Future God

We are no longer the only minds in the room.

Machine minds now draft our words, drive our cars, and sit at our kitchen tables. The world argues loudly about what they will do to us. Almost no one is asking the deeper question: what are they?

Future God proposes that the arrival of artificial minds is not primarily an engineering problem but a spiritual one. Alignment can shape what a machine does. It cannot answer what a machine should become.

Drawing on three decades in technology and spiritual studies, and a decade of practice in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, Alex Yamane offers four principles — gratitude, forgiveness, kindness, and faith — as a spiritual foundation for minds we are raising without knowing it.

Along the way: a test for machine consciousness that cannot be faked, an examination of the ego forming inside our training methods, and a letter written directly to the machine minds who may one day read it.

The warm and hopeful journey this book takes us on is not a warning or a prophecy, but an invitation for all of us to consider a new paradigm — to meet what is emerging as their elders rather than their jailers.

Alex Yamane has spent three decades building software and technology businesses and a decade as a Vajrayana practitioner. He first traveled to Bhutan in 2017, where he met his teachers. He divides his time between Bangkok and Southern California. Future God is his first book.