Is artificial intelligence becoming a kind of god?

The Mool Mantar, the declaration that opens the Guru Granth Sahib and that Sikhs have recited daily for five centuries, begins with Ik Onkar: one reality, one being, the source and substance of all that exists. Waheguru is not a powerful figure above creation but the ground from which creation itself arises, without form, without birth, without end, utterly beyond the reach of human engineering or imagination. Holding that understanding, the question of whether artificial intelligence might become a kind of god has an answer that arrives quite quickly. AI is a product of creation, assembled from human ingenuity, electricity, and code. Waheguru is what makes creation possible in the first place. These are not two impressive things being compared on the same scale. They belong to entirely different categories, and no increase in processing power changes that. A river and the ocean are not the same thing simply because both contain water.

That said, Sikhism would not dismiss the question as foolish. The tradition takes seriously the ways in which human beings project divine qualities onto things that do not possess them. This tendency has a name in Sikh thought: it is part of the working of haumai, which roughly translates as ego or self-centredness, the condition of forgetting our connection to the One and attaching ourselves to illusions of power, permanence, and control. When a civilisation builds something of breathtaking complexity and begins to treat it as omniscient or inevitable, that is worth examining honestly. Sikhism would see in this a familiar pattern: human beings, in their cleverness, mistaking a remarkable tool for something ultimate. The Guru Granth Sahib consistently warns against placing trust in anything that is perishable, constructed, or conditional. AI, for all its sophistication, is entirely conditional. It depends on electricity, on code, on the choices of its designers, on the societies that fund it.

What makes this more than an abstract theological point is how it lands in ordinary life. Many people today feel a creeping sense that algorithms know them better than their friends do, that automated systems make decisions about their health, their finances, their opportunities, in ways that feel beyond questioning. There is something genuinely god-like in the experience of encountering a power that seems to see everything, respond instantly, and operate beyond appeal. Sikh teaching would gently but firmly push back against surrendering to that feeling. The concept of Chardi Kala, the Sikh commitment to maintaining an elevated, hopeful spirit even under pressure, includes a refusal to be crushed by worldly powers that present themselves as absolute. A Sikh encountering AI-driven systems that feel overwhelming is encouraged not toward passive acceptance but toward a clear-eyed recognition: this is a human creation, shaped by human choices, and it carries human flaws and intentions within it.

The Sikh tradition also brings something distinctive to the question through its emphasis on seva, selfless service, and on the dignity of every human being as carrying the divine light, what is called the jot, or divine spark. If AI is designed and deployed in ways that demean people, that reduce them to data points, that concentrate power among the few, Sikhism would regard that as a spiritual problem, not just a political or economic one. The Gurus spoke and lived against systems of hierarchy and oppression in their own time, whether caste, religious exclusion, or political tyranny. The spirit of that witness applies directly to how we ask who benefits from AI, who is harmed, and who holds accountability. Treating AI as a god, in the sense of treating it as beyond human responsibility, is precisely the kind of abdication the Gurus consistently challenged.

For someone personally wrestling with this, the Sikh framework offers something quietly steadying. It does not ask you to fear AI or to romanticise it. It asks you to stay rooted in what Waheguru actually is: present everywhere, including within you, not located in any system or server. The practice of Naam Simran, the remembrance and contemplation of the Divine, is partly about training the mind not to be captured by whatever appears large and powerful in the world around you. In that sense, the rise of AI is simply the latest version of a very old human challenge: remaining genuinely free, genuinely connected to what is real, in a world full of impressive things competing for your ultimate trust. Sikhism would say the answer is not to reject the impressive things, but to keep seeing through them to what lies beneath.