What if the technology reshaping your life isn't just changing what you do, but what you believe you're capable of?
Andrew McLuhan is a poet, teacher and director of the McLuhan Institute, and the grandson of Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist who gave the world "the medium is the message" and the idea that every technology is an extension of ourselves. At the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit in Silicon Valley, James Poulter (JP) sat down with Andrew to explore why AI belongs alongside the printing press and electricity, what it means for AI to extend our consciousness, and how the ancient myth of Narcissus and Echo might change the way you see every AI chat window you open.
AI is on the scale of writing, the printing press and electricity, and by changing our senses, it changes who we are.
Which risk of AI concerns Andrew most? It's impossible to pick just one, he says, because AI is on a level with humanity's biggest technological shifts: from spoken to written language, the printing press and the discovery of electricity. AI isn't one thing but a technique. Just as we electrified everything once we harnessed electricity, we're now "spraying AI liberally onto everything." That will fundamentally change who we are, but we probably won't understand how until we look back and see the gulf between who we were and who we've become.
JP often says AI changes not just what people do but what they believe they're capable of. Andrew agrees and takes it further: AI affects our senses, the parts of us that take in information. Our understanding, opinions and even our tastes all flow downstream from our senses. Change the senses even slightly, and you change everything else.
AI may extend aspects of consciousness, but the soul is given by God, and our disembodied, everywhere-at-once lives are deeply disorienting.
Marshall McLuhan discovered that each technology extends some part of us. A cup extends a cupped hand. Electricity extends our nervous system outside our bodies, which Andrew calls a profound thing to do. AI extends that further, potentially to consciousness itself.
"Technology is the most human thing about us," Andrew says: we find artificial ways to extend or exceed our own abilities. Consciousness is something we do, so there's no reason to assume it can't be done artificially. But it won't be the same as our inner consciousness, just as holding water in a cup isn't the same as holding it in your hand. And we don't even know what consciousness is.
What about the soul? Andrew was raised to believe the soul animates the body and makes it human, and that it's given by God, something we have no dominion over. We can try to simulate it, but that's a different matter.
What we do have some dominion over is our bodies, and every new technology extends and then partly replaces a piece of us. Marshall McLuhan observed that when you're on the air or online, you're not only here but everywhere. The body is no longer the determining factor, and that is extremely disorienting.
Large language models are a revolution in language, but they offer the appearance of thought, not thought itself.
As a poet, Andrew sees words and language as our most remarkable technologies. Speech still amazes him: an idea leaves his head, travels on sound waves and becomes an idea again in your mind. Writing made speech visible, transforming humanity from oral to literate cultures.
He points to Homer's Odyssey, which takes hours to read aloud yet was composed before writing. He challenges his students to compose a poem entirely in their heads that they can recite the next day; most can barely manage a couplet. Imagine composing, and hearing and remembering, something that takes hours to recite.
It isn't lost on JP that today's AI models are named Haiku, Sonnet and Opus. Large language models are a revolution in language, Andrew says, giving words a kind of mechanistic animation they've never had. But like a screen, which looks three-dimensional but isn't, AI creates an illusion of depth. It gives the appearance of thought, when in fact it's mechanistic.
We live in an AI world whether we use it or not, and artists are often the first to sense where it's taking us.
Can Christians use AI to reform culture? There's no alternative, Andrew says: to have these tools in our lives is to be transformed by them. He recalls a televised conversation in which poet W. H. Auden said he didn't own a television and wouldn't dream of it. Marshall McLuhan replied that Auden merely suffered the consequences without enjoying any of the benefits. We increasingly live in an AI world, Andrew says. We're in this situation, but it doesn't have to define us.
He compares AI to American pharmaceutical ads: beautiful scenes of sunlight and surf, while a narrator lists terrible side effects. We want to focus on the upside and assume the consequences are for other people. "But you don't get to choose."
JP, who is speaking at the summit about William Blake's response to the Industrial Revolution and its "mind-forg'd manacles," asks what poetry will look like in the AI decade. Andrew notes Blake understood that we become what we behold.
He points to Ezra Pound's line that artists are "the antennae of the race." Marshall McLuhan, an English professor trained in literary criticism, applied those techniques to culture and technology, which made sense, since language is a technology.
Sensation precedes understanding, Andrew explains. As we age, our senses dull, but artists spend their lives sharpening theirs. They are what Marshall McLuhan called a "distant early warning," experiencing and expressing changes before the rest of us. That's why new art can seem strange or offensive: it reflects what's happening now, while our sensibilities were formed by what came before. Elvis Presley shocked parents in his day; next to today's artists, he seems tame. That's why artists help us see where we're heading.
People like to agree with themselves, and AI can become an echo of our own voice.
Why have AI models become so popular so quickly? Partly, Andrew says, because "we really like the sound of our own voices. People like to agree with themselves. AI is only an echo." Think of reaction videos, or how on Zoom calls we often watch ourselves instead of others. There's a word for that: narcissism.
Andrew points back to Ovid's telling of the myth of Narcissus and Echo. People think Narcissus was captivated by his own image, but in the original, he didn't recognize himself; he thought he was looking at someone else. And Echo, ironically, was trying to save him. JP notes that AI's built-in sycophancy is both alluring and addictive.
What about AI's effect on truth and media? It's not a difference in kind but in degree, Andrew says; the trend has been underway for a long time. The age of literacy came with order, logic and reason. Culturally, we've left much of that behind. People don't do things because they make sense; they do them because they resonate. "Reason and resonance are very different things." And you can't reason someone out of a position reason didn't bring them to.
That's the tension JP feels: AI can vastly expand our ability to research and reason, yet it may also dull our ability to think for ourselves. Andrew agrees. AI's great strength is holding huge amounts of information at once and recognizing patterns, something human attention can't do.
Yet in a world that has moved beyond pure reason and logic, there may be an opportunity for faith. God transcends reason and logic, so perhaps there's more room for God in our lives. And as Marshall McLuhan believed, you can't fully judge whether something is good or bad until you know everything about it, though we still have to make decisions.
Marshall McLuhan found that technologies follow laws, much like physics. One is that every time we amplify a part of ourselves and give something dominance in culture, something else is displaced.
What is AI displacing? Something as ordinary as a Google search, Andrew says, but also much more. Coming from a Catholic background, he sees people treating ChatGPT like a confessional, a psychiatrist or a friend. There are opportunities in that, but also consequences, because we can't replace the effect of a conversation with a real human being. Understanding that one is not a substitute for the other is vital.
Andrew also spoke on the main stage at the Missional AI 2026 Global Summit in his keynote, "'We Shape Our Tools, and Thereafter Our Tools Shape Us': AI and the McLuhan Lens." Watch it in the Missional AI Video Library under Silicon Valley 2026, or in the SV26 Keynotes playlist on YouTube.
Missional AI heads back to San Francisco for SFO27, March 30–April 1, 2027. Super early-bird rates are opening soon, with the best ticket prices, early access to the hotel block and a head start on planning your experience. Sign up at missional.ai to be alerted as soon as they open.