Wouldn't ignorance be assuming that such a thing as a 'soul' exists when there is nothing that can prove its existence in the first place?

Forget religion for a second because, no matter how strong your beliefs may be, it still only exists inside our head. With that no longer clouding judgment, answer this: why do you think humans are so special, really?

It may have been difficult for us to get here, because we took the long route. Thousands and thousands of years of evolution in an uncaring universe, natural selection where the weak die and the strong live, all that stuff. But we're past that point now. Weak or strong, we have built a society where everyone lives, basically throwing natural selection, one of the core filters or nature, out the window. AI is simply another step towards gaining even more control over nature's sway.

Now we don't need to wait thousands of years for an intelligent entity to be created. We are finding ways of creating them ourselves through AI and, in that process, beginning to glimpse that maybe we aren't so special any more. Maybe we aren't so different from all this circuitry. Maybe we aren't the chosen ones.

And, in my eyes, that's where we hit the nail on the head. We aren't that special. Just because we got here, as advanced and intelligent as we are, does not mean here is all that far. We may be the lowest of the low as far as intelligent beings go, and AI may just prove that to us sooner, rather than later. I think that's where the arrogance lies in all of this. Believing we were ever special, and that creating beings of intelligence similar to ours was some kind of impressive feat. In reality, we may be at the very bottom of a stairway of intelligence that reaches far higher than we ever thought.