Human beings are priests; our value is worship

LLMs are causing all sorts of angst and discussion these days, most noteably in the recent encyclical Magnifica Humanitas which I have yet to read. There is a duality of doom on one side and evangelical fervor on the other. For now, these thoughts from from author L. M. Sacasas in his Substack "The Convivial Society" point me forward in a laudable way:

We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly.

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generated passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

This is a good turn, but it is not turn enough. Human beings were not made for what we do. Certainly what we do is marvelous. But we were made to be priests. Priests receive their value from the calling they receive from their god and from the personal and corporate worship they do and produce for their god. This river of value flows from the Source of value and go back again to that Source.

The ability of the greatest LLM or robot may meet or surpass that of human beings, but we do not receive value from those abilities. The joy of the Lord is our strength. I rejoiced when I heard them say, 'Let us go to the house of the Lord.' Let's get our anthropology set and calm down about these new tools we've invented.

An adjacent though unrelated idea. "AI is not a unitary actor." wrote Joanna Bryson. "It is not unitary, and it does not act. . . It is a set of software engineering techniques and digital services. Thus it is meaningless to discuss what AI will do, or to look for singular solutions about how to govern it."