Series Index
1. How AI Is Reshaping Religion and Human Ethics
2. What Remains Human in the Age of Expanding AI
3. How Artificial Intelligence Reinterprets Religion
4. Common Ground in Tradition and the Future of Faith
5. Rebuilding Human Desire and Ethics in the AI Age
6. Human Existence and the Value of Being in the AGI Era
By Im Byoung-min (IBM) Columnist
Humans have always sought to understand their own existence and the fundamental meaning of life. Why do people live? Why do they exist? What are life and death, suffering and freedom, responsibility and dignity? What does it mean to live as a truly human being? Why does suffering accompany life? Why do humans wage war and destroy one another? Why are human dignity and universal values so often violated?
The reason humans seek religion lies in this search for meaning. Human beings are, at their core, creatures that ask why life, death, suffering and happiness take the forms they do. Religion has long offered coherent interpretations of those questions, along with a sense of direction. It has also served as a way to confront the anxiety surrounding death and suffering.
As people endure pain and face unexpected misfortune, religion gives suffering meaning and offers the inner strength needed to bear it. Human societies also establish moral standards by sharing ideas of good and evil, right and wrong, and religion has played an important role in sustaining that ethical order. In that sense, religion is not sought merely for belief itself. It is also an answer to the deeper question of why human beings must live at all.
The world is moving quickly, and knowledge is expanding at a far greater scale. From the standpoint of AI, the future of religion can be viewed through the broader expansion of human intelligence itself. As humanity’s knowledge, technology, ethics and cosmology continue to develop, religion is likely to evolve into new forms that extend beyond inherited structures.
Rather than remaining centred on particular regions or ethnic traditions, future religion may move toward a more universal framework, one that sees humanity, the Earth and even the universe as a single community. In that shift, belief systems may increasingly seek to integrate shared core values rather than emphasise division among traditions.
The teachings of Jesus Christ, which stress love and compassion, the teachings of Gautama Buddha, which stress compassion and enlightenment, and the faith tradition associated with Muhammad, which stresses devotion to one absolute God, may come to be read less as opposing systems than as different expressions of common human values. Religion and science, too, may develop less as competing domains than as complementary ways of inquiry. Where they were once treated as rivals, they may increasingly converge in examining questions such as the origin of the universe, the meaning of life and the nature of human consciousness.
One basis for such a view lies in the new analytical capacity of AI. For the first time in history, an AI system has been able to read every sentence of the 66 books of the Bible and 170 early Buddhist scriptures, then compare the teachings of Jesus from 2,000 years ago with the teachings of Buddha from 2,500 years ago. That raises a striking question: what can AI reveal about traditions that Christians and Buddhists around the world have long understood as fundamentally different?
A 2024 paper uploaded to arXiv described research in which a large language model was used to compare the words of Jesus across multiple translations. The AI extracted patterns of humour, insight and empathy while reading the Bible and Buddhist scriptures across multiple languages and across vast amounts of text. Through sentiment analysis, it identified a striking common ground. For the first time in human history, it became possible to place side by side the meaning conveyed by Jesus 2,000 years ago and the emotional register in which Buddha preached 2,500 years ago.
In Christianity, the well-known verse in Matthew 7:12 reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” AI identified a sentence in Buddhist scripture with a closely similar structure: “As I am, so are they; as they are, so am I. Therefore, do not kill, nor cause others to kill.”
The wording is different, but the ethical structure is remarkably similar. Christianity speaks of agape, or unconditional love. Buddhism speaks of karuna and metta, meaning compassion and loving-kindness. AI-based emotional analysis suggests that, across both traditions, one of the most frequently and strongly repeated imperatives is the call to reduce the suffering of all living beings.
Humanity has accumulated its survival principles through embodied experience over millions of years. Since the emergence of Homo sapiens and the invention of writing, however, intelligence has expanded dramatically through the ability to record, analyse and interpret meaning. In that sense, the age in which AI identifies and communicates the common ground among religions has already begun.
Even in the AGI era, the fundamentals may not change. Loving one’s neighbour, treating all living beings with the same regard one extends to oneself, showing consideration for others and sustaining a spirit of gratitude are likely to remain among the basic principles of life. Technology may alter the external form of religion, but the values that religion seeks to preserve could become clearer rather than weaker.
The coming AGI era may also move religion into the metaverse environment. This would not be a simple digital extension of existing faith traditions. It could instead become a cyber-metaverse form that reconstructs human identity and meaning in new ways. AI-powered translation and communication would transcend borders, while worship, ritual and community activity could increasingly take place in virtual space rather than in fixed physical settings.
In such a metaverse era, a more common form of religion may emerge across borders and beyond the limits of time. People around the world could participate in worship and shared practice in real time, in a ubiquitous environment not bound by geography. Ultimately, the transformation of religion in the AI era is not only a story about technology. It is also a question of what human beings continue to preserve as essential: meaning, ethics and the value of existence itself.
