AI and The Abolition of Man (Excursus on AI)

Andrés Morales

The following is from my last post, a book review of Carson Grubaugh’s experimental comic book The Abolition of Man: Deluxe Edition (TAOMDE), which itself is based off of C.S. Lewis’s book The Abolition of Man. At the end of the book review I turn to the third chapter of Lewis’s book and reflect on how Christians can view our present moment with AI in relation to Lewis’s hypothetical dystopia. Unfortunately this little excursus on AI was nested at the very end of the 13,000-word review, so it wasn’t very accessible. So I’m re-sharing just that section.

I agree with Lewis that those working in science and specifically on AI need to respect natural law (what he calls the Tao in his book). But the vast majority of us don’t work at AI companies, so his call for a “regenerate science” doesn’t apply to us personally. Lots of people I talk to seem pretty uncertain about what AI might mean for the future, and I am too, so these were my thoughts on how the rest of us onlookers can understand our situation.

Here it is:

One thought I had while reading The Abolition of Man was how prescient it felt. It seems especially well-suited to our moment right now—not only because of the meaning crisis, but even more so as we witness the rise of what might be the most transformative technologies humans will ever create. I find it hard to read this passage and not think about the current moment of rapid technological progress:

Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth century AD—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.1Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 34.

This is a terrifying picture. I think there is a very good chance we are this most dominant generation—and we got here much earlier than the hundredth century. Lewis talks about what it would take to get to that stage:

[The] manmoulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.2Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 27.

I heard someone say once that the successive Industrial Revolutions have increasingly made us more “like God”: the First gave us power through machines, the Second gave us reach through communication and transportation, and the ongoing Third and Fourth have given us mastery over information—we have become omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient (but not truly).3I heard this from my pastor years ago; I’m not sure if he came up with the concept himself. But a version of it is contained in this podcast he hosted. Yet there is still one future technology in particular that its creators insist will make us truly “omnicompetent”—Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). AGI will elevate us to the omnicompetent dominant generation. AGI could cause an intelligence explosion, and that could further every other area of science. Some people refer to this scenario as a technological singularity. There are new technologies on the horizon which could give us unprecedented control over nature and permanently transform humanity as a species—biotech, nanotechnology, robotics—and once they are released into the world, they’ll be really hard to reel back in.

I think The Abolition of Man should be read by everyone who might fall under the label of TESCREAL (which stands for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism [EA], and Longtermism4I know this term isn’t great and represents a wide bundle; for more discussion on the term see this article. I am mostly sympathetic to EA, but not the others on the list. ), and especially anyone that considers themselves e/acc-style accelerationists (not that they would waste their time on a book). There are some EA-aligned people I know of who have reflected on this passage by Lewis.5For a further exploration of Lewis and EA, see this article by Mike Morell. Toby Ord in his book The Precipice talks about the “single generation” that could harness technology to the point that they effectively control and subjugate all future generations by their choices, inadvertently resulting in what he calls “desired dystopia.”6Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (New York, NY: Hachette, 2020), 156, 375. Joe Carlsmith of Open Philanthropy has an essay where he relates Lewis’s essay to the concept of longtermism and avoiding what Will MacAskill has called “value lock-in.”7This is further discussed in William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future (New York, NY: Hachette, 2022). See also Scott Alexander’s famous post “Meditations on Moloch” on coordination problems. EA legend Holden Karnofsky, who now works at leading AI lab Anthropic, has called ours “the most important century.” What all these people are trying to say is, whatever we choose to do in the next few years could reverberate throughout the rest of human history, and potentially be the difference between humanity’s future being one full of suffering and one full of flourishing. How well it goes depends on what we do now, at this hinge of history. With AI here, we are the master generation that Lewis foresaw, and we should wake up and take that role seriously. Whether one has a fast or slow timeline on the transformativeness of AI, there’s no denying that it will be transformative. In one widely circulated report, AI 2027, forecasters predicted what the next few years and then beyond might look like. They lay out two possible futures: one where we slow down the AI race and another where it speeds up. Either scenario though sees the next decade as radically transformed—either we’re all dead, or we’ve become a star-faring civilization. This would mean that our actions in the next few years are critical.

Given AI’s potential to make us that master generation, what should our view toward AI be now? I want to first explore three different ways in which today’s AI discourse understands the “abolition of man”—what I call the Jezosian–transhumanist–accelerationist view, the Yudkowskian–safetyist–doomer view, and the Kingsnorthian–technophobic–spiritual view.8Yudkowsky and Kingsnorth both have books coming out later this month, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Against the Machine, respectively. I think they will complement each other well; I plan on reading them! First, there is the Beff Jezos (yes, Beff Jezos—not Jeff Bezos) view that humanity as a species can eventually be forgotten as civilization climbs the Kardashev scale and breaks free of its limitations. Jezos is an e/acc, whose movement manifesto states: “if one seeks to increase the amount of intelligence in the universe, staying perpetually anchored to the human form as our prior is counter-productive and overly restrictive/suboptimal.”9Beff Jezos and bayeslord, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets” (2022). On this view, there’s nothing really that special about humanity specifically, and our real role in the universe might just be to usher in a new and better form of intelligence. In this case, the abolition of man is a positive thing—a sign of success for the universe and the laws of physics. I’ve touched on related ideas in a previous essay arguing against AI sentience—from a Christian perspective this view should be off the table.10Peter Thiel, an extremely influential entrepreneur and self-described Christian, exhibited this view on a now-infamous podcast with Ross Douthat when he was questioned about whether the human race should endure; he didn’t really have an answer, but Douthat picked up that his hesitation revealed a lot. Second, there is the Eliezer Yudkowsky view that superintelligent AI will literally kill everyone. This is the view of many technologists who see superintelligence truly as an existential threat—there is no known way to develop friendly AI and therefore we are racing towards our own destruction as AI labs underestimate the power of what they are building. Yudkowsky has discussed being prepared to destroy rogue data centers by airstrike. This view advocates doing everything in our power to prevent the literal abolition of man, and pausing the development of AI seems to be the most important thing right now to that end. Third, there is the Paul Kingsnorth view that AI will lead to the spiritual death of man by means of dehumanization. Our souls, what makes us human, will be crushed by the techno–industrial complex which he calls the Machine. Kingsnorth has more of a neo-Luddite approach. Whereas Yudkowsky is narrowly concerned about AI, Kingsnorth takes issue with a broader set of issues that reinforce the Machine, like rampant capitalism, secularism, and modernity as a whole. Ultimately our woes stem from a spiritual crisis, and the technology we can hardly harness only exacerbates it. His solution is spiritual renewal—part of which will involve the ancient spiritual discipline of asceticism, specifically a kind of “technological askesis,” choosing to abstain from the march of the Machine. I believe Kingsnorth’s view would be the most aligned with Lewis.11It’s important to note that Lewis did stress that he was not anti-science. He was merely against science being done by a small group of people that have abandoned the Tao. Fully accepting the irony, I asked ChatGPT to guess what Lewis might say today about the AI situation: “As we train our engines to carry our thinking, we are tempted to lay down the office of the thinking man; and the more we boast of mastering Nature by our contrivances, the more she masters us through appetite and fashion, until at last we find our tools have become our tutors and our servants our rulers, and we wake to the quiet abolition of man.”12From a conversation with ChatGPT, GPT-5 Thinking model on August 24, 2025.

I agree with Yudkowsky about the danger of our lack of understanding of AI, and also with Kingsnorth and Lewis in their fear about how AI will change us.13I appreciate the Yudkowskian–safetyist–doomer camp for working on ways to slow down the rapid progress, or at least ensure the safety of each new development. As interesting as it is to think about alignment and all, it seems like the AI companies have not set aside their end goal of AGI. We should be paying attention. There are major new developments every month, and in my work as a software engineer I am urged to use AI often. People who haven’t used AI yet will soon be seeing it everywhere, and interacting with AI more and more. As time goes on I see fewer realistic options for slowing down the Machine.

How should we then live in such a time as this? Can we prevent the abolition of man? Can the Lewis–Kingsnorthian–technophobic–spiritual approach hold up to the steamrolling progress of the Machine, or will humanity have to actually fight back, rage against the Machine in a Butlerian Jihad, and carpet bomb the data centers? Is there hope? I don’t have it all figured out, but I tried to address this angst a few years ago in an anti-longtermism essay.

[We can] reasonably surrender the future to God and not be anxious about it; believers are promised earthly suffering not in the form of existential threat outcomes, but persecution and tribulation (Matt. 6:25−34, Matt. 24). And we know God has eternally executed his perfect plan for humanity and the world, fully aware of anything that would appear to genuinely threaten the human race. What we call existential risks to God may simply be never-actualized possibilities, or the means by which he brings about the eschaton … Even assured that God would likely not allow the dangers we face to actually become legitimate extinction events, humans still have responsibility … Importantly, the burden of bringing about utopia is not laid on humans.14My Substack post, “Christianity and Longtermism” (2022).

Maybe more simply, “Be still and know that I am God.”15Psalm 46:10.

My point is: we can genuinely trust God. I know very well how that can be a platitude that dismisses the severity of actual issues, but genuine trust in God will help. If it starts looking grim out there, we can remember Gamaliel’s principle: “if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought … if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it.”16Acts 5:38–39. Also see a short article on the principle here. Our technology can never get in the way of God’s plans, and God will not allow the absolute abolition of man. Though on the other hand, our responsibility in the world is real too. It can be difficult to look around and feel dismayed about the inaction of others, but thankfully we can still act ourselves. This action can range from quiet personal resistance to advocating for policy change. (There are concrete ways to have an impact in this area.17For actual advice on how best to use your talents, you can talk with people at Christians For Impact or 80,000 Hours. If you’re concerned about AI, and really want to do something about it, there are opportunities to do so. ) Trusting God and taking action are not contradictory but complementary: we act with confidence because we trust God. And we can trust our God-given minds that as long as we use discernment, we don’t have to second-guess what we choose to do, even considering the huge stakes mentioned earlier. God will work all things out for his good. Instead of immanentizing the eschaton, we can recommit to living out God’s calling in our lives daily.

It can help to remember that our current moment is not necessarily as unique as it might seem. There was another time in history where humanity also had to grapple with the specter of the abolition of man. The Trinity test in 1945 ushered in a new era of human history, the Atomic Age, where for the first time humanity became capable of legitimately annihilating itself. In 1948, three years after the first nuclear weapons had been used and their destructive potential proven, C.S. Lewis wrote an essay titled “On Living in an Atomic Age,” in which he gave counsel as to how to live when the threat of civilization-destroying weapons loomed large:

[You] and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways ... It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty … If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.18C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age.”

I find this quote very encouraging, even if I don’t think God would allow humanity to be wiped out. Our current AI moment, where American and Chinese companies are competing and several are on a mission to develop AGI, has drawn frequent comparison to the nuclear arms race. There’s a lot of anxiety; we may be close to living in an AGI Age. Ultimately no one knows what will pan out in the next decade, but no matter what you think might happen, it’ll help to heed Lewis’s wise words from an earlier era.

I appreciate Grubaugh’s afterword to the last issue of TAOMDE, as a final charge, in the face of the coming storm.

We can worry about, or celebrate, the future of humanity in the face of AI all we like but it is up to you to tune in, to turn on, to consume, to create, to love, to turn off, to stop and smell a real rose, ultimately to live your life as you see fit.

What will you do with that life?

Will it be one of submission to external forces? Complacent consumption of mere content? Will you happily be a produmer (to use another of Luciano’s neologisms) who produces more information by consuming than through any other means of creativity?

Or, will you be the one who carefully, thoughtfully, unselfishly, looks at the Infosphere around you and chooses, like a real adult, to take up the responsibilities of caring?

In a world where there is nothing new under the Sun, choose to change the Sun.19Grubaugh, TAOMDE, afterword to Issue #5.

Read apart from the Tao, this could collapse into individualism. But anchored in the natural law of the Tao, we can recognize the real calling here of faithful stewardship and walking in the good works prepared for us.

Footnotes

  1. 1.

    Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 34.

  2. 2.

    Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 27.

  3. 3.

    I heard this from my pastor years ago; I’m not sure if he came up with the concept himself. But a version of it is contained in this podcast he hosted.

  4. 4.

    I know this term isn’t great and represents a wide bundle; for more discussion on the term see this article. I am mostly sympathetic to EA, but not the others on the list.

  5. 5.

    For a further exploration of Lewis and EA, see this article by Mike Morell.

  6. 6.

    Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (New York, NY: Hachette, 2020), 156, 375.

  7. 7.

    This is further discussed in William MacAskill, What We Owe The Future (New York, NY: Hachette, 2022). See also Scott Alexander’s famous post “Meditations on Moloch” on coordination problems.

  8. 8.

    Yudkowsky and Kingsnorth both have books coming out later this month, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Against the Machine, respectively. I think they will complement each other well; I plan on reading them!

  9. 9.

    Beff Jezos and bayeslord, “Notes on e/acc principles and tenets” (2022).

  10. 10.

    Peter Thiel, an extremely influential entrepreneur and self-described Christian, exhibited this view on a now-infamous podcast with Ross Douthat when he was questioned about whether the human race should endure; he didn’t really have an answer, but Douthat picked up that his hesitation revealed a lot.

  11. 11.

    It’s important to note that Lewis did stress that he was not anti-science. He was merely against science being done by a small group of people that have abandoned the Tao.

  12. 12.

    From a conversation with ChatGPT, GPT-5 Thinking model on August 24, 2025.

  13. 13.

    I appreciate the Yudkowskian–safetyist–doomer camp for working on ways to slow down the rapid progress, or at least ensure the safety of each new development. As interesting as it is to think about alignment and all, it seems like the AI companies have not set aside their end goal of AGI.

  14. 14.

    My Substack post, “Christianity and Longtermism” (2022).

  15. 15.

    Psalm 46:10.

  16. 16.

    Acts 5:38–39. Also see a short article on the principle here.

  17. 17.

    For actual advice on how best to use your talents, you can talk with people at Christians For Impact or 80,000 Hours. If you’re concerned about AI, and really want to do something about it, there are opportunities to do so.

  18. 18.

    C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age.”

  19. 19.

    Grubaugh, TAOMDE, afterword to Issue #5.