Artificial intelligence (AI) poses obvious material threats to humankind, including the threat of environmental collapse and that of mass unemployment. However, alongside these material threats there exists a hidden existential threat too: in its promise to manufacture a self-conscious computer, artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the foundation of modern conceptions of selfhood. Our capacity for self-consciousness continues to be the locus around which theories of selfhood revolve, and in potentially reducing self-consciousness to a technological phenomenon, artificial intelligence similarly threatens to reduce selfhood to a manufactured quality. The struggle for selfhood has therefore taken on a new urgency. In responding to this threat, this article demonstrates that foremost in our mind should be Søren Kierkegaard, whose religious and existential work provides a compelling way to theorize the self. And by interpreting Kierkegaard’s work through the lens of several prescient works of science-fiction, it becomes possible to see the way that Kierkegaard’s account of the self is not only compelling in its own right, but also how it is uniquely suited to addressing the challenge to selfhood posed by artificial intelligence.
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