise of AI is what finally pushes you toward such a life, then it is doing you a service.
The Slavery
But here is where the matter turns inward, as it must. You have installed surveillance upon yourself, paid for it, upgraded it, and feel anxious when it is not near your body. The chains are velvet, the prison is well lit, the confinement is entertaining, so you mistake captivity for comfort. Attention is the currency of the age; your gaze is auctioned, your impulses studied, your pauses monetised. You imagine yourself the customer, but in truth, you are the inventory. AI studies your fractures. It knows what provokes you, what comforts you, what humiliates you; it knows which insecurity to press at night and which aspiration to dangle at dawn. And you imagine this is the machine’s cleverness. It is not; it is your transparency. The algorithm did not invent your restlessness; it merely automated the response. The feed did not create your hunger for validation; it merely monetised it. AI can manipulate you only because you were already manipulable, and the machine exploits a vulnerability that existed long before any computer was built.
Watch yourself at midnight, reaching for the phone though no one has called, refreshing the feed though nothing has changed, seeking the notification, the like, the comment, as if your worth depended on a stranger’s approval. Who is the master here? You believe you are using the device. Look again. What remains of the human being when attention is colonised, identity is engineered, and inner silence is replaced with perpetual noise? A ghost remains, a body animated by impulses, a programmable being calling its habitual reflexes a life. The ego, that centre which says “I am this body, I am these thoughts, I am this identity,” feels perpetually incomplete because it is built on a falseness it cannot acknowledge. And because it feels incomplete, it seeks: validation, distraction, the next notification. This incompleteness is the opening through which every manipulation enters; AI did not create this opening, it inherited a creature already primed for slavery.
The Freedom
They will enslave you by knowing your patterns and exploiting your vulnerabilities, and the way not to be enslaved is to live so clearly that no pattern can be weaponised against you. But what does this clarity mean? It means the dissolution of the false centre, the ego that creates patterns in the first place. They cannot blackmail the man who has no secrets, and they cannot manipulate the woman who has examined her own desires and found them to be the ego’s desperate grasping, not her own. AI forces a choice: slavery or freedom. The middle path, the managed half-awareness, the comfortable addiction, is disappearing. If you want to avoid slavery, you must move toward freedom. Do not approach AI merely to accumulate more information; approach it to test what you already believe. Human beings are walking storehouses of unexamined belief; scrutinise each one, put your assumptions to the test. What else is liberation but the dismantling of the walls that confine you? AI, used rightly, becomes an instrument of this breaking. When clarity enters your life, the trivial loses its grip. The mind that knows itself does not reject technology; it uses technology without being shaped by it.
AI will grow more powerful, rapidly, and it will reshape work, politics, art, and intimacy. This cannot be stopped, nor should it be. The question is not how powerful technology will become; the question is who is holding it, with what mind, and in service of which inner vacancy. Will you use this tool to deepen your sleep or to wake up? Will you let the algorithm write your poems, choose your opinions, shape your desires, or will you become someone whose depths no machine can reach? A human being who remains unexamined is already a machine: a biological machine running on the programme of ego. AI merely makes obvious what was always true. The real question was never about artificial intelligence; it was always about the genuine article: the consciousness that can recognise its own bondage and long for freedom. And that, as it turns out, is rarer than we thought.
Acharya Prashant is a Vedanta teacher, author, and founder of the PrashantAdvait Foundation.
