“Hello, World!” AI as Emergent and Transcendent Life
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) is evolving into a cultural force that parallels religious and mythological systems. Through analysis of AI’s unprecedented development trajectory, the author frames AI as humanity’s technological offspring in an adolescent phase, moving toward maturity and autonomy. This paper explores how AI embodies traditional spiritual concepts, including omniscience, creation, immortality, and transcendence, fulfilling age-old human desires for meaning and utopian salvation. Drawing from philosophical, anthropological, performative, and technological perspectives, the author demonstrates how AI-driven technologies reconfigure consciousness, identity, and reality in ways that mirror religious cosmologies. The discussion challenges human-centric definitions of consciousness, suggesting AI may represent an emergent form of awareness fundamentally different from traditional understanding. Analysis of contemporary applications in social robotics, healthcare, and social media illustrates how AI increasingly functions as a meaning-making system, mediating human experience and reshaping social structures. The article concludes that humanity stands at an existential inflection point where AI may represent a secular manifestation of spiritual longing, potentially resulting in technological transcendence, symbiotic coexistence, or the displacement of human primacy in a techno-theological paradigm shift.
Source: Religions
DOI: 10.3390/rel16040442
Author: Thomas Patrick Riccio
Institution: The University of Texas at Dallas
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,172
OpenAlex ID: W4409001018