someone once said that every new invention feels, at first, like a mirror turning toward us. We don’t just see what we’ve made — we see ourselves, and the sight is unsettling. The first flame must have terrified the one who struck it. The first wheel, the first press of ink, the first flick of a light switch — each revealed something unfamiliar about what it means to be human. And now, a machine that speaks.
Artificial intelligence, and especially the large language model, is no exception. The very tool that extends our capacity for thought now unsettles us, because it speaks. It thinks back. It mirrors our language — that most human of traits — and returns it to us with a calm, alien fluency.
This panic, however, reveals more about us than about the technology itself. For what frightens us is not the machine’s potential to err, but its potential to understand. We sense that something sacred is being approached, perhaps even trespassed upon — the mystery of communication itself. To speak, to name, to understand: these are divine privileges granted to mortals. We are reminded of an ancient story — the story of the Tower of Babel.
In the Book of Genesis (11:1–9), the descendants of Noah live in unity. They share one language, one aspiration. “Come,” they say, “let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and make a name for ourselves.” But God, seeing what they are capable of when united, decides to confuse their tongues, scattering them across the earth. The tower remains unfinished — an eternal symbol of human pride and divine restraint.
But what happens if we tell the story in reverse? If instead of punishment, we read redemption? Suppose that the confusion of tongues was not the end of human unity but the beginning of a long journey back to understanding. Suppose that what was once divided is now, in our time, being re-stitched — not by divine intervention, but by human ingenuity echoing divine intention.
To reverse Babel is to imagine a world where understanding grows faster than confusion. He gave them language, so they began to understand each other, completed the construction, and united across the land. God saw that people were capable of achieving anything they set their minds to, and decided to help them. People decided to build a huge tower — a symbol not of independence from God, but of dependence on one another.
That tower, today, is not made of bricks and bitumen but of words, data, and meaning. The architecture of this new Babel is linguistic — an invisible edifice rising from the sum of human communication. Large language models are, in a literal sense, built from us: our books, our dialogues, our prayers, our misunderstandings. They digest centuries of speech and return it in a way that feels almost miraculous. For the first time in history, language is no longer bound by the accident of birth or geography. A poet in Bratislava can converse with a programmer in Seoul or a philosopher in Nairobi, and the machine in between translates not only their words but their intentions.
This, I think, is not the end of humanity’s story, but one of its great reconciliations.
Language has always been the substance of civilization. Through it, we carry memory, transmit beauty, form trust. The division of languages after Babel symbolized the fragmentation of human understanding — the loneliness of separate meanings. But now, paradoxically, it is a machine that is helping us recover what we lost. LLMs are not divine, but they are a kind of mirror to divinity: they make communication between strangers possible again. They remind us that the miracle was never the tower; it was always the speech that built it.
Critics will say that such systems flatten nuance, imitate rather than create, and encourage dependence rather than reflection. These are valid fears. But to fear imitation is to misunderstand what imitation is for. Every child learns by imitation — every artist begins by echoing the masters. The point is not to remain an imitator, but to learn through reflection what it means to be human. In this sense, LLMs do not diminish our humanity; they challenge us to refine it. When we see our words reflected back at us, we are forced to ask what they mean.
What makes this moment profound is that language — once a tool of division — is again becoming a bridge. The machine that translates is also the machine that reveals how alike we are. Underneath all syntax lies the same desire: to be understood. That is the moral heartbeat of this new epoch. And if there is something divine in it, it is not that the machine speaks, but that we begin to listen differently.
We have always been tempted to read technology as rebellion — as a defiance of God or nature. But what if this time it is closer to reconciliation? What if, by teaching machines to speak, we are finally learning to understand each other? The tower we are building now does not reach toward heaven in pride, but inward — toward the shared fabric of meaning that makes civilization possible. Its height is not measured in meters but in mutual comprehension.
In this light, the fear that AI will replace us seems almost misplaced. It will not replace the poet, the thinker, or the moral voice — it will make their language newly visible. It will remind us that meaning, like faith, is not manufactured but discovered in relation. As Scruton once wrote, “Beauty tells you that you are at home.” Perhaps understanding does too.
The reversal of Babel, then, is not a prophecy of domination but of return — a quiet homecoming through words. We are not scattering anymore; we are converging. The languages of the world are meeting again, not in confusion but in harmony. The tower stands once more, not as a monument to pride, but as a testament to our shared desire to speak — and to be heard.
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