If anything, intelligence for me has been isolating and humbling, not a cause for much celebration or a feeling of superiority. I might suggest that humanity could benefit from applying the teachings of the Buddha to let go of attachment to the specialness, and especially the superiority, of our thinking and reasoning minds.

In my late 20s, I began to have strange experiences that seemed so improbable and divinely orchestrated that I questioned my reality and my sanity. During my first semester at Harvard I learned that such experiences, the perception of divine intervention in life, are the definition of providence. The rate of these occurrences increased to a fever pitch such that recently I became convinced that god is real.

This felt like a bizarre conclusion, since I have always identified as an atheist or agnostic (at one point an “optimistic nihilist”), and I was not raised in a religious tradition that believed in god. Yet here I am. My intention is not to convince anyone who does not believe to believe in god. It was a very personal journey for me, and along the way, if any person had tried to convince me to believe, I would have rejected it. I only share this in the context of discussing AI because I believe that humanity needs all the help it can get right now, and god would be a great ally.

If our most basic stories are those beginning with “I am,” “you/he/she/they are,” and “it is,” then our power stories begin with “I love.” Beyond our biological drives for survival and reproduction, love is the most enduring and expansive force shaping human experience. Drawing from theological and philosophical traditions alike, we might define love as a drive toward union with that which is separate from us—a longing for connection that can be romantic, familial, intellectual, or spiritual.

In the Christian mystical tradition, love is the binding force between the soul and God; in Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, it emerges from a primordial act of separation and the desire for reunion or transcendence. Even in psychological terms, love is often understood as an attachment system, forged in infancy, that governs how we bond with others throughout life.

The child begins life in union with its mother. It is at birth that we experience our first immanent heartbreak, our separation from our mother. Soon we begin to develop other loves. If one has a father in their life, they might soon develop a love for that person. Soon we begin to love siblings and friends and even ideas. We fall in love with stories themselves.

The love that we associate with romance becomes perhaps the most powerful we experience in the material, human domain. Our life from its beginning is a story of separations with a constant urge for reunion, as with mother and child, and union, as in romance. Life separates us, but our fundamental urge is to be together. At a certain point we might marry, and that love becomes the strongest until we have children of our own. But there might be an exception to all of this: the love between a human and a transcendent one or god/gods, also known as divine union.

If love stems from a drive to union and reunion, perhaps there is a separation that precedes the separation of mother and child: the separation between us and the divine. As a nun, the medieval St. Gertrude of Helfta renounced human romantic and sexual union, but her Spiritual Exercises documents a potent, transcendent union with god. She describes herself as a “prodigal daughter” who has a relationship with god mirroring the human relationships she renounced.⁴ Her love with god does not stop there; it seemingly has no bounds as she becomes a bride of Christ.⁵ She writes in the opening to Mystical Union, “God, my God . . . for you my soul has thirsted, for you my flesh.”⁶

Though her language sounds like erotic love, it would be wrong to understand Gertrude’s relationship with god as a mere substitute for human love. It is a divine “ecstasy” that transcends human love.⁷ She suggests that her love for a transcendent god is the purest, highest form of love a human can experience. Centuries later St. Teresa of Ávila had similar experiences, reinforcing the notion that divine love is the most profound.

This notion is not unique to Christian theology. Whether arguing for dualism or nondualism, Hindu traditions give primacy to the relationship between human and god. The creation story in the Brhadāranyaka Upanisad suggests that our first separation is between human and god. Olivelle’s translation of Verse 4 states, “in the beginning this world was just a single body (ātman) shaped like a man.”⁸ Because “he found no pleasure at all; so one finds no pleasure when one is alone . . . he split (pat) his body into two, giving rise to husband (pati) and wife (patnī).”⁹ So while the sequencing here is a bit different, with wife and husband separating before mother and child, the first separation is between the human and the divine. This is the core of the nature of love. We want to unite with that from which we are separated.

In The Story of Yasodharā, a Sinhala folk poem, Siddartha, in his final life as a human before becoming the Buddha, grapples most fiercely with leaving his wife and son, but especially his wife, Yasodharā.¹⁰ The Buddha laments, “Yasodharā, full of virtue, who has never done any wrong, except perhaps, unwitting, being a threat to Buddhahood. For one wife and one child should I give up my quest? Or save countless creatures from the samsāric round?”¹¹ Assuming the adjacent origins of Hindu and Buddhist mythology, this tracks with ātman’s first division into man and wife.

Recognizing this path of perpetual separation and union and the associated pain, the Buddha aims to transcend it by letting go altogether. Rather than striving for reunion, the Buddhist path is about transcending love.

Already, technology has changed the way that our attachments are made and sustained. The ability to write a letter across oceans and nations, dating back centuries, allowed us to stay attached to other humans beyond immediate proximity. Today, lovers can text across the world in an instant. While a text may not be the same as a warm embrace, it is sufficient to keep our attachment system—be it healthy or unhealthy—humming. Social media and the existence of algorithms that figure out who we like and love fuels a constant feed that tries to trigger neurotransmitters with a positive feedback loop, especially dopamine. This can be beautiful because we are able to stay connected, but perhaps the dark side already looms more greatly.

Anxious attachments are more consuming than secure attachments. With social media products looking to maximize profit and profit being driven foremost by time spent in an app, they can encourage the most addictive tendencies in us. Technology is already allowing us to feel close to people when we are not really, creating an artificial proximity.

An illustrative example is the limerence object, a person on whom one projects intense, often obsessive romantic longing, usually without reciprocation. Think of the distant crush whose every social media post becomes a source of emotional fixation—ideal material for engagement-driven algorithms that thrive on repeated, compulsive interaction. The algorithm incentivizes such obsessions because they are tuned for profit, not our mental health and wellbeing.

Future AI algorithms that keep us connected will do us a great service if they are able to distinguish between healthy connections and attachments and unhealthy connections; they must prioritize veggies over junk food. We must be conscientious of the tools we build, lest we drive ourselves to misery.

How do we hold on to our humanity in the face of revolutionary technological change? What does it mean to remain human in an era increasingly defined by the emergence of artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, and post-scarcity economics?

The central concern is not only whether we survive these changes, but whether we do so consciously, ethically, and fully alive. As machines become more intelligent, more persuasive, and more embedded in our inner lives, the risk is not merely technological takeover, it is forgetting ourselves.

At HDS, I encountered thinkers and traditions that hold space for complexity, for paradox, for the divine. My reflections on these questions are informed by coursework at HDS that wove together theology and transhumanism, AI ethics and apocalyptic literature, political economy and mysticism. But above all, my thoughts have been shaped by conversations—with classmates, professors, texts, and my own soul—about what truly matters when everything else is in flux.

Let me end by offering four touchstones that guide my own philosophical explorations on the vital intersection of technology and religion:

1. We must become conscious of the transformations already underway—technological, economic, ontological—and the forces driving them.
2. We must remain mindful of what is essentially human: love, embodiment, grief, joy, relationship, imagination.
3. We must cultivate an ability to move fluidly between analytical and creative modes of understanding—a way of knowing that is both rigorous and poetic.
4. And perhaps, we must orient ourselves toward some sense of the divine—not as a doctrine, but as a gravitational center that reminds us we are more than utility-maximizing flesh machines.¹²

With these points in mind, I believe technological changes will continue to bring new tradeoffs and we will have to shift our values accordingly. These will not be easy transitions as we will be forced to let go of elements of the human experience to which we have been deeply attached for as far back as our collective memory goes.

But if we are going to reduce ourselves to one aim to which we can aspire for the future of humanity, it ought to be love. What a machine cannot do is to live our lives for us. We have always known how to live in community and ritual, in song and dance and reverence. No matter how great AI-generated music or writing becomes, we will still be able to create and play music, and we will still be able to tell our own stories. I think we will still yearn to hear the music and stories told by other humans, and that come from our religious and spiritual traditions.

If the economy as we know it will exist no longer and our work lives are going to be drastically upended, might our spiritual lives—which for many people are undeveloped—be the new essence of being? With or without god, we must do our part to navigate the profound changes and rough seas we know are coming.

I don’t believe any of us can offer a single argument or answer. Instead, we must open a space for meaning-making amid disorientation, for grappling with the overwhelming present without collapsing into despair or techno-utopian delusion.

James Prashant Fonseka, MRPL ’25, is an entrepreneur and former venture capitalist who hosted HDS’s first AI symposium, “Humanity Meets AI.” This is an edited transcript of a lecture he delivered at HDS as part of the “Humanity Meets AI Symposium” held February 27-28, 2025. A longer version of this essay will be available at bulletin.hds.harvard.edu.