By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

One of the most suggestive allusions to Artificial Intelligence that I have come across lately came from Renaud Beauchard, a French journalist writing for Brownstone Institute. Right at the beginning of his essay Beauchard writes:

As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That's what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means 'The Fool for Christ.'

What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of 'objectivity,' a preparation for the arrival of superior beings.

It is not only the strangely portentous opening sentence (alluding to the imminent 'AI winter') that I immediately found intriguing, but – and this functioned as a kind of 'sign' to myself – Beauchard's reference to the third of the so-called Space Trilogy of novels by C.S. Lewis, namely That Hideous Strength (published in 1945, after the earlier texts, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra), came as a timely reminder to me. What it prompted in my memory was the almost uncanny prescience that Lewis displayed in that powerful novelistic anticipation of what we have been living through in the last six years or so. This should not be surprising to anyone familiar with C.S. Lewis's profound literary and philosophical contribution to (the history of) Western culture, as my recent essay on the resonances between his book, The Four Loves, and the Three Colours cinematic trilogy of Krzysztof Kieslowski demonstrates.

In fact, the very title of Lewis's novel (That Hideous Strength) – which can be read as an oxymoron, because we usually associate strength with something attractive or handsome – could be applied to the globalist cabal which relishes wielding their evil medical-technological power. Through his obedient sycophant, Yuval Noah Harari, Klaus Schwab – until recently the leader of the WEF (arguably the 'head of the snake') – made no bones about these neo-fascists' megalomania when he claimed that the technocratic cabal had acquired 'divine powers.'

A condensed account of the novel's narrative will have to suffice. It would probably not appeal to literary purists who insist on the distinctiveness of genres, insofar as it is a synthesis of dystopian science fiction (which always thematically includes technology), Christian theology and supernaturalist mythology, and Arthurian myth. I am no purist of that sort, primarily because I believe that new genres may emerge from the experimental blending of extant ones. Its science-fictional character is significant, particularly for the present, given the quintessential feature defining science fiction – first revealed to me by science fiction authority and connoisseur, James Sey, years ago – namely, the literary and cinematic genre which demonstrates thematically that science and technology comprise a pharmakon (simultaneously poison and cure) capable of constructing new worlds, but also of destroying them.

That is what That Hideous Strength achieves, even in admixture with the other thematic and generic components mentioned earlier.

As you would know if you were familiar with the novel, the narrative's main thread concerns Mark and Jane Studdock, a recently married couple whose lives are disrupted when Mark – an idealistic academic – is accepted ('recruited') by the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, ...