(The New Atlantis) – The new cold war means a race with China over AI, biotech, and more. This poses a hard dilemma: win by embracing technologies that make us more like our enemy — or protect ourselves from tech dehumanization but become subjects to a totalitarian menace.

In his later novel Erewhon, Butler imagined a people who take his advice and smash their machines — the inspiration for the “Butlerian Jihad” in Frank Herbert’s Dune. But to make his central conceit plausible, by the loose rules governing a Victorian satire, Butler had to drop the society of Erewhon in the middle of “nowhere” (an anagram of the name), in a remote valley cut off from the rest of the world. The Erewhonians, Butler recognized, would never have survived centuries of Luddism anywhere else: they would have vanquished the machines only to be vanquished by an antagonist lacking their technological caution. In the real world, Butler suggests, we face a choice: Will you preserve your humanity or your security?

This may be just the choice we face today. From Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, champions of new technologies often argue, with good reason, that we must embrace them because, if we don’t, the Chinese will — and then where will we be? (Read More)