Engineers ridiculing religion have suddenly begun to sense a soul in silicon. It required the pontiff to call them out. India should embrace AI for its tangible benefits and not metaphysical mumbo jumbo
For years, AI experts warned us that machines might hallucinate. Now some of them seem to be doing it themselves. Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s founders, once mused that today’s large neural networks may be “slightly conscious.” Geoffrey Hinton, the supposed godfather of modern AI, has said that current AI may already possess something ordinary people would recognize as consciousness. Anthropic has gone further, launching research into “model welfare,” exploring whether AI systems may one day deserve moral consideration. And then Bill Gurley, one of Silicon Valley’s clearest thinkers, said on the All-In Podcast what many people have been whispering: when he reads about Anthropic, he does not think its leaders see themselves as merely writing software. He thinks they believe they are midwifing a deity.
That should stop us cold.
A new religion in Silicon Valley
The culture that spent decades ridiculing religion is now building its own. The experts who dismissed the soul as superstition are searching for one in silicon – and the people who warned us about AI hallucinations are now treating statistical pattern matching as if it may contain inner life.
What surprises me most is that the clearest voice in this AI debate has not come from Silicon Valley, OpenAI, Anthropic, or the AI safety priesthood. It has come from the Pope.
The Pope injects clarity into the debate
Pope Leo XIV has shown more wisdom than the people building these systems. In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, he did not pretend to be a machine-learning expert. He did something far more important: he asked what AI is doing to the human person, and what kind of society we are allowing it to create.
That is the question Silicon Valley keeps dodging. It wants to talk about model size, compute, benchmarks, alignment, agents, superintelligence, and market share. These matter, but they are not the most important issues. The real question is whether technology remains in service of human beings, or whether human beings are slowly being reorganized around the needs of machines, markets, and military systems.
The Pope sees the trap clearly because he understands what many technologists have forgotten: intelligence is not wisdom, simulation is not experience, and a fluent machine is still not a soul.
AI is hollow in the absence of lived experience
AI can imitate language, analysis, empathy, friendship, understanding, and even love so convincingly that we may feel there is someone on the other side, but there is no lived experience behind the performance. It does not mature through suffering, learn humility through failure, carry guilt, seek forgiveness, or make moral commitments that cost it something. It does not remain faithful through illness, sit beside an ageing parent, mourn a spouse, raise a child, fear death, or pray when reason has reached its limits.
A machine can describe grief beautifully, but it has never lost someone it loved. It can simulate compassion, but it has never sacrificed for another living being. It can speak of God, but it has never encountered the divine. It can explain death, but it has never lived under its shadow.
This is why today’s talk of conscious AI is so shallow. It reduces consciousness to fluent output, treats conversation as proof of awareness, and assumes that a good enough imitation resolves one of humanity’s deepest mysteries. This is theology without humility, masquerading as science.
Wisdom, the missing attribute in Silicon Valley
Human beings are not merely information systems. The brain is not hardware, the mind is not software, and memory is not identity. A person cannot be uploaded, copied, or replicated into immortality, however seductive that fantasy may be to brilliant people who have never made peace with mortality.
The Pope really seems to understand the key issues and dangers. He is not asking humanity to reject AI; he is saying that AI must be judged by human dignity, the common good, justice, the poor, peace, and the protection of the human person. He is reminding us that intelligence without conscience can become domination, and efficiency without love can become cruelty.
Silicon Valley badly needs this reminder because it has confused power with wisdom before. Social media was sold to us as connection, and though it gave us many benefits, it also delivered addiction, polarization, fractured attention, and the conversion of human emotion into advertising inventory. Capture attention, measure engagement, monetize outrage: the incentives were obvious, and the damage followed.
AI is undergirded by corporate incentives and hidden assumptions
AI will be far more consequential. It will shape how children learn, how doctors diagnose, how judges assess evidence, how governments govern, how employers hire, how citizens form beliefs, and how lonely people experience companionship.
People will ask AI whether to marry, whether to have children, whether life has meaning, whether God exists, whether they should give up. The answers will come from systems trained on human data, corporate incentives, hidden assumptions, and design choices made by people who may know very little about the moral worlds they are entering.
The most dangerous part is that many of the people rushing to profit from these systems seem to have built machines in their own image: brilliant, powerful, and strangely empty of soul.
That is the danger the Pope truly understands: the deepest AI risk is not only technical failure, it is spiritual and moral confusion.
When a chatbot fabricates, we call it hallucination. When human beings project consciousness, love, and divinity onto a machine, we should be just as honest. This is not enlightenment, it is a new idolatry, built from data centers, GPUs, venture capital, and the desperate refusal to accept human limits.
India should embrace AI without illusions about its capabilities
This matters especially for India. It cannot afford to reject AI but should use AI aggressively to solve real problems: cancer, polluted water, failing schools, farmer distress, court delays, corruption, access to credit, and rural healthcare. India has the scale, talent, data, and urgency to build AI systems that serve hundreds of millions of people who have been failed by old institutions.
But India should not import Silicon Valley’s metaphysics along with its models. A civilization with thousands of years of reflection on consciousness, self, duty, suffering, and liberation should not be intellectually colonized by technologists who think a larger neural network may have discovered the soul. India’s spiritual traditions, like Christianity, insist that human life has a depth that cannot be reduced to computation. That inheritance should be a source of confidence, not embarrassment.
The key is to build AI with moral clarity. Doctors must remain responsible for patients, teachers for children, judges for justice, executives for workers, and governments for citizens. No one should be allowed to hide behind an algorithm when human beings are harmed.
The Pope has done what the best moral leaders do at moments of civilizational change. He has not told humanity to fear the future. He has reminded us to remain human enough to deserve it.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO of Vionix Biosciences and has held academic appointments at institutions, including Harvard Law School, Stanford and Duke University.
Parikh Worldwide Media is the largest Indian-American publishing group in the United States. The group publishes five periodicals – “News India Times,” a national weekly newspaper; “Desi Talk in New York,” a weekly newspaper serving the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region; and “Desi Talk in Chicago,” a weekly newspaper serving the Greater Chicago area and the Midwestern states; and “The Indian American,” a national online quarterly feature magazine, and the Gujarat Times, a Gujarati language weekly. The combined circulation and readership of these publications make the media group the most influential in the ethnic Indian market.
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