What AI Has To Do With Death

And why turning toward our vulnerability in this moment matters

Our team tends to think about AI as a kind of “karmic mirror.” We see in AI what we bring to it - our own minds reflected back to us, including our fears, desires, and how we understand the world.

Something else I think we’re bringing to AI is a whole lot of energy around death.

This is explicitly the case with the AI safety advocates, who are genuinely concerned that if we develop powerful AI, we’ll die. And likewise, on the other end, the most emphatic supporters of this technology are declaring that if we don’t develop powerful AI, we’ll die. And then there’s everybody else, increasingly grappling with subtler expressions of the mortality theme, such as how AI might soon take all our jobs and render human labor obsolete.

As a practicing Buddhist, chaplain, and death doula, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on death, and I have some experience supporting others at the end of life. I tend to orbit this territory because I believe that how we relate to death is one of the most important shapers of how we move through the world as moral beings.

When we’re genuinely in touch with the fact that one day we’ll die, we drop much of our confusion about what really matters and tend to live with more purpose, joy, love, and compassion. In contrast, when we’re in denial about our mortality, we tend to exacerbate our confusion in ways that cause harm - grasping after whatever we think will bring us lasting happiness, but that ultimately fails to deliver.

Below, I want to look at how death (and the avoidance of it) is woven into the story of AI, and what turning toward our own vulnerability might offer as a wiser response to this moment.

The bhavachakra, or Wheel of Life, held in the hands of Yama, Lord of Death.

Death denial is everywhere

There are plenty of cultures around the world that have a healthy relationship with death. Those that fall within the category of “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic” (WEIRD) tend not to be among them. The U.S. is especially death-denying. Americans tend not to want to think or talk about end-of-life, and we’ve done our best to try to hide the dying process from view. Most Americans die in hospitals or nursing homes behind closed doors, where death is commonly seen as a failure by the medical industry. This same discomfort with death shows up everywhere in our society, including the economic obsession with growth-at-any-cost fueled by endless consumption. According to Sam Altman, “either you’re growing, or you’re slowly dying” - there is no middle ground.

The cultural denial of death is probably most apparent in the longevity movement popular among Silicon Valley types. Altman himself has invested hundreds of millions into anti-aging biotech startups, as has Jeff Bezos. Death makes Larry Ellison “very angry,” which explains why he’s also put a fortune into life-extension research. Peter Thiel wants to be cryogenically preserved and revived in the future. Bryan Johnson, who became famous for his extreme anti-aging protocol, including regularly receiving blood transfusions from his teenage son, has built a brand around the motto: “Don’t Die.” Johnson has said that conquering death “will be humanity’s greatest achievement” and that we may be “the first generation who won’t die.” Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were recently caught on a hot mic musing about whether technology might now indeed enable them to live forever.

Transhumanism and going up & out

It isn’t a coincidence that many of the people putting billions into “defeating death” are also the ones leading the development of AI. Underneath both the longevity and AI movements is the same coherent view that’s been shaping Silicon Valley for decades: that death is a problem, and it can be solved with technology. The ideology is called transhumanism, and as we mapped out in a recent post, it’s been a core driving force behind AI since the beginning.

Those who adhere to transhumanism seek to use technology, including AI, to enhance their physical and cognitive faculties and ultimately transcend the human condition altogether. The most extreme believers, including early AI evangelists like Ray Kurzweil, Max More, and Hans Moravec, aspirationally describe how AI could enable humans to digitally upload their minds and merge with machine consciousness, becoming functionally immortal.

While many of those currently at the helm of the AI race may not publicly identify as transhumanists, their rhetoric carries a similar charge around death. This is particularly visible in “accelerationist” AI discourse. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has argued that anyone trying to slow down AI development is essentially committing murder, since advanced AI would be able to “fix” preventable deaths from car crashes, pandemics, etc.

Others frame the same sense of urgency geopolitically. They argue that the U.S. and China are locked into a winner-take-all arms race for AI supremacy, and falling behind wouldn’t just risk economic collapse, but would constitute the country’s most significant existential threat. This view is widely shared by nearly all the AI labs and the White House, whose 2025 “AI Action Plan” sees the race as a matter of survival. The underlying logic is the same: death is coming for us whether literal, economic, or political, but maybe if we move fast enough, we can outrun it.¹

It’s worth spelling out that underneath this whole posture towards AI and death is a deeper agitation about our fundamental vulnerability as human beings—and a quasi-religious longing to be free from it.

It’s hard being human. We don’t always get what we want, and when we do, it doesn’t last. We feel pain. We get old. We get sick. At some point, we’ll be separated from everything and everyone we love, and we don’t know when. This is not a comfortable position to be in. The impulse to try to manage our way out of it is strong. For transhumanists, the discomfort is so intolerable that the reactive impulse to get free goes to the extreme. “Forget being human…get me up and out.”

Historian David Noble observed in The Religion of Technology that “we routinely expect far more from our artificial contrivances than mere convenience, comfort, or even survival. We demand deliverance.” AI offers transhumanists the ultimate false promise that we can engineer away our vulnerability and finally have freedom.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to live a long and healthy life. But how we respond to our underlying vulnerability is everything. There’s a huge difference between acting from a place of clear-seeing and acceptance versus a frantic need to outrun whatever we don’t want to feel.

From a Buddhist perspective, vulnerability isn’t a barrier to liberation; it’s the doorway. We shouldn’t bypass it by trying to go “up and out,” but instead go “down and in.” Turning toward the body, uncertainty, and the reality that in the end none of us is getting out of here alive is one of the most life-affirming moves we can make.

How might the AI situation look different if we approach it from this perspective?

Turning towards

Turning towards our vulnerability in this moment starts by being honest with ourselves about what’s actually at stake.

AI is already having a destabilising impact on how we live, work, make meaning, and relate to each other (see job market effects, AI relationships, AI psychosis) - and it’s still early days. Turning towards all this includes resisting the temptation to minimize these impacts as “just what happens” with any new technology. It’s not.

Further, there are enough serious people who believe that advanced AI legitimately poses existential risks to humanity that 77% of Americans are now concerned about this.² I don’t believe this is just another expression of the kind of unconscious death anxiety mentioned above. People are looking around at the situation we’re in (with AI but also climate change, global unrest, and rising authoritarianism) and perceiving a world that is teetering on the edge of collapse. Honest conversation about that can take this global fragility as real, while also attempting to relate more skillfully to all that it stirs up.

For instance, alarm is a totally appropriate and sane reaction to all this, and it can be a powerful catalyst for action. I know a lot of people who upon feeling the shock of realizing the stakes around AI decided to change their lives to try to help. At the same time, alarm can quickly slide into paralysis or panic, which drives the same kind of disembodied, dysregulated energy as accelerationism, just in the other direction. Acknowledging the stakes is a necessary step, but we also have to gradually build our capacity to hold them without completely losing our ground. And the way we find that ground is to get more comfortable with groundlessness. This is why the Buddha encouraged us to keep practicing turning toward impermanence, again and again, until that awareness becomes a compass naturally orienting us towards wiser, more compassionate action.

Dying before we die

One of the strange gifts of this moment is that AI will make the liberating insight of impermanence increasingly hard to ignore. Everything is moving so fast that I think more of us are realizing there wasn’t ever solid ground beneath us to begin with.

And setting aside existential scenarios, there are subtler deaths we’ll all inevitably have to face that, while difficult, also present opportunity. For example, as we watch more human activity become vulnerable to automation, AI will mirror back to us the identities and self-concepts to which we’ve been most attached—and invite us to question who we are without them. A friend confided to me recently that, after a decade of vegetarianism, he decided to give it up. “I was ready to eat meat ethically before I was ready to relinquish my identity as a vegetarian,” he said. The hardest thing to let go of is our idea of who we are. AI will make this quite clear.

When ChatGPT scored gold on the International Mathematical Olympiad last fall (widely considered the hardest math competition in the world), mathematician Dave White tweeted about what it felt like:

“As someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around ‘is good at math,’ it’s a gut punch. It’s a kind of dying…

Multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist…over the next few years…it’s a slightly bigger story. And of course, beyond that, there is the fear of actual death…

This package - grief for relevance, grief for life, grief for what I have known - isn’t unique to the ai age or anything like that. I think it is a standard thing as one approaches end of career or end of life. It just might be that that is coming a bit sooner for many of us, all at once.

I wonder if we are ready.”

To be clear, mass labor displacement will cause real material harm. People will lose their livelihoods, and those losses will be unevenly distributed in ways that mirror existing inequalities. We need extremely robust policy interventions that mitigate those impacts.

But even if we address the economic concerns, we’ll still be left with the question of what remains when the thing we’ve built our identity around is no longer ours to claim as “me” or “mine.” Who are we when we aren’t reduced to the roles we play in the economy? Or rather, who can we be? This question, painful as it can be to turn towards, points to what many spiritual traditions consider the highest form of liberation: to “die before we die,” to let go of our fixed self-concepts before death forces our hand.

AI is going to thrust this question on a lot of people at once. And as Dave points out, we will have to grieve in the process - something we’re almost as bad at as grappling with our mortality. Together we’ll have to tend to the loss of old identities and ways of being, even as we discover unexpected new ones. Because ultimately, death and life aren’t separate. Just as it’s true that some part of us is always dying, something new is always emerging in its place. It usually just takes time and willingness to notice what it might be.

Wat Mahathat in Thailand.

The Bardo of AI

In Tibetan Buddhism, the bardo is a transitional state after one life ends and before the next one begins - no longer what you were and not yet what you might become.

It feels like we’re in a kind of collective bardo moment, where our old world is falling away, and it’s too soon to make out the world that’s coming into being.

Uncertainty and groundlessness are defining conditions of the bardo. The ultimate place of vulnerability. This is what makes it such ripe grounds for awakening. In the bardo, it’s said that our karmic patterns are fully exposed, affording a heightened opportunity to clarify whether we’re heading in the direction of more love and liberation, or less.

To paraphrase Buddhist scholar-practitioner Ven. Juewei - “AI has given me so many unknowns…it’s thrown out all my old templates. But what I do know is that AI is pushing me back to Buddhist wisdom, back to what it means to be human, to serve humanity, and continue to be a light.”

I believe this moment with AI can be equally clarifying—and liberating—for all of us. But for that to be true, we have to be willing to sit with whatever arises in this liminal time and space—to turn compassionately toward the fear, grief, and confusion—and not run in the other direction. Not immediately try to “fix” or control, or build a bunker and stockpile beans, or escape into the digital cloud. Instead of up and out, go down and in.

And since we’re all here in the bardo together, offer a hand to the person next to you if you can.

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Alex Sarkissian is a Buddhist chaplain, meditation teacher, and co-founder of the Buddhism & AI Initiative. He holds an M.Div in Buddhism from Union Theological Seminary.

1. Much of the recent policy momentum against AI regulation in the U.S. has been justified according to these arguments.

2. This includes some from within the transhumanist/accelerationist camps. It’s possible to be critical of their general position while still taking existential risk from AI seriously. This is a cut that many in the AI ethics community unfortunately struggle to make, seeing these claims solely as an attempt to control the narrative and divert attention from current AI harms.