Vedic Foresight and the Ethics of Future Machines
The Ancient Anticipation of AI and Robotics 1. Introduction — The Forgotten Foresight of the Ancient Indic Wisdom. Humanity, standing on the edge of the robotic and AI revolution, imagines itself at the summit of innovation — as though it were the first species to contemplate the mystery of self-creating intelligence. Yet deep within the archives of the world’s oldest texts — the Vedas , the Upanishads , and the philosophies that followed — lie archetypes that seem to anticipate the very dilemmas we now face: the nature of sentient embodiment, autonomous power, synthetic life, collective cognition, and ethical order. To read these hymns not as mythology but as encoded cosmology is to realize that the ancients had already explored the central tension that modern robotics is just beginning to articulate — How does consciousness infuse matter? And once it does, how should that consciousness act? 2. T...