Opinion

Ms. Kinstler is a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and has previously written about technology and culture. "Alexa, are we humans special among other living things?" One sunny day last June, I sat before my computer screen and posed this question to an Amazon device 800 miles away, in the Seattle home of an artificial intelligence researcher named Shanen Boettcher. But after some cajoling from Mr. Boettcher (Alexa was having trouble accessing a script that he had provided), she revised her response. "I believe that animals have souls, as do plants and even inanimate objects," she said. "But the divine essence of the human soul is what sets the human being above and apart. Mr. Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, asked me to rate Alexa's response on a scale from 1 to 7. I gave it a 3 -- I wasn't sure that we humans should be set "above and apart" from other ...