2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity | John C. Lennox

we humans are insatiably curious [Music] we've been asking questions since the dawn of history we've especially been asking the big questions about origin and destiny [Music] where do i come from and where am i going the problem is that these are not easy questions and with the rise of artificial intelligence the questions become even more daunting [Music] will technology change what it means to be human how should we think about the artificial intelligence we encounter in everyday life will all this change the way people think about god i believe that there are real credible answers to these questions to show that christianity has some very serious sensible evidence-based things to say about the nature of our quest for super intelligent that it is real answers way beyond anything that a. i prophets can even dream about every author has a biography and i found when i read books that the more i know about the author the better i can understand why they write what they do and in my case i come from northern ireland which is a country sadly infamous for terrorism and violence and i grew up in the city of armagh which was a particularly violent center the violence was just beginning when i left to go to cambridge but what was very important was the way in which i was brought up by my parents they were very unusual people in the sense that we lived in a sectarian country divided across protestantism and catholicism but my parents they were christian but they were not sectarian and that was demonstrated by the fact that my father who ran a medium-sized country store he tried to employ as best he could people from both communities and the shop was bombed because of that my brother nearly killed and i asked him once why he'd done that and he said well i believe that the biblical account of human life is correct that human beings no matter what they believe are made in the image of god therefore of infinite value and i try to treat them that way and that has become a life principle for me and we'll be looking at that a little bit later the significance of human life but the second thing i got from my parents was they loved me enough to allow me to think and that i discovered later was unusual because the country was full of religious bigotry but my father in particular read widely although he didn't have the education i later got and encouraged me to read as widely as i could when i was about 14 he gave me a copy of the communist manifesto and i said have you read that he said no but you should i said why because you need to know what other people think so with that background i went up to cambridge to rate mathematics although i was originally interested firstly in languages and secondly in electrical engineering i ended in cambridge because my school headmaster thought i might have a chance of getting there and i suppose one of the first interesting things about cambridge was that c. s lewis was still there and i was able to attend some of the very last lectures he ever gave but i was challenged when i got to cambridge very early on a fellow student said to me do you believe in god and then he apologized and he said i shouldn't have asked you that you're irish all you irish believe in god and you fight about it and of course i'd heard that many times but i thought i've got a real opportunity now at cambridge to meet people from different world views and to find out what makes them tick to befriend them and so i searched for people who did not share my christian world view and i've been befriending people like that ever since so what that explains about me is that i've always been since childhood interested in the big questions the big questions of life the big worldview questions and being a mathematician i've wondered well where does mathematics fit in science and then where does science fit in our view of reality does science tell us everything or is there more to be found is there a transcendent dimension which of course i believed in as a christian but i wanted to expose my faith in god and christ to questioning and so for all of my life i have opened myself made myself vulnerable if you'd like to facing really big questions and i spend my time playing socrates asking the big questions and i'm looking at some of the big questions with which developments in artificial intelligence confront us questions like this will we be able one day to construct artificial life will we be able to re-engineer humans so that they become super intelligent and what implications will advances in a.

i have on our world views in general and indeed on the god question in particular now i have never personally constructed an autonomous vehicle or weapon indeed i've never designed a machine learning system but you don't have to be able to do either of these practical things in order to have an intelligent discussion about their implications my background is in pure mathematics of the philosophy of science and that has given me a keen interest in the public understanding of science so let's begin with human curiosity about the questions where do i come from and where am i going our answers to the first shape our concepts of who we are a person who has lost his memory often loses his identity and has to be given information about their past in order to reconstruct their identity so the past determines our identity but then the second question the matter of the future where we're going our answers to that question give us our goals to live for the sad tragedy is that people commit suicide and often leave a note behind them saying i had nothing to live for so we live for the future and our identity is shaped by the past and both of those fill up our world view and help to define it now what is our worldview it's the narrative within which we live our lives the narrative that give our lives their meaning and over the years many answers to these questions of course have been proposed by science philosophy religion politics and so on and two of the most famous futuristic scenarios are the novels brave new world by aldous huxley and george orwell's 1984 which suggested my present title both novels are dystopian that is according to the oxford english dictionary at least they describe an imaginary place or condition that is as bad as possible however they are very different the famous sociologist dale postman says orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression but at huxley's vision no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy maturity and history as he saw it people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that undo their capacity to think orwell envisaged the arrival of a surveillance state the development of face recognition and tracker technology using ai has now made this possible and is reason enough in itself to write about ai whose goal is to build computer technology that can do the sorts of things that a human mind can do in the hope of eventually producing super intelligence billions of dollars are now being invested in artificial intelligence and we wonder where it's all going to lead for good or ill on the plus side better quality of life through digital assistance medical innovation and human enhancement of the one hand and on the minus side fear of job losses and orwellian surveillance societies on the other we need to separate reality from fantasy and hype so let's be very clear at the start that most of the successes so far in artificial intelligence have to do with building systems that do one thing and only one thing that would normally take human intelligence to implement for instance like working out your buying preferences this is called narrow ai by contrast artificial general intelligence agi is the very ambitious quest to build systems which some think will surpass human intelligence within a relatively short time even by 2084 on that score three contemporary best-selling books came to my attention firstly two books by israeli historian yuval noah harari sapiens which deals as its title suggests with the first of our questions the origins of humanity and secondly homo deus a brief history of tomorrow which deals with humanity's future the third book is like huxleys and orwells a novel origin by dan brown it focuses on the use of a. i to answer both of our questions in the form of a page-turning sci-fi thriller that is likely to be read by billions of people brown also focuses on the question will god survive science a question in various forms that has motivated me to write several of my books that work has led me to the conclusion that god will more than survive science but it has also led me seriously to question whether atheism will survive science a very controversial viewpoint i know one of dan brown's main characters at origin is a billionaire of course computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert edmund kirsch who claims to have solved the questions of life's origin and human destiny he intends to use his results to fulfill his longtime goal to employ the truth of science to destroy the myth of religions meaning in particular the three abrahamic faith judaism christianity and islam perhaps inevitably he concentrates on christianity his solutions when they are eventually revealed to the world are a product of his expertise in artificial intelligence his take of the future involves the technological modification of human beings now it should be pointed out right away that it is not only historians and science fiction writers but some of our most respected scientists who are now suggesting that humanity itself may well be changed by future technology for example uk astronomer royal lord rhys says we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of the way we behaved the term a. i or artificial intelligence was coined in a summer school held at the mathematics department of dartmouth university in 1956 a conference that was organized by john mccarthy who said a.

i is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines however the idea of constructing machines that can simulate aspects of human and indeed animal behavior has a very long history some of which we describe particularly the brilliant work of alan turing during world war ii to decode messages encrypted by the germans on their enigma machine more recent landmark achievements that attracted huge public attention were ibm's deep blue computer which beat world chess champion gary kasparov in 1997 and in 2016 google's alphago program became the first to beat an unhandicapped professional human go player using machine learning early robots and ai systems did not involve learning key to the current machine learning process is the idea of an algorithm which may be of various types symbolic mathematical and so on the word algorithm itself is derived from the name of a famous persian mathematician astronomer and geographer mohammed even moussa al parismi who lived around 780 to 850. an algorithm is quotes a precisely defined set of mathematical or logical operations for the performance of a particular task according to the oxford english dictionary the key feature of an algorithm is that once you know how it works you can solve not only one problem but a whole class of problems one of the most famous examples is the euclidean algorithm which is used to find the greatest common divisor of two positive integers and which many of us learned at school in a typical contemporary artificial intelligence system the relevant algorithms are embedded in computing software that sorts filters and selects various pieces of data that are presented to it in general terms sensor system can use training data to quotes learn machine learning that is to recognize identify and interpret digital patterns such as images sound speech text data and so on in short a machine learning system takes in information about the past and makes decisions or predictions when it is presented with new information in a lot of early work in artificial intelligence algorithms were designed to solve a particular problem in more recent ai a general algorithm is designed which quotes learns a solution to the problem often the human developers don't know an explicit algorithm for solving the problem and don't know how the system arrives at its conclusions early chess playing programs were of the first type even deep blue was more in this category whereas the modern go software is of the second type but here are some examples of ai systems so if we can make this more precise and clear for instance amazon uses algorithms that trace your online purchases and mine too and uses statistical methods to suggest new products you or i might like to buy algorithms have been devised to sort through job applications and suggest the applicant most suited to the job ai systems are already up and running that work with the database consisting of many thousands of x-rays of lungs for example labeled according to their states of health by top-level medical professionals in that sense the system learns about the various diseases from the labels the system then compares an x-ray of your lungs or mind with this database in order to check whether or not you have say a specific type of lung cancer such a system is an example of what is called supervised machine learning and has been very successful in recent years a great deal of research is being done in another direction to develop ai systems that can translate from one language to another as in google translate facial recognition is now highly developed one rather amusing application is to use artificial intelligence face recognition technology in a pub in order to recognize who's next to the line to get a drink at the bar and so avoid unfair cue jumping closed circuit television cameras are now ubiquitous and are used by police to track criminal activity however of course such surveillance systems can also be used for social control we shall look later at the major ethical issues that arise from such applications it's pretty obvious from even this short list that many if not all of these developments raise ethical questions from financial manipulation and crime to invasion of privacy and social control the danger is that people are carried away with the idea if it can be done it should be done and they're carried away mentally without thinking carefully through potential ethical problems you see the big question to be faced is this how can an ethical dimension be built into an algorithm that is itself devoid of heart soul and mind and it's here that the language of a.