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After an action-packed climax to That Hideous Strength, there is a moment of quiet reflection at St Anne’s as members of the company consider the responsibility of the academics at Edgestow for the catastrophe.
“But did they really mean any great harm with all their fussy little intrigues?” Mrs Dimble asks.
Arthur Denniston replies by talking about la trahison des clercs (“the betrayal, or treason, of the intellectuals,” though it sounds much better in French, I think):
I know. […] One’s sorry for a man like Churchwood. I knew him well; he was an old dear. All his lectures were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life he’d have walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the same . . . was there a single doctrine practised at Belbury which hadn’t been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never thought that any one would act on their theories! No one was more astonished than they when what they’d been talking of for years suddenly took on reality. But it was their own child coming back to them: grown up and unrecognisable, but their own.
It’s a great answer but what’s it got to do with AI, Google, or everlasting life? To answer that question we need to look at some of the darker and wilder claims made by members of the N.I.C.E. at Belbury. What did the villains of the book think they were up to? There are many passages I could have chosen, but let me restrict myself to Filostrato’s Cartesian vision of the future:
In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould - all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.
And again,
This Institute - Dio meo, it is for something better than housing and vaccinations and faster trains and curing the people of cancer. It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”
It is a terrifying - and perhaps also a ludicrous - vision, but it is real enough to tempt Mark Studdock. And, sadly, not just Mark Studdock. Here’s Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google:
We’ll ultimately be able to scan all the salient details of our brains from inside, using billions of nanobots in the capillaries. We can then back up the information. Using nanotechnology-based manufacturing, we could recreate your brain, or better yet reinstantiate it in a more capable computing substrate.
I see this starting with nanobots in our bodies and brains. The nanobots will keep us healthy, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide direct brain-to-brain communication over the Internet, and otherwise greatly expand human intelligence. But keep in mind that nonbiological intelligence is doubling in capability each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially fixed in capacity. As we get to the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.
There are all sorts of problems with Kurzweil’s logic and philosophical assumptions, as many critics have pointed out, but I’m going to leave them to one side, for the time being at least. For the moment all we need to know is that he really believes this stuff and he’s not the only one. Here’s Hugo de Garis, who takes the same vision even further:
There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that humanity will be able to build massively intelligent machines this century that will be hugely smarter than human beings. The author, for example, thinks that the issue of whether humanity should build these “artilects” (artificial intellects) will dominate our global politics this century and lead to a “gigadeath” war, killing billions of people….
If humans with our puny human brains are capable of conceiving the idea of building universes, then perhaps artilects, with all their godlike capacities, could actually construct them, based on their vastly superior ability to architect possible universes.
Does any of that sound familiar? It will do if you’ve read That Hideous Strength. Lord Feverstone doesn’t speak as coldly as Hugo de Garis about a “gigadeath” war, but he does argue that there will be “a real war with real casualties”. What this means in practice is later explained to Mark by Professor Frost:
[E]very advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs.
And here is the apostate clergyman, Straik, joining Filostrato to explain the real aims of the N.I.C.E. to an initially incredulous Mark:
“And so,” said Straik, “the lessons you learned at your mother’s knee return. God will have power to give eternal reward and eternal punishment.”
“God?” said Mark. “How does He come into it? I don’t believe in God.”
“But, my friend,” said Filostrato, “does it follow that because there was no God in the past that there will be no God also in the future?”
“Don’t you see,” said Straik, “that we are offering you the unspeakable glory of being present at the creation of God Almighty?”
So there you have it: a clear vision of the future from the N.I.C.E. at Belbury and from AI futurists employed by leading tech firms. Nature is kicked away, mass slaughter takes place, an artificial form of everlasting life is created, as is God. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ray Kurzweil and Hugo de Garis think themselves very daring and modern to hold such views, but of course C. S. Lewis knew better. “Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God,” as the narrator puts it in The Hideous Strength. There’s not much that’s really new here.
So what is C. S. Lewis’s solution to this “devilry,” as he calls it in the book’s preface? The first step is to recognise that ideas have consequences. It is no defence to argue that no one will act on your theories. But Lewis also sets out a positive vision with which to oppose the horrors of N.I.C.E. and their ilk and it is that vision which I shall be looking at in the final installment of this mini-series.