A few months ago, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, mused on stage about the impact of generative AI on society.
“I don’t know how we’ll respond,” he told Kenny Malone of NPR’s Planet Money. “A hundred years ago, CS Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, about a demon in Hell whose job is writing letters to their boss, a senior demon, a manager demon, about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth. And they have a letter where they say, Wonderful news. My human has just got an invention called the telephone.”
And what’s wrong with the telephone, one might ask? Clark recalls the junior demon explaining, “Whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to Hell. Now, what does that get right and wrong? What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.”
Clark is certainly right that phones changed us. In 1975, a major fire at a telephone exchange on Manhattan’s Lower East Side disconnected more than 100,000 phone lines — potentially for months, although service was eventually restored after about three weeks. Shortly after that resumption, two media researchers, Alan Wurtzel and Colin Turner, surveyed several hundred of the people who had been affected, and asked them how being without a working phone had felt, and what implications it had had.
Two-thirds of respondents reported that the lack of a telephone left them feeling either “isolated” or “uneasy”, and more than half felt both. Many lamented the loss of the ability to make and receive calls to friends and family. On the plus side, a third of people reported that when the phone lines were down, they visited other people in person more frequently, and the same proportion said they received visitors more often.
There is a complexity here worth observing. As the political scientist Robert Putnam wrote in Bowling Alone (2000), “Socially speaking, the telephone both gives and takes away.” The 1975 fire demonstrated that “the telephone appears to reduce both loneliness and face-to-face socializing”.
Much has changed since 1975, but Putnam’s conclusion remains plausible. The telephone, like all of the hyper-connective technologies that have succeeded it, cuts both ways.
I doubt CS Lewis would have been surprised. The Screwtape Letters are full of descriptions of situations that might equally bring humans closer to God or closer to damnation. Falling in love, explains the senior devil Screwtape, “is simply an occasion which we and the Enemy are both trying to exploit”. The same is true of war. Even sin can bring a person closer to God, by prompting reflection and repentance. If love, war and sin are double-edged swords, we should hardly be shocked to find that the same thing is true of the telephone — or of artificial intelligence.
Why, then, did CS Lewis argue that the telephone was a shortcut to the inferno? Fans of Lewis will have guessed at the answer: he didn’t. Jack Clark had misremembered almost all of his claims. Lewis didn’t write The Screwtape Letters (1942) a century ago; they are not letters from a junior demon, but addressed to him from his uncle, Screwtape. And there is no mention of the telephone at all.
Without wishing to criticise Jack Clark too harshly for misspeaking in an onstage conversation (it’s easily done) there is something magnificently symbolic about hearing such an authority on generative AI produce a string of charming, thought-provoking and believable claims about CS Lewis, all of which turn out to be factually incorrect. Planet Money added a “clarification” to their recording of the conversation, noting that CS Lewis had “talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio” in “a different private letter”.
Curious as to exactly what CS Lewis said about the radio, I tracked down a quotation widely attributed to him — an ironic piece of advice explaining how to avoid God: “Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation.”
But where did he originally write those words? I pasted the quote into Google, but ahead of any search results, Google’s AI Gemini hastened to misinform: “You are quoting or closely paraphrasing CS Lewis from The Screwtape Letters.” Nice try, senior tempter; they were written two decades after Screwtape.
If the telephone can connect us but also drive us away from each other, what should we make of generative AI? I’d suggest that it connects us to — and drives us away from — facts. Anyone who has asked a large language model to produce a research report knows how impressive the results can be — wide-ranging, comprehensive, packed with useful links, and quick. It is a research tool to rival the Google search, and before it, the library catalogue.
And yet with every turn — and now, every Google search — AI confronts us with slick yet forgettable summaries and confident, plausible confabulations. Cheerleaders for AI keep telling me that these fictions hardly ever happen any more. My own lying eyes tell me a different story.
To put it another way, the telephone makes superficial contact easy. That can be the beginning of a more meaningful human relationship, or it can be a replacement for it. Large language models offer the same temptation when it comes to gathering knowledge. A superficial survey becomes effortless. Do we let it catalyse deeper research and understanding? Or replace it?
The choice is ours. Put like that, it verges on being a moral question. We can easily imagine what Screwtape might have made of that.
My dear Wormwood,
I am pleased to hear that the patient has become enamoured of the Machine. Do not try to convince him that it is infallible. That crude approach will not long survive contact with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
You must be more subtle. He will learn to distrust it, yes, but his distrust can be kept at a theoretical level. It can easily be curdled into cynicism, an excellent state of affairs from our point of view. Questions about specific facts are what must be avoided. We want him complacent, not curious.
Encourage him to feel that fact-checking is a pedantic inefficiency that is beneath him. Let him enjoy his laziness and call it productivity. Humans have long tended to conflate having an answer with finding the truth. That’s the game.
Your affectionate uncle,
SCREWTAPE
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