What do they mean by spiritual?
Kevin Kelly, who was on this panel says.
What is the most spiritual event we could imagine? A verifiable contact with an ET would rock the foundations of established religions. It would rekindle the question of God no matter what ET’s answers. I think the movie Contact is the only movie where a theologian is a star. But we don’t have to wait for SETI to contact ET. We will do it by making ET; that is by making a robot. In this way ET goes by another name: AI. People worried about AI being an artificial human are way off. AIs will be closer to artificial aliens. Your calculator is already smarter in arithmetic than any person in this room. Why aren’t we threaten by it? Because it is “other.” A different kind of intelligence. One superior to us, but one we aren’t particularly envious of. Most of the minds we make including the smartest AI, will be “other.” Even in the possibility space of types of conscious minds, there are 2 million other possible species of intelligence than the one type we know (humans) — each one of them unique and different as a calculator and a dolphin. There is no reason to make a clone of human intelligence because making traditional version is so easy. Our endeavor in the coming centuries is to use all minds so far (artificial and natural) to make all possible new minds. Meeting these minds I think will be the most spiritual thing we can imagine right now.
Thank you for that pull quote from Kevin Kelly. Minds given to hyperbole are susceptible to self-deception and ultimately incapable of true critical thinking. Mr. Kelly: My calculare is not an "intelligence". Poor bot needs me to push its buttons before it 'reacts'. It is not 'other'. It is 'thing', 'construct', "mecha". We made it and certainly not in our own image given that contemplation of our own image brings our minds to its knees ..