2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future: Updated and Expanded Edition by John C. Lennox

Author:John C. Lennox [Lennox, John C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2024-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

Orwell argued that Lewis’s book “would probably have been better . . . if the magical element had been left out,” and he objected to the ending in which N.I.C.E. (National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) is overthrown by divine intervention: “[Lewis] is entitled to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.”70

On the contrary, Lewis’s belief in the supernatural strengthens the story. Firstly, knowing which side is going to win in the struggle between good and evil has never spoiled any story for me or anyone I know – think of The Lord of the Rings, for instance. If there is a God and a supernatural dimension, then leaving it out will diminish the story, since it will be told in a framework that is less than the whole and so omits part of reality. Also, it is not true that the addition of supernatural aid detracts from the drama. It all depends on the nature of that aid and the way in which it is employed, or not employed, as in the case of Jesus’ refusal of angelic help when he was facing the cross.71

All of these dystopias and, indeed, most futuristic AI scenarios tend to assume that human beings will always be on the earth. The exception here is the oft-mentioned speculation that an AGI, if ever created, may decide to dispense with humanity. In other words, the human race will come to an end and be replaced by machines. Indeed, reminiscent of C. S. Lewis, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, in his keynote to the AI World Summit 2022, speaking of cyborgs, said that “the best way to destroy humanity will be to hybridize it with a machine.”72

An alternative scenario to C. S. Lewis’s “abolition of man” is the subject of a piece of dystopian writing that is not so well known – P. D. James’s novel The Children of Men, written in 1992 and set in 2021. The book takes the form of a journal written by Oxford historian Theodore Faron, who is the cousin of the despotic Warden of the police state of England. The key idea is that the entire world, in which nation after nation has been recording a rapidly declining birth rate, is gradually engulfed by a mysterious pandemic of infertility so that in 1995 the last human child is born. That year was designated Omega, and the children born in it were called Omegas, about which James makes the prescient remark: “If from infancy you treat children as gods, they are liable in adulthood to act as devils.”73 The human race stands threatened with extinction. In an interview, P. D. James said that

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