That Hideous A.I.

The biggest danger of AI is the ancient temptation of the enemy in the garden: “You can become like God.”

Most of us have read some C.S. Lewis. He’s best known for his Chronicles of Narnia series, his fictional account of two demons’ postal correspondence, The Screwtape Letters, and also for his works of popular theology, like Mere Christianity.

The Space Trilogy

But he also published three of his most important books between 1938 and 1945, a trilogy of science fiction novels, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. These books are often called “The Space Trilogy” or “The Ransom Trilogy” (after the main character, Dr. Elwin Ransom).

I hate spoilers, even about basic plot lines, so I’m going to stay as spoiler-free as possible. If you haven’t read the trilogy, you really should. Lewis weaves in some fun, interesting, and profound reveals as the stories move along. And even though you could technically read the third book without reading the first two, you should read them in order. Out of the Silent Plant and Perelandra provide a rich and important background for understanding the context of the third book, That Hideous Strength.

It’s become almost a cliché in some Christian theological spheres to rediscover these volumes as prophetic parables of our modern technological moment. With good reason. The third volume is, I think, the weakest of the three in some ways, but more profoundly important than the first two in other ways. That Hideous Strength narrates the danger of the technological industrial complex partnered with governmental power, with a dark, spiritual backbone underneath it all.

The stories envision our world and solar system in deeply spiritual terms. The entire world is filled with a complex, tiered network of beings made by God, either working for His will or against it. Specifically, Lewis imagines a dark, demonic power in the shadows behind organizations and people who claim to be doing nothing but technological innovation.

That thought haunts us, especially in our world of AI. And it should.

One Danger of A.I.

We’re all concerned with AI, and wrestling with how we engage AI, think about AI, and protect against possible dangers of AI. For example, before our service on Sunday, a few of our key leaders started chatting about AI, impromptu. It’s on everyone’s mind: how should Christians respond?

I’ve already gone on the record with some thoughts about the topic, with a relatively neutral, maybe even optimistic, essay. I want to continue that conversation here, with a more negative caution. Like so many things, I don’t see a one-size-fits-all approach. While I don’t want to project everything in The Space Trilogy onto our modern day, Lewis pinpoints one of the most profound dangers of our technological, mechanized age.

The biggest danger of AI is the ancient temptation of the enemy in the garden: “You can become like God.” AI accumulates human knowledge in a digital, abstract way, without the presence of actual humans. Humans are both spiritual and organic—bodies and souls. But AI is electrical, machine, and digital. It universalizes humanity rather than personalizing humans. It doesn’t turn individual “humans” into little gods. But it can promise to turn the abstract mass of “Humanity” into God. It worships Man, not men. This would mean that a demonic danger of AI is not AI “coming to life” so much as AI lulling humans into a kind of death.

Let’s think about four key things God intended for us as humans when he made us in his image. First, God designed humans to be physical beings. We have bodies. God created the man from the dust of the earth. Second, God created humans to be spiritual beings. God breathed life into the man and made the man alive. Third, God also created humans to be relational beings. God made a woman from the man’s side. Fourth, God created humans to be thinking, constructive beings, naming animals and cultivating the world.

Sin dehumanizes us, and corrupts and corrodes our good nature at each point. It kills our bodies, damns our souls, fragments our relationships, and perverts our reason and work in the world.

As I reflect on That Hideous Strength, I think Lewis would warn us that AI promises to make us more than human while actually making us less than human. AI can allow and even encourage humans to further dehumanize ourselves. It can disembody our existence and substitute for real, flesh and blood relationships. There have been haunting and terrifying stories of people falling in love with AI chatbots, or being led into harm of themselves or others. AI can substitute for the human privilege and calling of thinking and creating, filling and subbing the world. It can create an impulse to put a prompt into Grok or Gemini or ChatGPT instead of spending seven minutes noodling on a problem.

There may or may not be actual, literal demons in the machines, or at work in those who are building them. But the risk is much the same, either way.

The risk is self-worship. That we will fall for the primal temptation to make ourselves like God rather than being the image-bearers he created us to be. Building machines that mirror us back to ourselves and amplify human achievements to make us feel bigger, better, and smarter than we should.

It risks us putting our heads together to build something that we can build—but shouldn’t. As the Lord saw at Babel, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (Gen 11:6). Lewis himself draws on themes of Babel in That Hideous Strength, because Babel is the basic story of humans building things for the greatness of themselves. As Lewis says, “Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the dream of Man as God.”

Technology in general and AI specifically tempts us to view ourselves not in proportion to God as those who bear his image but as those who infatuate ourselves with our own image. In other words, it threatens true worship. It risks triggering a hideous feedback loop that echoes us back to ourselves while actually removing us from ourselves and others—and from God.