When C. S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man in 1943, he warned of trends in modern education that “remove the organ and demand the function.” That is, he rejected the notion of a purely utilitarian approach to learning that removes what philosophers going back to Plato and Augustine have considered to be the true object of education: to train the affections and to “make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Lewis worried about an approach to education that created what he famously termed “men without chests.”
In 1943, Lewis could hardly have anticipated what the arrival of artificial intelligence would mean for humanity. Yet his warning feels particularly timely today.
Time magazine named the “Architects of AI” as its 2025 Person of the Year in recognition of the sweeping impact artificial intelligence has made across all of society, from industry and education to public discourse. “This was the year when artificial intelligence’s full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out. Whatever the question was, AI was the answer.”
Tech utopians hail this transformation as an unmitigated good, promising unprecedented productivity, efficiency, and progress. Work will be optional! Money will disappear!
But as our mothers warned us when we were little, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
In the midst of these gains, it is worth pausing to consider what we may be losing and where the current AI push, particularly in K–12 education, may ultimately lead us. Not merely to men without chests, but to something worse: bodies with neither brains nor souls. We may gain efficiency, but is it worth losing our humanity? “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)
Bodies Without Souls
Education should cultivate a love for truth, beauty, and goodness — attributes that reflect the nature of God.
Yet these ends were set aside when educators prioritized “workforce readiness” over soul formation. Classrooms grew cold, sterile, and institutional, mirroring this shift. The adoption of Common Core standards accelerated the decline as the study of literature gave way to “informational texts.” Instead of Shakespeare, Tennyson, or Dickens, students are more often asked to read advocacy journalism and technical articles.
Students are no longer asked to interpret meaning, infer from subtext, or analyze lengthy passages. Third grade reading comprehension is now all they need to master, not merely to graduate, but even to move on to higher education.
If you think I am exaggerating, below is a sample question from an SAT practice test:
The following text is from David Barclay Moore’s 2022 novel Holler of the Fireflies. The narrator has just arrived at summer camp, which is far away from his home.
This place was different than I thought it would be. I’d never been somewhere like this before. I did feel scared, but also excited.
According to the text, how does the narrator feel about being at summer camp?
- He feels overjoyed.
- He feels peaceful.
- He feels both scared and excited.
- He feels both angry and jealous.
The consequences of this purely utilitarian approach to reading are profound: diminished capacity for critical thinking; less exposure to rich language and complex syntax; reduced familiarity with irony, abstraction, ambiguity, and metaphor; and a growing inability to analyze tone, subtext, and meaning.
In the age of AI, this abandonment becomes catastrophic.
Without the intellectual discipline that comes from close reading and critical thinking skills grounded in truth, we willingly abandon our tastes, our creativity, and even our intuition to machine-generated content as our preferences and perceptions become reshaped by AI-generated counterfeit.
Philosopher Jean Baudrillard explains how this process works: First, the image is the reflection of a basic reality. Then it masks and perverts a basic reality. Next it masks the absence of a basic reality. Finally, it bears no relation to any reality whatever: It is its own pure simulacrum.
We have all seen this process unfold. A generation ago, if we shared photos of ourselves with friends or family, those photos showed our real selves. Maybe we adjusted the lighting or angle for optimum effect, but they were, nevertheless, unadulterated representations of how we present ourselves to the world. Five years ago, those photos were likely to have been run through some kind of filter to make our skin appear smoother, our eyes look larger and brighter, our lips look fuller, and our flaws and imperfections air-brushed away. Today, images shared online are often AI-generated and bear little resemblance to the reality they supposedly reflect.
Social media feeds are now overflowing with AI-generated images of food, flowers, insects, and animals that bear only the faintest resemblance to anything existing in nature or reality, yet those images are shared with impunity as if they are real, or worse, as if the simulacra were somehow superior to the real.
Plato warned that without the love of beauty, the soul becomes disordered; Kant believed beauty connects us to the sacred. Strip beauty from education, and we produce not only “men without chests,” as Lewis feared, but generations unable to discern what is authentic from what is artificial and ultimately unable to discern right from wrong. In a future dominated by machine-generated content, the cultivated ability to perceive beauty may be the last safeguard of our humanity.
Bodies Without Brains
It would perhaps be helpful to stop using the terminology “artificial intelligence” entirely and instead call these systems what they actually are: “large language models” or LLMs. We deceive ourselves if we pretend there is “an intelligence” behind the systems. Instead, when we engage with an LLM tool, it is a little like shuffling a deck of cards. There are many possible combinations of cards, but you will only ever be able to play the cards that are already in the deck. The LLM cannot create a new suit or invent a new face card. It has no capacity for originality.
True creativity is an inherently human trait that mirrors the divine nature of God. Scripture opens with a powerful affirmation of God’s creative act: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Made in His image (Genesis 1:27) humans share this capacity for creativity; the ability to envision, design, and bring new ideas into existence. Humans have created these LLMs.
But because LLM tools can conveniently and effortlessly simulate creativity while generating persuasive-sounding outputs, users are increasingly relying on them for a range of tasks from art creation to writing to data analysis.
But this cognitive offloading comes at great cost.
Studies show that the more individuals rely on these LLMs for information retrieval and decision making, the lower they scored on critical-thinking measures.
A June 2025 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that subjects who used ChatGPT to write essays demonstrated much less brain activity than those who relied on their own knowledge to formulate arguments or even than those who used Google search to look up relevant information themselves. Users of large language models showed fewer connections between different parts of their brains, including those associated with creativity and working memory. LLMs have also been found to reinforce cognitive biases, while exerting a “homogenizing” effect on students’ work.
Relying on large language models removes the “productive struggle” that our brains engage in to develop cognitive strength and deep thinking.
Writing is a form of productive struggle. It is a process of working out your thoughts and ideas on paper or screen, weighing evidence and discarding ideas that are unsupported, choosing the exact word that will most accurately convey your meaning.
LLMs preempt all that.
We may struggle for hours over a composition and still be unsatisfied with the results. LLMs lead us to question our own competency in the face of seemingly effortless and perfectly constructed content churned out in a matter of seconds. Our tech-forward future is going to be short-circuited by a generation of children whose curiosity was dulled and creativity stifled by instant answers and whose critical thinking skills were never developed.
Lewis warned that the abolition of man begins when we stop teaching what it means to be human. Today, that warning feels prophetic. If we allow “AI” to replace not just our labor but our learning, we risk creating a generation of bodies without brains and without souls.
The question is not whether “AI” will shape the future. It is whether we will remain human in that future.
Melissa Henson is the Senior Policy Advisor for Media and Culture for Concerned Women for America, the nation’s public policy women’s organization, dedicated to promoting biblical values and constitutional principles in public policy. On X: @CWforA
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