What Would C. S. Lewis Have Thought of AI?
27th June 2026
What would C. S. Lewis have thought of artificial intelligence? I doubt he would have begun with the machine. Indeed, Lewis always began with man.
He would not have asked first whether AI can write a poem, draft a law, tutor a child, or write a sermon. He would have asked, “What sort of people want a machine to do these things for them?” He would have asked, “What have we already lost when we greet such a tool not with care, but with wonder?”
That is why reading The Abolition of Man in 2026 makes the work feel more like a book written for the age of the chatbot. Lewis warned that we “make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” By the chest he meant the trained physical sources of love and judgment. The head thinks. The belly wants. The chest teaches a man to love what is good, hate what is evil, and submit both thought and appetite to truth.