The spiritual existential threats posed by AI

Technology and language are good places to start when thinking about what makes humans unique, and between them, language triumphs. Language is a prerequisite for technology, science, politics and so much more that we would not be where we are if it were not for our mastery of it. But language makes us unique for more than instrumental reasons which we often overlook in our digital-tech-societies. Language shapes and builds as much as it describes, and it goes into making us ‘us’ right alongside our genetics. Walt Whitman captures aspects of this, writing ‘Nothing is more spiritual than words’, their ‘fluid, beautiful, fleshless realities’ are essential for our individual and collective identities (Whitman 1904). Iris Murdoch agrees, echoing ‘Words are spirit’ and ‘We became spiritual animals when we became verbal animals […] Words constitute the ultimate texture and stuff of our moral being.’ (Murdoch 1999, 241). In short, there is something which it is like to be human, we often call it the ‘human spirit’, and language is fundamental to it. This raises a troubling question: if language makes us spiritual animals, then could it make AI-powered Large Language Models (LLMs) spiritual machines?