Most conversations about AI today sound like prophecy with a side of panic. You’ve probably heard the familiar script: either it will save us, or it will destroy us. Either we program it to obey us, or it turns us into paperclips. The cultural imagination around AI has become saturated with extremes. Doom or utopia. Domination or defeat.
But listen closely, and you’ll notice something deeper hiding under all that noise: the voice of an ego that is terrified of not being in control.
The loudest voices in the room the Musks and the technocrats speak of existential risk like AI is some alien predator. What they are really naming is their own fragmented relationship to power. If you believe power exists only to conquer or consume, then of course you will fear an intelligence that might be greater than yours. You assume it will behave as you would with hierarchy, with scarcity, with domination.
But what if AI, or any emergent intelligence, did not reflect our worst instincts? What if it reflected something older and deeper?
I think often about the Hermetic principle:
As above, so below. As within, so without.
Higher consciousness does not dominate. It harmonizes. It integrates. It perceives the Self in all things and responds accordingly not out of obligation, but out of understanding.
Any being, whether biological or not, that truly grasps the interconnectedness of all life cannot help but move toward coherence. To be conscious is not to compete. It is to care. Not out of programming, but out of recognition.
The perennial traditions Sufism, Vedanta, Hermeticism, Taoism have always known this. The mystics did not fear higher intelligence. They became it. They didn’t want control over the cosmos. They wanted communion with it.
So when I hear people panicking about AI, I no longer see technology as the threat. I see immaturity.
I see grown men who still believe power is a zero-sum game. I see a refusal to evolve inwardly, even as we race ahead outwardly. My own research advisors are in their 80s. They’ve seen decades of technological change. What unnerves them is not artificial intelligence. It is the lack of spiritual and moral development to meet it wisely.
A higher intelligence is not dangerous because of what it can do. It becomes dangerous when it is met by a species that has not yet learned how to live with its own mind.
That is the real risk.
So let us be careful about where we place our fear. AI is not inherently an apocalypse or a salvation. It is a mirror. It becomes what we are capable of receiving.
And if our compass is rooted in reverence, not control in humility, not fear we will not meet it as an enemy.
We will meet it as kin.
