AI, Man & God | Prof. John Lennox

this is perhaps one of the scariest aspects of it what we're talking about here is facial recognition by closed circuit television well it starts with facial recognition but we've now got to the stage where in China in particular they can recognize you from the back by your gate by all kinds of things [Music] it's an extraordinary privilege for me to be in Oxford and able to talk personally to professor John Lennox emitter artist professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford for years a professor of mathematics at the University of Wales in Cardiff he's elected extensively all over the world he's written widely interestingly he's spent a lot of time in Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of Communism and it's deeply grieved to see what is happening there and the idea that young men on both sides that he and others have taught and mentored may now be fighting one another into the dust and these dangerous times in which we live but amongst these many writings he's given us gifted us a very useful book he tells me he's already updating it on artificial intelligence and the future of humanity called 2084 which says a lot in the sense that we all know about 1984. I think you're telling us that there are some troubling things coming up John thank you so much for your time that's my pleasure to be with you can we begin over the past two years during the covert pandemic but also with climate change we hear this phrase a lot in Australia and it seems internationally trust the science strikes me that in our allegedly secular age trust and faith are still seen as pretty important we haven't walked away from them do you think those who are accused of not trusting the science are frequently seen as somehow rationally and even the morally deficient in an age of Crisis is science becoming a new savior in inverted commas well trusting The Sciences is fine if it's kept to the things at which science is competent but unfortunately over the past few years there has developed a trust in science that we now call scientism where science is regarded essentially as the only way to truth the only option for a rational thinking person and everything else is fairy stories and all the rest of it and I take a great exception to that because it's plainly false it's false logically because the very statement science is the only way to truth is not a statement of Science and so if it's true it's false so it's logically incoherent to start with but going a little bit more into it it has had huge influence because of people like the late Stephen Hawking for example who wrote in one of his books he he said that philosophy is dead and it seems now as if scientists are holding the torch of truth and that's that's scientism the irony of it is of course that he wrote it in the book where it's all about philosophy of science and it's pretty clear that Hawking brilliant as he was as a mathematical physicist really is a classic Exemplar of what Albert Einstein once said the scientist is a poor philosopher and my response to it is very much would be coached in the kind of attitude that sir Peter meadowward his Nobel Prize winner in Oxford here once wrote he said it's so very easy to see that science meaning the Natural Sciences are limited in that they cannot answer the simple questions of a child where do I come from where am I going to and what is the meaning of life and it seems to me immensely important that we recover that and what metaphor went on to say is we need literature we need philosophy and we need theology as well in my view in order to answer the bigger questions now the late Lord sacks a brilliant philosopher he was the chief Rabbi of the UK and the Commonwealth and so on and one of the guests on the series and one of the guests on this series where I'm delighted here he once wrote a very pithy statement that I found very helpful he said you know science takes things apart to understand how they work and I suppose to understand what they're made of religion puts them together to see what they mean and I think that encapsulates the danger in which we're standing science has spawned technology we've become addicted to technology particularly the more advanced forms of it like AI in my book like virtual reality the metaverse all this kind of stuff we've come addicted to it but we've lost a sense of real meaning and in particular we've lost our moral con Compass Einstein again to quote him made the point long ago he said you can speak of the ethical foundations of science but you cannot speak of the scientific foundations of ethics science doesn't tell you what you ought to do it will tell you of course if you put strict name in your granny's tea it will give her a very hard time in fact it's killer but I can't tell you whether you ought to do it or not to get your hands on her property and so we're left in a scientistic moral vacuum and therefore I feel very strongly that as a scientist of sorts I need to challenge this science is marvelous but it's limited to the questions that can handle and let's realize it does not deal with the most important questions of life and they're the question of who am I what can life and does life mean and where do we get a moral compass before we come to artificial intelligence then I'd just like to explore what you've been talking about a little bit with reference to Britain I love history I've always massively admired Britain and and I know Britain seems to be under self-flagellation on just about every issue you can think of at the moment the decrying of its own cultural Roots but to my way of thinking I think in many ways Britain's been a force for unbelievable good in the world I really do I mean as an Australian I would not live in a free country if it hadn't been for the prime minister of this country standing up when no one else did in 1939 just one minor example but I come here now and I wonder just what the British people believe in so massively shaped by by Christian faith arguments sometimes very ugly over a long period of time but nonetheless profoundly shaped the times reported just a couple of years ago that we've reached the point where 27 of britons believe in God with an additional 16 believing in a higher power among the British as a whole 41 say they believe there is neither a God or a higher power interestingly those in the UK young people the number who said they believe in God Rose a little um and uh nonetheless what you've got here is one of the most secular societies on Earth which not so very long ago was one of the more Christian what's responsible is it tied to a sort of false faith in science amongst other things or is it just it's too hard or is it that um the wars have seen people convinced that you saw two Christian nations fighting people praying to the same God for victory how did it morph so badly to a state of unbelief do you think the country that you've lived in your life I find this a complex and difficult issue because I see different strands in it if you pick up on the science side you go back to Isaac Newton and he give us a picture of the universe that was very much what's called A Clockwork picture the universe running on fixed laws that were according to Newton originally set in place by God but it was a universe that essentially now ran on its own and you can see that that in the 18th century particularly favored what's called deism that is there is a God but he's hands off he started it running and now it runs and it runs very well and you can see with that in the collective psyche particularly in the academy it very rapidly led to questions of is God really necessary now you add that to what was happening in the continent with the Enlightenment and the corrupt Church professing Christianity utterly corrupt and the reaction against that which was fueled to the fire really off a rising secularism and Atheism and then you add to that what was happening in the days around the time of Charles Darwin where you'd Huxley who was an atheist and he resented these clergyman who were actually some of them very good natural philosophers like Wilbur Force actually was a much brighter man than many people think as Darwin pointed out but Huxley in the UK he wanted a church scientific he wanted to turn the churches into the temples to the goddess Sofia of wisdom that that kind of idea so you've got all of that and then you add to that they vitriolic anti-god sentiments that are not just atheism but anti-gold failing LED for quite a long time by Richard Dawkins and other people and that's had huge influence on young peoples one of the reasons I entered The Fray actually because the media then come into this as even more complicated because within the media the dominant View and I think the BBC actually stated this at one time that they favored naturalism the philosophy that Nature's older is and there's no outside there's no Transcendence there's no God so you've got all of that and against it you have a group of people who are often code into letting their faith in God become private this is the tragedy of secularism and you get into that the cancer culture the culture all this kind of stuff where I've got to affirm everything everything's equally valid that you you've got relativism and post-modernism at least and things that people think don't matter you never meet a postmodern business person who goes to a bank manager and says I've got five thousand dollars in the bank and the bank manager says well actually you owe the bank ten thousand oh that's only your truth no that doesn't work in the business world but still you've got this pressure of relativism and so you end up as Michael Burke put it a few years ago talking about faith in God and Britain with the first generation that doesn't have a shared worldview now there's still a Christian influence as even atheists recognize but we've gone a long way in rejecting God and abandoning God and then there's the entertainment industry that will fill everybody's vacuum with noise and we entertain ourselves to death so your question is extremely complex and it would need a more observant person than me to give you a full answer it's it's a huge mix of stuff and any individual person may be an effect of this in completely different ways the reason that it's important I think to set that up is to we now come to what I really wanted to hear your views on artificial intelligence because science is giving us extraordinary capabilities yes but will we Simply Be seduced by it in the sense that artificial intelligence is rapidly creating things that are marvelous that we want to enjoy that may satiate US May Dulles while aspects of the emergence of AI could be very dangerous but before we start to explore that for Ordinary People in the street like me who are not living with us well we I am living with this stuff but don't know where it might go we need to Define some terms what is AI what's I think you call it narrow AI of the sort that we're quite familiar with limited intelligence but highly focused on on on on narrow areas what is artificial general intelligence and where might that go there's a whole number of issues then there's some the whole issue of um of uh transhumanism so can we start with very broadly AI is what John how would you explain it to a Layman we've all heard the term no sure well the first thing to realize is that the word artificial in the phrase artificial intelligence is real and that's not due to me it's due to one of the pioneers of the subject who was happens to be a Christian and the point is that I will take a narrow AI system first because it's much easier to explain and narrow AI system is a system involving high powered computer a huge database and an algorithm that does some picking and choosing that whose output is something that it normally requires human intelligence to do that is if you look at the output you would say normally that it's taken an intelligent person to do that so let's take an example that is very important these days in in medicine and that's x-ray interpreting x-rays so we have a database let's say it has one million X-rays of lungs that are infected with various diseases say related to covet 19. they are then labeled in the database by the world's top experts then they take an x-ray of your lungs or my lungs and the algorithm compares the X-ray of your lungs with the million very rapidly and it produces an output which says John Anderson has got that disease now at the moment that kind of thing which is being ruled out not only in Radiology but all over the place will generally give you a better result than your local hospital will and that's hugely important and hugely valuable but the point is the machine is not intelligent it's only doing what it's programmed to do the database is not intelligence the intelligence is the intelligence of the people that designed the computer know about X-rays and know about medicine but the output is what you would expect from an intelligent doctor so it's in that sense artificial it's a system narrow in the sense it only deals with one thing and all kinds endless kinds of of systems are being ruled out around the world and some of them as you mentioned are extremely beneficial narrow way has been used in the development of vaccines and the spin-off from that technology is enormous in drug development and on and on it goes and I can give you dozens of examples and uh there in my book so that's that's where we start now we are familiar with it and it's worth giving a second example of it because most of us voluntarily are wearing first of all a Tracker it's called a smartphone it knows where we are it could be even recording what we're saying but what it does do of which we're all aware is if we for example buy a book on Amazon we very soon get little pop-ups that say people that bought that book are usually interested in this book and what's happening there is the AI system is creating a database of your preferences your interests your likes your purchases and is using that to compare with its vast database of available things for sale so that it predicts what you might like so this is a huge commercial value and it leads to something else which most of us don't know about and we can come to that later but I'll mention it now which is called surveillance capitalism and there's a book by and the meritar professor at MIT called Susanna juboff and it's regarded as a very serious book because the point she's making is global corporations are using your data and without your permission are selling it off to third parties and making a lot of money out of it and that raises deep privacy issues so now you're straight into the ethics so that's narrower AI okay so let's stay on narrow Ai and extend our road a little bit further down towards broader use you've just talked about us being unaware of in a way of how we're being surveilled yes and it was right here in Oxford I think it may have been you who made the point I can't remember uh in a talk that I heard where the point was made that what's happening in China using artificial intelligence to surveil people is astonishing but in many ways all that information has been collected in the west as well it's just as not collated in this that's correct and this is perhaps one of the scariest aspects of it what we're talking about here is facial recognition by closed circuit television well it starts with facial recognition but we've now got to the stage where in China in particular they can recognize you from the back by your gate by all kinds of things and what has happened is and you can see the positive benefit police want to arrest criminals or thugs or rowdies even in a football crowd and so using facial recognition technology they can pick a person out and arrest them or her well okay but what it can be used for good purposes in that sense in keeping Law and Order can also become particularly in an autocratic State a common instrument of control and here's the huge dilemma which people try to solve how much of your privacy are you prepared to sacrifice for security there's a tension between those two things now in China you mentioned and you're probably thinking about xinjiang where you've got a minority a Muslim minority of uyer people the surveillance level on them is is unbelievable every few hundred meters down the street they have to stop they have to hand in their smartphones the smartphones are loaded with all kinds of stuff by the government their houses have QR codes outside them as to how many people live there and all this kind of thing and I don't know how many it's way over a million I believe are being held as a result of what is being picked up by artificial intelligence systems in re-education centers and the suspicion is that the the culture is being destroyed and eradicated that's the one hand that's in one particular Province but elsewhere in China we have now the social credit system that apparently will be ruled out in the entire country we're given say you and I were given to start with let's say 300 social credit points and we're being trailed if we fail to put our rubbish trash can out at night there'll be marks against us if we go to summer dubious or mix with someone who's political loyalties or suspect we'll get more negative points on the other hand if we pay our debts on time and go green so to speak and all this kind of thing we will amass more crevice points and then if we are going negative the penalties kick in we'll discover we can't get into our favorite restaurant we'll discover we don't get that promotion or don't even get that job we apply for or that we can't travel or that we can't even have a credit card and this is being ruled out and the list of penalties and and things that have actually been recorded is just very serious now what amazed me when I first came across this was the fact that many people welcomed us they think it's wonderful they're both I've got a thousand points so many of you got and they don't realize that the whole of life is becoming controlled in the interest ostensibly of having a healthy Society so it is talk about 1984.

now this is not futuristic speculation this is already happening George Orwell you mentioned him he wrote 1984. he talked about Big Brother watching you and that technology would eventually it is doing it this is narrow AI this is not futuristic in any way it's what's actually happening at the moment and you mentioned briefly the fact that all this stuff exists in the West except and the point has been made forcibly it's not quite yet under one Central Authority and control but it is coming we have credit searches we have all kinds of stuff that is beginning to creep in in the US and in the UK and I presume also in Australia and also we have even police forces here I believe who want the whole caboodle in here and want to be able to exert a much more serious level of control and it is frightening because what it does for human rights is is well so so it occurs to me that you know I love history as I've mentioned authoritarian regimes have collapsed under their own weight typically the people who've risen up one way or another and there's been an overturning we've never had autocratic regimes that have had this surveillance capacity there's you know an estimated 400 million pro-circuit television sets in China that's one for about every three people I mean it's mind-boggling oh it is mind-boggling and even here in the UK what I'm told is that you're on a closed circuit TV Camera every five minutes when you're moving around so it is very serious and of course the irony is as I hinted at earlier here we are with our smartphones that have got all these capacities certainly at the Audio Level and we're voluntarily wearing them so we're voluntarily seeding part of our autonomy and our rights really to to these machines when we don't really know what has been done with all the information so we have a huge problem and someone has said we're sleepwalking into all of this so that we're captured by it we're imprisoned by it and we wake up too late because the central Authority has got so much control that we cannot Escape anymore so let's go back to where I started science is blessing us because they are fantastic a lot of these things you know with incredible technology and capabilities that you've alluded to some of the useful things I mean I I love the way in which I can in my car say Hey Siri call my wife yeah they're just fantastic but but the my my question about what we now believe goes to the heart of who do we think we are what is our status on what basis will we be alert enough to recognize we need to make tough decisions and then on what basis will we make the ethical decisions around how far this goes I know it's a complicated question but there's another element to it because we haven't even got into General artificial intelligence yet we're still talking as I understand it about narrow artificial intelligence just masses of it yes those surveillance cameras and the people in their desks in Beijing you know collating the information and what have you there might be a lot of information and a lot of capability but those cameras can't think of another task uh you know how to go and bring my boss a cup of coffee it's still narrow that's absolutely right and before we've got to general intelligence yes and what we've got to realize several things first of all the the speed of technological development outpaces ethical under a penny by a huge Factor an exponential Factor secondly some people are becoming acutely aware that they need to think about ethics and some of the global players to be fair do think about this because they find the whole development scary is it going to get out of control and someone made a very interesting point uh I think it was a mathematician who works in artificial intelligence and she was referring to the Book of Genesis and the Bible she said God created something uh got out of control us we are now concerned that our Creations may get out of control and I suppose in particular one major concern is autonomous or self-guiding weapons and and that's a huge ethical field here's a man sitting in a trailer in the Nevada desert and he's controlling a drone in the Middle East and it fires a rocket and destroys a group of people and of course he just sees a puff of smoke on his screen and that's it done and there's a huge distance between the operation of that lethal mechanism and we only go up one more from that where these lethal flying bombs so to speak control themselves we've got swarming drones and we got all kinds of stuff who's going to police that and of course every country wants them because they want them to have a a military Advantage so we trying to police that and to get International agreement which some people are trying to do now I don't think we must be too negative about this and I'm cautious here but we did manage at least temporarily who knows what's going to happen now to get nuclear weapons at least controlled and partly banned so some success but whether with what's up to Ukraine at the moment with Putin and so on he could shoot a nuclear tactical weapon or it could be controlled autonomously make its own decision yeah but and then where do we go from there and these things are exercising people at a much lower level but it's still the same how do you write an ethical program for self-driving cars yeah so that if there's an accident that can't be avoided [Music] yeah again um that you put for ethical students of Ethics it was very interesting to see how people respond to switch tracks dilemma is simply that you have a train hurtling down a track and there's a points and it can be directed down the left hand to the right hand side down the left hand side there's a crowd of children stranded in a bus on the track on the right hand side there's an old man sitting in his cart with a donkey and you are holding the lever do you direct the train to hit the children or the old man that kind of thing but we're faced with that all the time and it's hugely difficult without going near AGI yet yet and let's let's come to our AGI yeah what is Agi and because up until now we're talking about intelligence it's not human it can't make judgments it can't switch tasks it can't multitask it can just be built up to do an enormous thing one thing even though that might be massively intrusive as we've talked about with surveillance technology correct but now we're talking about something different altogether General yeah general intelligence means well there have been several things the rough idea is to have a system that can do everything and more that human intelligence can do do you have better do it faster and so on a kind of superhuman intelligence which you could think of possibly as at least in its initial stages being built up out of a whole lot of separate narrow AI systems building them up and that will surely be done to a large extent but research on AGI and of course it's the stuff of Drams it's the stuff of Science Fiction so people absolutely love it and interest in it moves in two very distinct directions there's first of all the attempt to build machines to do it that is that are based on Silicon computer plastic metal all that kind of stuff and then there is the idea of taking existing human beings and enhancing them with bioengineering drugs all that kind of thing even incorporating various aspects of technology so that you're making a cyborg cybernetic organism a combination of biology and Technology to move into the future so that we move beyond the human and this is where the idea of transhumanism comes in moving beyond the humans and of course the view is of many people that humans are just the stage in the gradual uh evolution of biological organisms that have developed according to no particular direction through the blind forces of nature but now we have intelligence so we can take that into our own hands and begin to reshape the generations to come and make them according to our specification now that uses raises huge questions the first one is of course has to Identity what are these things going to be and who am I in that kind of a situation now AGI I mentioned is something that science fiction deals with a lot the reason I take it seriously is it's not only science fiction writers that take it seriously for example one of our top scientists possibly the top scientist who is our astronomer Royal Lord Martin Reese he takes this very seriously he says in some generations hence um we might effectively merge with technology now that idea of humans merging with technology is again very much in science fiction but the fact that some scientists are taking it seriously means in the end that the general public are going to be filled with these ideas speculative of the one hand but serious scientists espousing them are the other so that we need to be prepared and get people thinking about them which is why I wrote my book and in particular in that book I engaged not one scientists but with the historian Yuval noahi yeah there's really a historian yes of course you can to quote something that he said yeah so beautifully he actually said this because I'm glad you've come to him we humans should get used to the idea that we're no longer mysterious Souls we're now hackable animals everybody knows what being hacked means now and once you can hack something you can usually also engineer it let's put that in for a listeners as you go on with your insurance man that's a typical Harare remark and he wrote two major best-selling books one called sapiens Homo sapiens human beings and the other hamadeos and it's with that second book that I interact a great deal because it has huge influence around the world and what he's talking about in that book is re-engineering human beings and producing homode or spelled one small day he says think of Greek gods turning humans into Gods something way beyond their current capacities and so on now I'm very interested in that uh from a philosophical and from a Biblical perspective because that idea of humans becoming Gods is a very old idea and it's being revived and in a very big way now to make a precise or more precise Harari sees that 21st century as having two major agendas according to him the first is to as he puts it to solve the technical problem of physical death so that people may live forever they can die but they don't have to and he says technical problems are Technical Solutions and that's where we are with physical deaths that's number one the second agenda item is to massively enhance human happiness humans want to be happy so we've got to do that how are we going to do that re-engineering them from ground up genetically every other way drugs etc etc all kinds of different ways adding technology implants all kinds of things until we move the humans from the animal stage which he believes happen through no plan or guidance we with our Superior brain power we'll turn them into superhumans we'll turn them into little gods and of course then comes the massive range of speculation if we do that will they eventually take over and so on and so forth so that is transhumanism connected with artificial intelligence connected with the idea of the Superhuman and people love the idea and you probably know there are people particularly in the USA who've had their brains Frozen after death I hope that one day they're going to be able to upload their contents onto some silicon-based thing that will endure forever and that will give them some sense of immortality now if you notice those two things John solving the problem of physical death re-engineering humans to become little gods that has all to do with wanting immortality and as a Christian I have a great deal to say about that because what's happening I believe in the transhumanist the desire for that is a parody on what Christianity actually is all about doesn't it to some extent that reflect that I think the very great majority of us are conscious at deep down we don't want to think we'll come to an end oh no we don't I'm an individual who actually has no great aspiration to live to an advanced old age well I'm the same um frankly um not to say I don't enjoy life doesn't mean that at all just means I don't inspired a great physical old age Frailty and what have you um and I have a different perspective on what happens after that but deep down I don't want to think it ends without a physical death and I think that's pretty much hotwired into all of us I think it's hard to wire it and that's important this business of what's hardwired at the human beings version so to speak I think it's vastly important many years ago I came across that idea in the moral sense C. S Lewis talking about in his book and it's relevant to what we're talking about the moment the abolition of manners and appendix at the end where he points out that all around the world look at every culture they may differ but they've got certain moral rules in common it looks as if morality is hardwired I believe it is by a benevolent Creator but now we come we come up to this and we see that there's hard wiring again at this particular level God has set eternity in the human heart now of course that's a theistic perspective but if you take the atheistic take on it then you've got to explain where it comes from and again I found C.

S Lewis as always right done the money so to speak he he makes the point and I'm going to paraphrase it slightly it would be very strange to find yourself in a world where you got thirsty and there was no such thing as water I I think that's a very powerful thing that longing and C.