By Auston Habershaw
Auston Habershaw goes in depth on the troubling commonalities between our world and his inspirations for “Dead God’s Algorithm” in our [July/August issue, on sale now!]
When I was a kid, me and my friends used to joke that the holodeck, from Star Trek, would be the last invention human beings ever developed. Why? Well, if you could walk into a room and, just by talking aloud, “have” or “create” whatever you wanted or had ever dreamed, why would you leave the room? Why would you bother learning anything new? If necessity is the mother of invention, then satisfaction is its grave. If you are without want, you are without drive.
HG Wells explored this idea in his 1895 novel The Time Machine in exhaustive detail. The Eloi, resting upon the paradise of the Earth’s surface in 802,701 AD, have everything they need: food, shelter, clothing, health, and leisure. There are no more diseases, no more crime, no more need for them to strive for anything more. Humanity had regressed, in the Eloi, to delicate shadows of what Wells (in classically chauvinistic Victorian style) termed the “manliness” of his present age. In the book, his Time Traveler laments:
It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. . . . For the first time, I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which we are at present engaged. . . . One triumph of a united humanity over Nature had followed another. . . . And the harvest was what I saw! (Wells, pg 26)
The Eloi are not the failure of humanity, but rather the logical consequence of its triumph.
Now, of course, if you know the book, you know that the Time Traveler doesn’t have the whole picture as of this narrative. He cycles through several theories regarding the degeneration of the human species—laziness, Communism, catastrophe. Then, finally, he hits upon the truth of it: the Eloi were once the aristocrats, the oligarchs. The Morlocks were once the laborers. As an existence of pure leisure weakened the oligarchs into Eloi, a life of dark and unrewarded toil corrupted the laboring class into the Morlocks. And so, quite literally, the Morlocks eat the rich. Their ease had robbed the Eloi of their humanity, just as the Morlocks toil had robbed them of theirs, and all that was left was a stable, brutal pantomime of hunter and hunted, of hungry shepherds and fattened flocks.
Now, bear with me here, since this is going to seem like a jump: one of the consistent underlying motivations behind my creation of the Union of Stars—the world of Faceless the Tohrroid assassin—was an exploration of the Fermi Paradox. How is it the universe can be so old and we can’t hear anything, no matter how we hold our ear to the keyhole? Where is everyone? There are many explanations for this (the one I hold to is just that everything is too far away for us to hear, but that’s neither here nor there), but the one I play with in the Union of Stars is the Dark Forest theory. Popularized by Cixin Liu in his sequel to The Three Body Problem, the basic idea is that the universe is full of life, it’s just that the ones that survive don’t advertise. In Faceless’s world, electromagnetic communication is taboo, because it calls out for attention. Pump out radio waves, and you’ll draw in a Marshal or even draw the attention of the Bodani Collective. Those civilizations that last develop alternate means of communication that are more secure.
In “Dead God’s Algorithm,” the Bodani’s infiltration and corruption of Moja society is just one manifestation of the Great Filter—the thing that keeps civilizations from going interstellar. The Moja are a sophisticated technological species and, like us, they have reached out to the stars. Who is out there?
At the same time, they are developing their own technology. Having conquered their natural environment, they seek to conquer their industrialized one. The invent electronic computers and global communications. They take the same steps we have.
They “invent” AI—algorithmic systems that enable them to become more efficient, more useful. And, also, less Moja. This process is hastened by the Bodani, who are more than happy to deliver technological breakthroughs if it means increased Moja reliance on their own systems. Systems that do not have the Moja’s best interests at heart. Again, I have my little frog aliens face the same question the Eloi pose and the same problem the holodeck represents: if all your thinking can be done for you, if the world is perfectly efficient and orderly, if everything works, why would you bother being you anymore? No need to work that hard, friends. Relax. Let the algorithm take over. Allow your brain to atrophy and your thought processes to automate and . . . drift away.
Already there is evidence with our own nascent journeys into so-called “AI” (machine learning algorithms, really—complex statistical pattern matching systems. If you want to insist that’s no different than human beings, that’s your business, but I feel the quotes are warranted here) that use of these models is atrophying our own capacity for critical thought. It is hastening a process already begun by the convenience of the smart phone—by enabling you to outsource your thinking to a little rectangle in your pocket (called “cognitive offloading”), why would you need to develop those aspects of your brain that enable you to do the things that the computer can do for you. So, you run into a lot of people younger than myself who have never read a map and have difficulty navigating without GPS systems, you have people having difficulty in social settings as the social media systems in their phone make it so they don’t have to develop those connections in their brain, and so on and so forth. The advent of AI stands to accelerate this already accelerating trend. While people who have already attained high degrees of education have a buffer against this atrophy, for younger people it represents a larger danger. To quote Michael Gerlich in his study published in the academic journal Societies in 2025:
Our research demonstrates a significant negative correlation between the frequent use of AI tools and critical thinking abilities, mediated by the phenomenon of cognitive offloading. This suggests that while AI tools offer undeniable benefits in terms of efficiency and accessibility, they may inadvertently diminish users’ engagement in deep, reflective thinking processes. Younger participants who exhibited higher dependence on AI tools scored lower in critical thinking compared to their older counterparts.
Friends, what if this is the Great Filter? Not nuclear Armageddon or environmental collapse, but the gradual pulping of our brains into a slurry unable to solve any problem without tools created by earlier generations that we cannot hope to duplicate? What if the universe is not filled with barren planets or aggressive space-faring predators, but just gardens full of Eloi, listlessly scrolling their versions of social media until their final oblivion?
Faceless, in its characteristically violent way, finds a “solution” to this potentially dystopian future. I fear for our own children and our own future. There is nothing so detrimental to progress as ease, and I don’t mean that in a “starving artist” sort of way, but in the very simple way that says all of us are striving for something better, but not all of us have the wherewithal to see the trap in what appears to be “better.” We can do better than AI running our lives, and especially than this particular kind of “AI.” We need to keep trying, though, or we may never find it. This is my fear, and this is the bloody minded “hope” that Faceless, in its brutal way, is seeking to give to the Moja.
References
Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006
Wells, H.G. (1995). The Time Machine. New York, NY: Dover Publications
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