This paper explores ethical concerns and existential risks associated with Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies through the lens of C. S. Lewis’s thought. Over the last decade, technological breakthroughs have significantly increased the impact of narrow AI technologies across nearly all domains of human life and accelerated the timeline for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Consequently, AI ethics has emerged as a vibrant field of academic research. Large AI development companies and governments across the world are beginning to recognize and acknowledge the power of AI to radically reshape the world, including the potential for disruptive economic shocks, abusive surveillance, and other catastrophic effects. However, progress toward solutions to the problems of unsafe and unethical AI systems lags well behind technological progress in the race to build superintelligent AGI systems.
This paper contributes to the field of AI ethics by presenting several Lewisian concerns about the nature, application, and undergirding philosophy of current and future AI technologies. Specifically, the paper demonstrates that the quest for safe and ethical AI is undermined by much of the philosophy, implicit and explicit, in AI research and development. Lewis’s writings provide a prescient and penetrating critique of this philosophy and point toward a “regenerate science” that addresses the present need for wisdom in AI development. Lewis recognized the dehumanizing and destructive potential of the reigning scientific mythology supporting this philosophy. Its anthropology reduces man to an accidental arrangement of particles. Its axiology recognizes no objective moral order from which ethical approaches to AI might be sustained. Its soteriology seeks human salvation in technological power over nature and freedom in escape from all creaturely limits, and its emergentist or posthumanist eschatology is inherently dehumanizing. Lewis, therefore, seeks for “a new Natural Philosophy,” by which wonderful technologies can be developed and deployed to humanizing and broadly beneficial effect.