Monday, September 28, 2026

Kingsnorth and Quay on transhumanism

My review of Grayson Quay’s The Transhumanist Temptation and Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity appears in the Fall 2026 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

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2 comments:

  1. NormSeptember 28, 2026 at 8:55 PM

    Paywall sadly

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  2. English CatholicSeptember 30, 2026 at 9:24 AM

    Curious to see these. Like many I work heavily with 'AI'. Some Catholics and others have tried to argue that AI is intrinsically evil and that one should never use it. To my mind, the arguments have been weak. They have shown it's dangerous and has deleterious effects, and that some of its uses are intrinsically evil. But not that it's per se evil.

    Marc Barnes, for example, makes a pretty odd use of the perverted faculty argument here: https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/08/ai-chatbots-evil-marc-barnes.html

    It's trivial to respond that, in using an LLM ("AI" is a term so broad as to be meaningless), you're not communicating with a machine, so you're not perverting the communicative faculty. Instead, you're inputting information into a machine in a way that happens to be convenient, just like when you use a calculator. When you use a treadmill, you're not walking, so you're not perverting your locomotive faculty. Conversely, when you contracept, you're using your procreative faculty in a way that makes it fail, hence it's evil.

    His claim that the end of talking is communion also proves too much. If true, it would presumably mean any kind of harsh language -- a judge giving someone a $100 fine -- is intrinsically evil. He also asserts, bizarrely, that human beings are alone among animals in being able to act contrary to their nature. I guess he's never seen a rabid dog.

    He also doesn't distinguish between "chatting" to an LLM as a pasttime (which is admittedly a bit weird), and using it for search, or coding, or avoiding having to fill out a form with the same info 5 times. Admittedly this was written over a year ago, but even then, people were using LLMs for these more useful things.

    Perhaps realizing this, he tries to claim that artifacts have uses that are 'extrinsic' to their design, but that this doesn't change their 'intrinsic' use, which is apparently that which its designer imparted to it. This is philosophical nonsense. He should know that artifacts have no intrinsic end at all. The good or evil of an artifact -- actually, I'd say even the essence of an artifact -- lies in its relation to people.

    Others' arguments are no better.

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