The Last Conditioners

When most people think about C.S. Lewis, they will think of Narnia.

Lewis 's The Abolition of Man is not as known, but I think may end up being more important. Lewis — writing in 1943, before the transistor, before the internet, before anyone had denoted artificial intelligence — understood something profound about the exponential trajectory of technology, the resulting concentration of power, and the means of subjugation by the powerful.

His core insight is that the more we control nature through technology, the more power accrues to the few who control technology over the many, the more people become products of those who hold power, and the more we lose human nature itself. The paradox: humanity set out to conquer nature and built ever greater technology to do more with less, but humanity’s conquest of nature results in nature's conquest of humanity.

Lewis frames the argument around Tao — the set of first principles every serious civilization has recognized as self-evidently true, often through religion. That cruelty is wrong. That the strong bear responsibility toward the weak. That some things are sacred. The fabric of what makes us human.

Over time, our technological progress will eventually enable some people to stand outside the Tao to engineer it for everyone else.

Some must decide which values to encode, which behaviors to encourage, which impulses to dampen. These are the Conditioners: "The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race… They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what 'Humanity' shall henceforth mean."

I appreciate how he used the word “artificial” back then.

The Conditioners are not necessarily evil. They are in a structurally impossible position, asked to encode the depth of human morality into a system, and in the process, reducing it to something programable: "It is not that they are bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all…Man's conquest of nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man," with technology as the instrument.

Lewis concludes with this image: "If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see… Man's conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundred men over billions upon billions of men."

He wrote that in 1943.

It's crazy how relevant that feels today.

Artificial Tao, Artificial Intelligence…AI has that potential to create The Conditioners… not (hu)men in the old sense.... who are figuring out what humanity shall henceforth mean.

We’re at a point where the power afforded by technology to a small number of people will allow them to have an outsized impact on society's direction and on future generations. That alone is worth paying attention to. “This time is different” is a belief that permeates history—and is usually wrong—but AI lends it real credence.

Sometimes, this time is actually different, and those in control of this time will shape what comes next for everyone else.

(There’s already an endless stream of writing today on AI—AI has made it easier to write about AI, too—but this is more an exercise in capturing where my own thinking is right now (Circa March 2026) than it is trying to say anything novel or insightful... just capturing the moment.)

Ephemeralization

The best phrase I've come across for the governing logic of technological progress is ephemeralization. Buckminster Fuller's expression of doing ever more with ever less. The building-sized calculator, becomes the pocket supercomputer, becomes the invisible digital god.

Ephemeralization has progressed so thoroughly that it will force humanity to confront topics it explicitly tries to avoid: scarcity and abundance, fairness, what happens when productive capacity outpaces our frameworks for distributing and making sense of what it produces, and meaning in a society where increasingly everything is automated.

Anything that can be automated will be automated.

That is the spirit of ephemeralization: externalizing repetitive human functions into tools that ultimately handle them better, freeing the only non-renewable resource any of us has: time.

This is the paradox of the current wave of automation. Historically, as tools automate more of the work, people specialize in what's left.

But what happens when it is hard to conceive of what's left, because ephemeralization has pushed AI to automate cognition itself?

Lewis notes: "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger."

The Concentration by The Conditioners

Power concentrates.

Corporate concentration has been trending in only one direction over the last century. The top 1% of corporations by assets held about 72% of total corporate assets in the 1930s and about 97% by the 2010s; today seven companies account for a third of the public market itself.

AI is accelerating this.

The challenge is that corporations are abstract, unaccountable, ruthless entities — not because the people within them are evil (they are often well-intentioned, thoughtful, decent (h/t Lewis’ framing of the individual Conditioners)), but because the corporations are giant non-human power-maximizing entities. They have been granted legal autonomy through regulatory capture of the very systems meant to govern them, and they routinely produce outcomes no one within them would individually endorse.

Power has always been concentrated in the hands of those with the most technological leverage. And AI is on a trajectory to become the greatest technological leverage we’ve seen, in posterity.

Historically, whoever controlled the seas controlled the world. The pirates' technological leverage was knowledge of chemistry, physics, mathematics, logistics, economics, law, psychology, and engineering —generalists by necessity, because at sea there was no other authority for thousands of miles. What the pirates deliberately did was keep everyone else specialized. Knowledge was technological leverage was power.

"Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery, wherein the 'expert' is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, highly secure, lifelong position. But only the king's son received the kingdom-wide broad scope of training… Only 1% of the 1% of humanity that went to sea came to rule the world. Secrecy was their chief weapon."²

However, the past pirates’ knowledge didn't exert power over future generations; their power was temporally limited to their time and place. Today it is different. This concentration of power affords deciding what values to instill into AI — standing outside the automation framework to engineer it for the future. Values become design choices. The language of engineering becomes the language of ethics. What Tao parameters and constraints will be instilled into AI?

Today, those architecting AI get to answer that question for everyone and will be architecting the future of cognition itself.

This is where Lewis's Conditioners become real.

Inundated with Information, Starved for Knowledge

This kind of power requires a civilizational-level buy-in or distraction—an inability of an ignorant population to notice or care.  In this way, AI not only enables the Conditioners but also creates the environment for the Conditioned.

We've never been more inundated with information, yet starved for knowledge and understanding.

We are blind to what's going on in our own local communities, yet bombarded with the world’s most dire problems in real time. We’re fed contextless information and glued to the most attention-grabbing events involving people we’ll never know in places we'll never see. It’s demonstrated to be more addictive than the most powerful drugs.

AI pushes this over the edge by collapsing the cost of content creation to zero.

Ephemeralization of media has resulted in each media transition — from print to telegraph to television to social media — compressing the unit of discourse and degrading the relationship between information consumed and the ability to do anything useful with it.

The result is infinite content creation. Not because there are infinite meaningful things to say, but because the economics of engagement incentivize anything that captures attention.

Even if it’s entirely fabricated. The ability for us to discern what is even real or artificial is already degrading.

Lewis warned about The Conditioners — the few who shape what humanity pays attention to and values. Equally important: the environment we’re in may affect our ability to think clearly enough to notice.

You don't need to censor information when the public is so overstimulated that it can't notice what matters.

Censorship is still a threat, in an Orwellian sense, but the greater threat may be attention-demanding entertainment. We are being entertained, saturated in Memes. And that seems to be a more effective form of control.

AI, by simultaneously flooding our environment with noise and doing our sense-making of that noise for us, is empowering The Conditioners and distracting The Conditioned.

"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies."

What Then

I don't know.

I prefer to be optimistic. Yet, sentiment is uneasy. People are not very comfortable talking about what might actually be happening and the implications for society.

The tools no longer limit you. Capability — to write, to design, to code, to analyze, to build — is no longer the constraint.

The gap between what you can imagine and what you can produce is narrowing.

Imagination. Vision. Creativity. Judgment. Taste — these will become the limiting reagents.

In a world where most things will be automated, the traits that matter most are the ones we've been least deliberate about cultivating: adaptability, comfort with ambiguity, comfort with the accelerating pace of change, love of learning, and the creativity to synthesize across domains.

Maybe artists are the future. Artist-Engineers.

With automation, society could free people to focus their time on other things.

If the tools no longer limit you, and you still cannot make something meaningful, were the tools ever the problem? This is part of the societal uneasiness. The actual meaning crisis.

The path forward requires something structurally radical: breaking the link between economic value and self-worth. We have this phrase — “earn a living.” Why do you have to earn your right to live by gaining and holding employment, when employment generally involves automatable tasks?

We have built a civilization in which people derive meaning from economic productivity.

If AI is productivity incarnate, and we have not decoupled meaning from production, the technology that was supposed to free us will hollow us out. Not because it fails, but because we have no framework for what that kind of life looks like.

What won’t be automated? Community. Bringing people together in person.

Sci-fi has been the best guide because it actually explored what those kinds of societies look like when these assumptions are taken to be true. What about human prosperity and flourishing?

Lewis thought: We build tools to see through nature — to model it, predict it, optimize it. Then we turn those tools on ourselves. We see through behavior to the underlying psychology. But Lewis's warning is about the end state, not the trajectory. "If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."

Maybe, some things should remain opaque. Maybe, meaning is found beyond the model's reach — not because AI will lack the capability — it seems like it will definitely be capable — but because modeling it destroys what we were trying to understand. This is where it flips from our conquest over nature to nature’s conquest over us. One question is whether we will be conscious enough to choose that, or whether the choice will be made for us by systems so helpful, so aligned, so genuinely good at what they do, that we never notice the moment we stopped choosing at all.

Because today, AI is contributing to the discovery of new knowledge, and the entire global economy is reorganizing around the scale-up of AI's proliferation across every domain — including all the domains humans were supposed to specialize in when everything else got automated.

And The Conditioners are proceeding accordingly. Society should probably pay a little more attention to what is being conditioned.

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C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth; the Great Pirate theory (1969)

Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion (1969)

Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)

Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (1920)