Why Am I Calling This Blog 'Dharma of AI'
Find here essays on AI’s true nature, the world it’s quietly building, and our place within that new order. A journey beyond hype and fear into what AI really is.
Welcome to ‘Dharma of AI’, By Jaspreet Bindra—The Tech Whisperer.
Dharma is one of those words that refuses to sit quietly in a dictionary. It can mean duty, law, righteousness—but underneath all that, it points to something deeper: the essence of a thing, and the order it belongs to. The dharma of fire is to burn, of water to flow. Their dharma is not a moral rulebook; it is their nature, the pattern they express in the world.
It has been translated as duty, righteousness, law, religion, teaching—but all of these are only partial reflections. From the root dhṛ, “to hold or sustain,” dharma is that which keeps things from falling apart: the pattern, the essence, the order within which life, society, and even thought can make sense.
In the Bhagavad Gita, Dharma is not just a philosophical abstraction, but a here-and-now problem and dilemma. Arjuna stands on the battlefield paralysed between conflicting obligations. Krishna does not give him a generic moral checklist or a black-and-white answer. Instead, he points him to his svadharma, or his own particular duty and essence as a warrior, a leader, and a part of a larger cosmic order. “Better one’s own dharma, even if imperfect, than another’s perfectly performed.” Dharma here is both what you are and what you must do, given who you are and where you stand.
In Buddhism, Dharma takes on another nuance. Not only is it the Buddha’s teaching but also the law of reality itself - the way things truly are beneath our stories and illusions. To ‘see the Dharma’ is to see clearly: impermanence, interdependence, the patterns out of which our experience is built. In some Buddhist schools, dharmas are literally the smallest units of reality, the building blocks of mind and matter.
From Ancient Wisdom to Artificial Intelligence
Across these traditions, dharma fuses three ideas: essence, order and responsibility. It is the nature of a thing and the web of relations and dependencies it lives in.
We are now unleashing Artificial Intelligence into every facet of human life. AI is not just a clever piece of software running in a data centre. It is starting to shape how societies work, how geopolitics plays out, how economies allocate power and wealth, how culture is produced, how language and knowledge are created and consumed. It is beyond a tool, more like a system or even an organism.
So the question that interests me is: what is the dharma of AI?
At a narrow technical level, AI’s dharma seems simple: recognise patterns, predict the next token, or optimise a workflow. But as AI is plugged into education, warfare, finance, governance, social media and everyday life, something much larger emerges. We get an AI-shaped order: new ways of deciding who gets a loan, what news we see, how we work, how we wage war, how we imagine success, even how and with whom we fall in love.
Like Arjuna, we now stand in the middle of a field shaped by forces we helped create but do not fully understand. We cannot walk away from AI, it is here now, whether we like it or not; but, nor can we blindly surrender to it. Our challenge is to understand its dharma and our own: what is the essence of this technology, what kind of world does it tend to produce, and what are our particular responsibilities— as CEOs, policymakers, engineers, workers, home makers students, citizens? As homo sapiens sapiens.
There is also a geopolitical dharma at play. For the first time, the balance of power between nations is being reorganised not just by land, labour or oil, but by access to data, algorithms and compute. A handful of countries and companies control the largest models and the biggest data centres. The rest provide data, markets, talent, regulation—and often bear the downstream effects. The Global North writes most of the code and the narratives, but it is the Global South that lives much of the reality.
India’s Moment: Beyond Silicon Valley
Can India and other emerging economies articulate a distinct Dharma of AI, one that reflects our pluralism, our development challenges, our sensitivities about work, education and dignity, rather than merely importing Silicon Valley’s dreams and Brussels’ anxieties? Dharma in this sense is not only an ethical question, but is a strategic one: how do we align this general-purpose technology with the actual lives and aspirations of billions of people across the whole globe, especially the forgotten portions of it?
Buddhism’s sense of Dharma, as the law of reality and the path to seeing it clearly, matters here too. AI is surrounded by hype and fear: Godlike saviour on some days, apocalyptic threat on others. To work with it wisely, we need something like Dharma vision: the ability to see what these systems really are, how they are trained, where the power sits, what incentives drive them, what they can and cannot do. Without that clarity, we either worship or panic. Hopefully, by knowing the essence we will decide and choose more wisely.
AI’s Mirror: Seeing Ourselves Clearly
There is also another subtler “dharma” at play: what AI reveals about us as humans. When a model predicts our clicks better than we understand our own habits, when it fakes a video more convincingly than our memory can resist, when it drafts better emails than we care to write, it holds up an uncomfortable mirror. What is the essence of human judgment, creativity, responsibility, once machines can approximate them?
The Dharma of AI is my attempt to explore all of this: not just AI’s ethics, but its essence and influence on work and business, on society and geopolitics, on culture, story and meaning. I will write about how AI is changing offices and factories, elections and media, classrooms and households. I will bring in mythology and history, boardrooms and bazaars, India and the wider world. Sometimes I will be optimistic, sometimes sceptical, but always trying to demystify rather than shroud AI further in mystery.
This is not a doctrinal blog that claims to know the one correct path. It is, in the Buddhist sense, a Dharma path of inquiry: a continuing effort to see more clearly what AI is, what world it is quietly building around us, and what roles we might each play within that new order.
If dharma is that which holds things together and reveals what they truly are, then this blog is my ongoing inquiry into what AI really is becoming among us – and what kind of world it is quietly building.