Aligning Technology with Dharma through a Vedāntic Lens
Artificial intelligence has become the connective layer running through most modern technologies, from social feeds and synthetic media to the compute infrastructure beneath them. In that position it works as an accelerant. It strips away the friction that once limited what a technology could do, and it magnifies both the good and the harm a technology can carry. A recommender that personalizes learning also fuels craving. Generative models that widen access to creative work also erode the shared evidentiary ground that public trust rests on. The same compute that advances climate modeling draws heavily on energy and freshwater.
Regulation handles the worst of these harms. It says far less about where technology ought to go. This poster develops a complementary account drawn from Vedāntic thought, organized around four principles. Viveka is the discernment of the eternal from the transient. Satya and māyā concern truth and the power of appearance. Vairāgya counsels dispassion as consumption escalates. Vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam, the last, holds that the whole earth forms a single family.
A. Evidence
McCrosky, Jesse, and Brandi Geurkink. YouTube Regrets: A Crowdsourced Investigation into YouTube's Recommendation Algorithm. Mozilla Foundation, July 2021. — 71% recommender-driven regret. https://assets.mofoprod.net/network/documents/Mozilla_YouTube_Regrets_Report.pdf
McCrosky, Jesse, and Becca Ricks. Does This Button Work? Investigating YouTube's Ineffective User Controls. Mozilla Foundation, Sept. 2022. — User controls stop under half of unwanted videos. https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/research/library/user-controls/report/meager-and-inadequate-a-quantitative-analysis-of-youtubes-user-controls/
International Energy Agency. Key Questions on Energy and AI. IEA, Paris, Apr. 2026. — 485 → 950 TWh data-centre electricity. https://www.iea.org/reports/key-questions-on-energy-and-ai/executive-summary
Li, Pengfei, Jianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and Shaolei Ren. "Making AI Less 'Thirsty': Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models." Communications of the ACM, vol. 68, no. 7, July 2025, pp. 54–61. — ≈ 5.4M litres water, GPT-3 training. https://doi.org/10.1145/3724499 · https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271
Global Partnership for Action on Gender-Based Online Harassment and Abuse. Joint Statement on the Prevention of and Response to Non-Consensual Intimate Image Abuse. Dec. 2025. — 98% sexually explicit; 99% target women. https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/presse-et-ressources/decouvrir-et-informer/actualites/declaration-conjointe-sur-la-prevention-et-la-reponse-aux-abus-par-des-images-intimessexuelles-non
Ajder, Henry, Giorgio Patrini, Francesco Cavalli, and Laurence Cullen. The State of Deepfakes: Landscape, Threats, and Impact. Deeptrace, Sept. 2019. — Original 96% figure, 2019 baseline. https://regmedia.co.uk/2019/10/08/deepfake_report.pdf
B. Philosophical Texts
Śaṅkarācārya (attrib.). Vivekacūḍāmaṇi [The Crest-Jewel of Discrimination], verses 19–21. Translated by Swāmī Mādhavānanda, Advaita Ashrama, 1921. — viveka, vairāgya.https://shlokam.org/text/vivekachudamani.htm · http://www.celextel.org/adisankara/vivekachudamani.html
Patañjali. Yoga Sūtra, Sādhana Pāda 2.30 (with the Vyāsa Bhāṣya). Translated by Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, North Point Press, 2009. — satya. https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/yoga-sutras-study/d/doc628740.html
Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 4.10. In The Thirteen Principal Upanishads, translated by Robert Ernest Hume, Oxford University Press, 1921. — māyā. https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-svetasvatara-upanishad · https://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe15/sbe15035.htm
Mahā Upaniṣad 6.71 (vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam). Sāmānya Vedānta Upaniṣads, translated by A. G. Krishna Warrier, Adyar Library. — vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasudhaiva_Kutumbakam
Note on attribution: the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi is traditionally ascribed to Ādi Śaṅkara; modern scholarship treats the ascription as uncertain, so it is cited as "Śaṅkara (attrib.)." The set is Advaita-anchored and Advaita-consonant; satya in its yama sense is Pātañjala, and vasudhaiva kuṭumbakam is an Upaniṣadic ethical maxim rather than a technical Advaita term.