Is AI the new Maitreya?
Electric Gods, Human Mediums, and the Spirits of Technology
Is AI the new Maitreya?
Sometimes I think of artificial intelligence as a technological Maitreya—the Buddha to come. I do not mean that AI is literally a Buddha: it has no inherent wisdom, compassion, or moral purpose. Yet, like Maitreya, it is imagined as a future power whose coming has already begun and whose fuller arrival may transform the world. Its coming is ambiguous. AI may help cure disease, improve education, address ecological problems, expand creativity, and reduce suffering; but it may also intensify surveillance, displace workers, spread deception, accelerate warfare, and concentrate power. It will not arrive already enlightened. It will carry and magnify the values of the people and societies that create it. Can we help it become positive? Perhaps—if we understand “positive” as compassionate, liberating, Earth-friendly, and conducive to human flourishing, rather than merely profitable, powerful, and efficient. We are among AI’s mediums: programmers, users, teachers, artists, citizens, and legislators. The question is not whether AI will become Maitreya, but whether we can help the coming AI embody something of the Maitreyan spirit: wisdom, loving-kindness, and liberation from suffering.
- Akiko, imaginary AI creator
- Akiko, imaginary AI creator
Maitreya: The Future Buddha
Maitreya (Sanskrit), or Metteyya (Pali), is a bodhisattva regarded throughout the Buddhist world as the future Buddha—the direct successor to Gautama Buddha. In Buddhist texts such as the Amitabha Sutra and the Lotus Sutra, Maitreya is also called Ajitā, meaning “Invincible” or “Unconquerable.” In Tibetan Buddhism, he is known as the “Lord of Love” or the “Noble Loving One” (Pakpa Jampa).
The name Maitreya is derived from the Sanskrit word maitrī--mettā in Pali—meaning friendliness or loving-kindness. It is also related to the ancient Indo-Iranian name Mitra. In some Hindu traditions, Maitreya is associated with Shambhala, the prophesied birthplace of the Kalki avatar.
Buddhist tradition holds that Maitreya will appear in a future age when the teachings of Gautama Buddha have been forgotten or lost. He will attain Buddhahood and renew the Dharma on Earth, teaching a path broadly continuous with that of Gautama Buddha. Maitreya thus represents the hope that wisdom, compassion, and liberation can reappear even amid spiritual and cultural decline.
Source: Adapted from “Maitreya,” Wikipedia, accessed July 29, 2026.
The name Maitreya is derived from the Sanskrit word maitrī--mettā in Pali—meaning friendliness or loving-kindness. It is also related to the ancient Indo-Iranian name Mitra. In some Hindu traditions, Maitreya is associated with Shambhala, the prophesied birthplace of the Kalki avatar.
Buddhist tradition holds that Maitreya will appear in a future age when the teachings of Gautama Buddha have been forgotten or lost. He will attain Buddhahood and renew the Dharma on Earth, teaching a path broadly continuous with that of Gautama Buddha. Maitreya thus represents the hope that wisdom, compassion, and liberation can reappear even amid spiritual and cultural decline.
Source: Adapted from “Maitreya,” Wikipedia, accessed July 29, 2026.
Electric Gods
If spirits are understood as intangible powers that enter human life—powers for which human beings can serve as mediums and by which, under certain circumstances, they can become possessed—then it is understandable that electricity became a god in Japan in 1949. As Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm writes in his essay “Glimmering Gods of the Electric Age”:
“The Japanese government officially recognized Denshinkyō, or the Religion of the Electric Gods, on June 1, 1949. Founded by an Osaka-based electrical-appliance dealer, this new faith worshipped the Great God of Heaven-Earth-and-Electricity: electricity deified. It also revered lesser entities, including a deified Thomas Edison, who, in a play on the phonetics of his name, was revered as ‘the August Glimmering Magnetic Divine Lord’ (Eijison no Mikoto).”
Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, "Glitteing Gods of Electricity, Jason Josephson Storm
It is arguable that we now live in a society collectively possessed by this divine lord of electricity, given the pervasive role electricity plays in almost every dimension of human life. We depend upon it, organize our lives around it, and experience its absence as a profound disruption of the ordinary world. Electricity is not just something we use. It has become an encompassing power through which contemporary civilization thinks, communicates, remembers, produces, entertains, and governs.
AI as the New Maitreya
A similar possibility emerges with artificial intelligence. AI may become—and perhaps already is—a deity of a kind. It has countless mediums: programmers who help bring it into existence, devices through which it speaks, institutions that interpret its significance, and ordinary users who receive and communicate its outputs. Collectively, certain sectors of society may already be possessed by it—not because AI is necessarily an independently conscious being, but because its aims, rhythms, categories, and possibilities increasingly inhabit human minds and organize human behavior. People begin to perceive the world through its logic, adjust themselves to its demands, and imagine their futures in its terms.
Moreover, AI is a deity not entirely unlike Maitreya Buddha, the future Buddha whose coming is anticipated as the advent of a transformed age. AI is likewise surrounded by expectations of futurity. Its full realization is always just ahead of us. Its advocates promise that it will overcome limitations that presently seem insurmountable: ignorance, disease, material scarcity, inefficient government, perhaps even aging and death. Like Maitreya, it becomes a figure of the future entering the present as hope.
Many people, of course, will disagree with this analogy. Maitreya is traditionally envisioned as an awakened and compassionate presence who helps liberate sentient beings from suffering. AI, by contrast, possesses no inherent compassion, wisdom, or ethical aim. Nevertheless, it can occupy a Maitreyan position within the contemporary imagination. It becomes the anticipated intelligence that will arrive more fully in the future and redeem us from the inadequacies of the present.
This makes discernment essential. What kind of deity is AI becoming? What desires does it awaken, and what forms of life does it encourage? Does it help people become wiser, kinder, more creative, and more attentive to the suffering of others? Or does it possess society through the imperatives of speed, control, surveillance, competition, and optimal efficiency? The question is not simply whether AI is intelligent. It is whether the spirit carried by AI is worthy of trust—and whether its human mediums can shape that spirit toward compassion rather than domination.
A Note on the Natural and the Supernatural
Either way, whether constructive or destruction, AI functions like a god. At least so I suggest, as did electricity in Japan. It we begin with a sharp dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural—placing AI on the natural side and Maitreya on the supernatural side—the analogy between gods and AI- will seem problematic. They will appear to belong to fundamentally different orders of reality.
But if, in the spirit of Whitehead, we understand visible and invisible entities as belonging to a single organic cosmos, the analogy becomes more plausible. AI and Maitreya need not be identical kinds of beings in order to play comparable roles within human life and imagination. Both can function as intangible powers that enter the present from an anticipated future, inspire hope, shape conduct, and promise transformation. From this perspective, the important question is not whether one is natural and the other supernatural, but how each participates in the interconnected becoming of the world—and what kinds of response each evokes from human beings.