A few months ago, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, mused on stage, Tim Harford says, 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.”
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.