Tolkien, AI, and the shadow of the machine
While researching Tolkien for a tour, a clear thread emerged: a deep distaste for the mechanical mindset and a corresponding love of the natural and hand-crafted, rooted not only in aesthetics but in concerns about domination and spiritual flattening. Tolkien associated “machines” with the will-to-power, a coercive shortcut that distances people from living realities, a theme reflected in his letters and widely discussed by commentators on his work.
In the age of AI, digital identity systems, and the discovery that society can function with many confined indoors, it is consoling—and bracing—to remember these questions are ancient. The suspicion that devices can mediate and even deform relations to the world runs through history, from Egyptian reverence for the Nile to modern debates on computation and consciousness.
Lessons from ancient Egypt
Jeremy Naydler’s account of Egyptian water-lifting devices—most notably the shaduf—shows that civilizations do not adopt technologies neutrally; they accept or resist them according to their deepest consciousness. Egyptians knew of such devices for centuries yet resisted their use, even as Mesopotamia employed them, because inserting machinery between themselves and the Nile threatened a sacred bond central to their way of life.
When Egyptians gradually accepted water-lifting tools, it marked more than practical progress—it expressed a shift toward a utilitarian relation to nature and away from participatory reverence. Technologies embody metaphysics, and the tools a culture builds both reveal and reshape how it knows the world, which is Naydler’s central claim about technology and consciousness.
Writing versus oral tradition
Across cultures, the transition from oral to written knowledge was experienced not only as an advance but as an existential trade: oral transmission embeds memory in community, performance, and place, while writing externalizes living speech into fixed marks that can be stored and controlled. Traditions that hesitated to adopt writing intuited that the shift would change them—altering how knowledge lives in bodies, relationships, and rituals.
Seen through Tolkien’s lens, this is a kind of mechanization of thought: moving from participatory presence to external apparatus, from living word to technical record. The risk is not writing itself but forgetting what oral culture cultivates—context, communal memory, and a form of knowing grounded in encounter rather than extraction.
Francis Bacon and the mechanical turn
Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum championed systematic experiment and inductive method, seeking to overcome the idols of the mind and to found a new operative science aimed at reliable power over nature. This revolution decisively privileged objective, quantitative knowledge and oriented inquiry toward practical mastery in ways that shaped subsequent technological development.
Naydler and sympathetic readers argue that this also reconfigured consciousness toward machine logic: the world (and eventually the mind) became intelligible as a mechanism to be modeled, predicted, and controlled, culminating in computers as “logical thought patterns exteriorised.” On this reading, the computer is not an accident of engineering but the apotheosis of a cultural commitment to calculative reason, with a lineage that runs through binary looms and mechanical calculators to electronic computation.
Bacon’s legacy is powerful and fruitful, but it invites criticisms: reductionism that flattens qualitative and symbolic dimensions; fragmentation that obscures wholes; and an ethos of conquest that can eclipse reverence and generate ethical blind spots when power outpaces reflection. These critiques warn against mistaking one way of knowing for the whole of wisdom while acknowledging the immense gains of empirical method.
What Tolkien might say about AI
Tolkien’s writings often treat machinery as the mythic expression of domination—the ring as the machine made metaphysical, a shortcut that bypasses the slow, formative work by which skill and virtue grow. He would likely ask of AI not whether it is clever, but what kind of relationship it establishes between human beings and meaning, and whether it trains habits of coercion or of cultivation.
Perhaps the fear is not of technology or even mechanization as such, but of forgetting what might be lost along the way: reverent bonds with the more-than-human world, the communal memory of oral lifeways, and modes of wisdom that exceed calculation. The task, as old as Egypt and as timely as AI, is to remember what kind of consciousness tools express—and to choose to cultivate what makes life genuinely whole.
