John Lennox on "2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity"

Hey listen this is the third annual John Warick Montgomery lecture in evidential apologetics now in 2021 the man himself John W Montgomery was here to talk about this was his tit well roughly his topic not his title how is it that unbelievers persist in unbelief despite the clear evidences of the Christian faith and last year mark lanir himself spoke from his book atheism on trial and this time John Linux from Oxford University is here to speak about 2084 artificial intelligence and the future of humanity I am so pleased about that now inside of your uh

program is a brochure that tells a little bit about an academic Academy on apologetics that takes place annually in strawberg now it's amazing we would encourage you to look and read more about that while you're here would you thank John Linx for being here all the way from Oxford and give him a warm Texas welcome are you sitting com L ladies and gentlemen well so am I I learned to do this in Siberia and then I discovered it was totally biblical rabbis sit to teach and I'm so thrilled at this late stage in my life

to have been allowed to come into contact with the laner foundation and it's it's a real high point for me to be invited to come amongst you to this facility which has enormous potential for reaching the world for Christ the initiatives are mindblowing but they're real and I believe they're going to have a wonderful future and it's been an honor for me to get to know the senior people Mark and his wife the two Davids and they have welcomed me with a warmth that I think is really characteristic of this part of the world and

I should probably say to you how are yall now I see that I'm not like the bishop an elderly Bishop who turned up at a little Country Church in the depths of the CWS in England Eng land near where I live on a Sunday to preach and as he mounted the pulpit stairs he noticed that there were only three elderly people in the congregation and because he was like me frail he was being helped up to the pulpit and as he ascended he said to the local Minister did you tell them I was coming and

the minister said no but word seems to have got around now you have asked me to speak on a hugely important topic and I'm going to try my best to introduce it to you in the context of deep concern on the part of many leading thinkers eel Wilson is a brilliant American entomologist and he said that the real problem of humanity is the following we have Paleolithic emotions Medi evil institutions and Godlike technology and it's terrifically dangerous until we answer those huge questions of philosophy that the philosophers abandoned a couple of generations ago where do

we come from who are we where are we going rationally we're on very thin ground I disagree with him about the philosophers we are fortunate I think in the Christian world to have some distinguished philosophers some in this room tonight who have not abandoned these big questions which are the famous three questions of Emanuel Kant we have ways of dealing with this fundamental set of problems even though they are terrifically dangerous and one brilliant way of formulating those answers was given by the late Lord Jonathan Sachs the chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom science he

said takes things apart to see how they work religion puts them together to see what they mean and tragically the emphasis over the centuries on the Natural Sciences and their domination and I'm a scientist and I love science has as the recent writer neuroscientist polymath Ian mcgilchrist has said it's left us in a world where we understand how almost everything works and we know the meaning of nothing and so he's written a book called the matter with things but what are these scary things well they're not just the product of overheated imagination of Science Fiction

writers they are coming from some of the most distinguished Minds in our generation like for example our astronomer Royal Lord Martin Ree talking about our topic he says the abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science but this activity spanning tens of Millennia at most will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic postum era so in the far future it won't be the minds of humans but those of machines that will most fully understand the cosmos now of course we are all familiar with two

famous books dystopias written about the future oldest huxley's Brave New world and George Orwell's 1984 and my title 2084 was given to me by a very famous atheist in Oxford who when he discovered I was writing on artificial intelligence he said I've got a title for you and he said you should call it 2084 so I said if I do I'll acknowledge you and I did Neil Postman in a fascinating book amusing ourselves to death wrote some time ago contrasting these two analyses of the future or well he said warns that we will be overcome

by an externally imposed oppression big brother but in huxley's Vision no big brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy maturity and history people will come to love their oppression to adore the technologies that undo do their capacities to think so Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us huxly feared that what we love will ruin us and in our current culture it seems to me that both things are happening simultaneously we have a LoveHate relationship with what is going on now the response to the technologically driven oppression in terms of surveillance reactions

are very different H some people think and here's an example a very famous web engine developer and he said that AI doesn't mean that the end of humanity is nigh it's maths code computers built by people owned by people controlled by people the idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it is motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a Superstition a superstitious handwave in short AI doesn't want it doesn't of goals it doesn't want to kill you because it's not alive AI is a

machine and it's not going to come alive anymore than your toaster mind you when my toaster this morning threw two bits of toast up 2 feet in the air I thought maybe it was coming alive so that's one View but here's a different view by a man who's known as The Godfather of AI Jeffrey Hinton who left Google recently to be free to speak about what he saw as the dangers of it so here's what he says but as soon as it gets really complicated we don't actually know what's going on anymore than we know

what's going on in your brain we designed the learning of algorithm but when this learning algorithm then interacts with data it produces complicated neural networks that are good at doing things but we don't here it comes to the second time we don't really understand exactly how they do those things one of the ways in which these systems might Escape control is by writing their own computer code to modify themselves and that's something we need to seriously worry about so that puts forward a picture some of it optimistic some of a pessimistic of the future but

what are we talking about we're talking about artificial intelligence but what is it and it comes in two sorts as many of you will know there's narrow Ai and a narrow AI system typically does one thing and one thing only that normally requires an intelligent human being Radiology gives us a very good example an AI system for analyzing chest x-ray images uses an algorithm that's just simply a set of step-by-step instructions embedded in computer software that selects a fit for my x-ray of my lungs from a huge database of X-rays of other people that are

labeled by doctors with the diseases that they represent and it then gives a diagnosis and that diagnosis these days will normally be better than what your local hospital can give you there's been a recent phenomenal development and adaptive radiotherapy for tumors artificial intelligence reduces 2 weeks work to 5 minutes and that kind of Advance is spectacularly beneficial to human beings now what we're going to find is this that like any technology AI is like a sharp knife a sharp knife can be used to do surgery it can be used to commit murder and the more

advanced a technology the more it can be used for good and the more it can be used for evil so let's just have a look run through briefly some current examples of narrow AI digital assistance Siri Alexa and so on online shopping I buy a book few minutes later a popup tells me that people who bought my book often bought the other book then there's the phenomenal research conducted by people like Deus hassabis one of the Geniuses of the AI world who solved a problem that was was thought to be completely intractable and that is

how do proteins fold and to make new molecules and to use them for the development of medicine and so on then AI is used for job interviews or non-ins where people never come face to face with an individual but an artificial intelligence poses questions to them and decides whether they're suitable for the job and of course now the dangers start because bias is built in the programs are made by humans and humans are biased and some of these interviewing programs have been seen to be biased against women for example against people of color and so

on and so forth and there's a whole industry out there trying to deal with the increasingly intransigent problem of the ethics of artificial intelligence because the one thing that's obvious is this the technology is rising at a vast pace and the ethics is chugging along very far behind then there's crime prevention uh and this brings me again to the kind of face recognition technology which is incredibly sophisticated it's no longer face recognition the Chinese have developed cameras that can recognize you by your gate from any direction the back the front anything and of course police

forces love to have this to pick out a terrorist in a crowd but the flip side of it is there's an entire population in King Jang in China that is being monitored unbelievably and is being oppressed and suppressed by being subject to to the most intrusive and constant surveillance and now comes the huge problem you want to be secure we all want to be secure how much of your privacy are you prepared to give up to be secure and that's a very difficult problem to decide so these Technologies are being used particularly in sing Chang

to control a population and in fact to remove its ethnic roots and re-educated it but as a famous article in this warned all the technology that can do this is available in the west and the writer pointed out the only difference is it is not yet in the west under the control of a single authoritarian Central Authority then we've got chat GPT now these are all just narrow AI all of this stuff is working it's in operation today chat GPT as you know is a very Advanced version of the thing that used to drive me

mad my first simple Smarsh phone kept telling me what I should write next do you remember those phones and they drove you absolutely out of your mind but now chat GPT you can write into it and type a question and ask it what does biner think of atheism and it's read all his books but it didn't get permission for from you for copyright did it and as many of you know there's a big class action being undertaken it's read my books I checked that up some of them it has given up I think um so

there are all those problems and it's interesting because it's useful I know many people that are using it to do research to find out things to stuff to investigate but all of them tell me it is very important to check out what you find very interesting thing recently chat GPT was asked a series of very penetrating questions are you an atheist and after a whole sequence of questions it came to the end and it says I'm an atheist but the next question was are you a Christian and these penetrating questions went all the way through

and it ended up by saying you may say I am a Christian so it's both a Christian and an atheist at the same time apparently there are huge dangers with this and there's a very big debate among School teachers I was in a seminar for directors of higher educational institutions half of them wanted it used half of them wanted it banned and people are working and I know in this country especially as to how far you can let it go should we have all examinations in Faraday cages so that there's no electronic signal can come

in or out I tend to um agree with that kind of approach to it we need to test what people think then there are deep fakes and this is now getting into really serious territory a short video clip of you a short audio clip and they can make you say anything they want you to say and the Deep fake technology is already to such an extent that you might get a phone call I wonder if any of you have it sounds like your daughter and she's stuck in Paris and she needs an air ticket and

it's on sale right at the moment and please Dad send me $1,000 at once what father who had $1,000 would reject that but it's not his daughter it's a clone of The Voice by a deep fake and it could be on video so many families are adopting the very sensible technique that if any putative family member telephones them to talk about Finance they've got code words and code questions so that they can be sure they're talking to their children and then there are of course autonomous vehicles autonomous weapons AI war is already being fought by

the control of swarms of drones that are equipped with lethal weapons and that raises all kinds of questions so all of these are technologies that are being developed at a huge speed and they're all in operation today but artificial intelligence is not intelligent the word artificial is there for a reason it simulates intelligence in other words it plays What's called the imitation game which is the name of a very interesting film about the late Alan Turing who invented the enig who solved the problem of the German Enigma machine and invented the bomb b o m

b e and it's important to realize and we're coming closer to a very big question what is a human being because that's being questioned left right and center today we notice that God has coupled in human beings intelligence with Consciousness now no one and I've talked to some of the world's leading researchers no one knows what Consciousness is and when people say that machines are conscious they're actually talking nonsense they don't even know what Consciousness is and many leading researchers are perfectly content to simulate intelligence without Consciousness in other words that Ray AI machine the

result looks as if it had been reached by a conscious intelligent human being but it's been reached by a machine which is neither intelligent nor conscious it's simply doing what it's been programmed to do and here Stuart Russell and Peter norvig authors of the what's regarded by many people as the AI Bible artificial intelligence a modern approach Third Edition we are interested in creating programs that behave intelligently the additional project of making them conscious is not one that we are equipped to take on nor one whose success we would be able to determine that's a

very honest statement by two of the Pioneers in these fields all of that narrow AI one thing that normally requires an intelligent human but there's a second Quest and that's the Quest for artificial general intelligence and as the name suggests the idea is to create technology that can simulate everything and a great deal more that normally takes an intelligent human being and there are two directions of research in order to build a superint ENT AI system that equals or exceeds all human capacities you either take existing humans and enhance them by bioengineering or you start

with a non-biological base one of the problems of getting old is that our bodies the bits start to fall off it as I know and the Bones start to Creek and all of that wouldn't it be great to do without the biological stuff stuff and just have the hard silicon uh mechanical stuff well that's one way people want to go now because it is futuristic and it appeals to the imagination there is a lot of literature about it and in my book I interact with various kinds of literature at a scientific and popular level as

well as the literature in the subject itself but one of the most influential writers these days is Yuval Noah Harari he's not a scientist he is an Israeli historian and he's written a book A Brief History Of Tomorrow homod deos which being translated from Latin is the god man the man who is God and the reason he's called his book that is he believes that this Century the 21st century is going to see two major developments first of all there's going to be a serious bid for immortality by which he means we are going to

solve the medical problem of physical death for him death is a technological problem and he writes that technological problems always have technological solutions so we shall solve the problem of physical death which won't mean that people may not die it will mean they don't have to die and so you have people hoping that this will be solved freezing their brains and their bodies uh and hoping that one day they'll be wakened up if nobody switches the power off in the meantime that's keeping them cold the second agenda item is intensification of the pursuit of happiness

making us happier people uh now here's what needs to be done according to Harari it will be necessary to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and our minds so that we shall need to re-engineer Homo sapiens so that it can enjoy Everlasting pleasure now listen to this very carefully having raised Humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into homo deos and he adds no humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design and extend life from the organic realm into

the inorganic he's got many people on his side there's a lot of money being put into it and I would repeat this is not simply the pipe dream of an obscure historian there are many leading scientists like Lord Rees that feel that this will be achieved now moving humankind Beyond human means that they're going to become what's called transhuman now that's a serious issue God created human beings model 101 in his own image now says Harari that's only one stage it parallels in our society what's going on with gender God created male and female but

now we're moving on from that and it's all becoming fluid exactly the same at a much higher level is happening with human beings themselves so what is transhumanism a lot of it comes from my own University I regret to say the intellectual and this is Nick Bostrom of the Oxford Institute for the future the intellectual cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving The Human Condition through applied reason especially by developing and making widely available Technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual physical and psychological capacities that's transhumanism so we're

going to enhance human beings we're going to eliminate aging and we're going to become essentially Supermen and women with bigger brains more ability and all the rest of it but now there's been a subtle change transhumanism will produce in some people's opinion billions of entities let's not call them human because they won't be human they'll be transhuman they may be cyborg a cyborg is a combination of the biological and the mechanical in many science fiction novels and in the future Lord re says that the majority of the population is going to be those entities so

what should our attitude be today and here we come to the fearful term and I say that advisedly of long-termism listen carefully to bost's priorities priority number 1 2 3 and four should be to reduce existential risk we mustn't Fritter away our finite resources on feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy such as alleviating Global poverty and reducing animal suffering since neither threatens our long-term potential and our long-term potential is what really matters that's devastating because it's a complete denial of the fundamental altruistic moral principle love your neighbor as yourself don't bother about the 2/3 world but

pour your money into the brains in the west who are going to be able to develop these beings because if you don't pour the money there you run the risk of these beings never being created now apparently and I have this from several good sources it's not Millions but billions of dollars that are going into these projects we got to think very hard ladies and gentlemen don't we as to how we're going to respond to this because this is totally not immoral but immoral and Joshua Bendigo who is a very famous fellow of the Royal

Society Canadian computer scientist neural networks deep learning he was right in at the heart of it and he says this people need to understand that current Ai and the AI we can foresee in the reasonable future does not and will not have a moral sense or moral understanding of what is right and what is wrong not only that there's a question of Truth Ken mcallum head of MI5 in the UK was in California 3 days ago and this was published two days ago in the London Times the fabric of society he says could be undermined

by AI impersonating real people that's the Deep fake so that it would no longer be possible to distinguish truth from falsehood deep fake techn is a threat to democracy and could be H harnessed by hostile states to so confusion and disinformation at the next general election in any country governments are scared there are big meetings about this what is going to happen to the Democratic electoral process now one commentator in all these things who I love to read is Leon C of Chicago he's a polyman he's Jewish and he's written some phenomenally interesting commentaries on

Genesis and exodus from a philosophical perspective but here's what he says we have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature but none so high is the intellectual and spiritual cost of seeing nature as mere material for our manipulation exploitation and transformation with the powers of biological engineering Gathering there will be Splendid new opportunities for similar degradation of our view of man if we come to see ourselves as meat then meat we shall become and CS Lewis saw it in the 1940s the first edition of this book is in the library behind me

man's conquest of nature means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions millions of men each new power one by man is a power over man as well each Advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger in every Victory besides being the general who triumphs he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car man's final Conquest has proved to be the abolition of man 1940s he saw it and it's coming true so AI to many people is posing a major threat or perhaps three threats first of all take over an

AI war to end all wars secondly mass unemployment not only will be people unemployed they'll be unemployable because they haven't got the skills to cope with this that's a huge problem in subsaharan Africa I was talking at a seminar there and they said to me it's all very well telling us to Res skill and learn to use artificial intelligence but we don't have the educational infrastructure to do that and the bias that we talked about before the late Steven Hawking was always interesting to read and he made a comment on What's called the alignment problem

thinking of this first thing the Takeover by AI the real risk with AI he wrote isn't malice but competence a super intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals and if those goals aren't aligned with ours we're in trouble so you've got the alignment problem that leads to the regulation problem regulation will be critical says Sam open the head of open AI that developed chat GPT it will take time to figure out although current generation AI tools aren't very scary I think we're potentially not that far away from potentially scary ones but you

know in most of the Western countries at least before 2020 there was no ethical policy for dealing with this kind of thing whatsoever Stuart Russell whom I quoted earlier one of the Pioneers he puts up three principles that he feels governments ought to adhere to firstly restricting AI systems goals only to maximizing realization of human goals then keep the AI uncertain about what those goals are so it has to keep asking and thirdly insist that it tries to understand the nature of those goals by constant observation of human behavior how realizable these things are is

another huge question and it leads to very deep ethical problems that you can ask me about later now with all that people think about about possible scenarios as Orwell and hoxley did and one of the prominent thinkers about this is a brilliant physicist uh Max tmar of Princeton and he's got several about a dozen AI scenarios that he sets up in his book life 3.0 I'm only going to mention three of them the first one is that AI is developed and it becomes a kind of protector God these are his words it's a amazing the

number of time God Appears in these books so essentially omniscient and omnipotent AI maximizes human Happiness by intervening only in ways that preserve our feeling of control of Our Own Destiny and hides well enough that many humans even doubt the ai's existence opposite to that AI takes control it decides that humans are a threat nuisance or waste of resources and gets rid of them by by a method they don't understand and possibly even keeps a few as pets in a little Zoo but what's interesting about his book is he gives a lot of space to

what he calls the Omega project this he develops in detail it comes out of the turkers in Amazon and this Omega Corporation becomes a world Corporation and gathers all the wealth and he describ it in great detail until he reaches the climax of it for the first time ever our planet was run by a single power called Prometheus Amplified by an intelligence so vast that it could potentially enable life to flourish for billions of years throughout the cosmos but what specifically was their plan and one of the major characteristics of Prometheus was this economic control

with the excuse of fighting crime and terrorism and rescuing people suffering medical emergencies everybody could be required to wear a security bracelet that combined the functionality of an Apple Watch with continuous uploading of position health status and conversations overheard unauthorized attempts to remove or disable it would cause it to inject a lethal toxin into the forearm that is the scenario that he spends most time over now let's bring another realm and that is the question of a new AI religion now the person writing these words is the director for the center for professional and applied

ethics at Montreal University we're about to witness the birth of a new kind of religion in the next few years or perhaps even months we will see the emergence of sects devoted to the worship of artificial intelligence it has already started ladies and gentlemen and why is that well it's obvious certain AI systems are beginning to exhibit the kind of capacities usually ascribed to deity such as immortality omniscience and omnipresence these super AIS have prayer-like connectivity via the Internet the like capacity of chat GPT to answer virtually any question produce life advice and even scriptures

almost instantaneously nor do they have needs or desires like humans only electricity you can see it happen very easily and people will be deceived and coming back to Max tegmark after he's describing this futuristic scenario with Prometheus he then says are we really in an unavoidable battle with an AI monster to stay alive listen to much of the debate and you could be forgiven for thinking so a monster and that brings me directly to the biblical scenario for the future a series of monsters and using wild beasts as symbols of totalitarian governments is something that

we meet in scripture both Old Testament and New The Book of Daniel is famous for it but let me read to you Revelation 13 and I saw a beast rising out of the sea with 10 horns and seven heads with 10 diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads and the whole earth marveled as they followed the Beast and they worshiped the Dragon for he had given his authority to the Beast they worshiped the Beast saying who is like the Beast and who can fight against it it's a Prometheus like teg marks and

then there was another a wild monster from the earth I saw another Beast two horns like a lamb speaking like a dragon and what did it do it deceives those who dwell of the earth telling them to make an image for the Beast that was wounded By The Sword and yet lived and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the Beast so that the image of the Beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the Beast to be slain also it causes all to be marked

in the right hand so that no one can buy or sell unless he is the mark that is the name of the beast of the number of its name that's almost identical to the Prometheus project of tar now when you see that a question arises what is this is this scripture telling us that there's going to be an artificial general intelligence like the Omega monster or is it something even more Sinister because it is an artifact it's a construct they make the image but then it's given breath how far is God going to allow people

to go on the other hand people may Bea and say but look this is imagery this is symbolism good may all these Bas with multiple heads and horns and all this kind of thing it symbolism metaphor of course it is but if you've read a lot of CS Lewis like I've done you'll not make the mistake of thinking that because there are symbols there's no underlying reality and Lewis made very clear in his writings that symbols and metaphors always describe a reality and what is the reality well the theologians among you will know instantly that

what is described in symbolic language in Daniel and the Book of Revelation is described in plain downto Earth text by Paul in his second letter to the Thessalonians listen to it for that day will not come unless the Rebellion comes first and the man of lawlessness is revealed the son of destruction who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called God or object of worship so that he takes his seat in the temple of God proclaiming himself to be God homodeos and then says Paul the Lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord Jesus will kill

with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming the coming of the Lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders and deception that's straightforward language and Paul actually told this to people who had only been Christian for 3 weeks and he reminded them I wonder do you teach this to Young Christians in your church why did he do it why talk about the future to 3 we old Christians because as he said the mystery of this lawlessness it is lawlessness by

the way ladies and gentlemen in the sense of spirit ritual lawlessness a man claiming to be God and ruling the Earth with a rod of iron of course it's not civil lawlessness why did he say it then because it already operating in their society he told them so the Caesars were claiming to be God some of them before their death most of them after their death and Christians were being persecuted tortured and killed because they wouldn't bow down and acknowledge the power and the authority of the Caesar who is God I find this fascinating that

20 centuries ago there's a scenario that people are bringing to scientists leading thinkers and my argument is simple which is why I wrote my book it's just this if you're going to take seriously Tark in his scenario I would like to introduce you to a scenario that's got far more credibility because of the actual Arguments for its truth than T marks and I find that people do but now I'm coming to a crunch here the AGI project the homodeus project is flawed now why is it flawed well Harari wants to solve the problem of physical

till death he also wants to upgrade Humanity but there's another person with a completely different agenda when people talk to me about hari's hopes I say you're too late the problem of physical death was so of 20 centuries ago when God raised Christ from the dead and as for upgrading Humanity what a marvelous upgrade that Jesus Christ has done first it's in two stages of course because when we encounter Christ and face the mess we've made of our own lives and sadly sometimes the lives of others and Trust of us Savior and Lord we receive

new life it's eternal life and that is true in several senses it's the very life of God so it will exists eternally and it guarantees for the person that trusts the Lord Jesus that they will be raised from the dead that is by far the biggest upload I've ever read of to as many as received him to them give you the right to become children of God and phase two it's worth reading this isn't it after all this gloy stuff just listen to this I tell you this Brothers Flesh and Blood shall not inherit the

kingdom of God nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable behold I tell you a mystory we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed in a moment in the trinkling of an eye at the last trumpet for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed this Mortal must put on immortality you see the true hodas will return from Heaven does he stood before his judges you shall see he said the son of man sitting on the right hand of God and on the clouds of heaven

and privately to his disciples in Acts 1 they were told this same Jesus shall so come as you saw him go they saw him go literally and physically until a croud cloud received him out of their sight he shall come literally and visibly so we've got the contrast between hari's vision and the vision of Jesus Christ and the contrast is huge let's take these two World Views as we come to a conclusion John Gray is a professor of the history of European thought an atheist well worth reading usually humans May well use science to turn

themselves into something like Gods as they have imagined them to be but no Supreme Being will appear on the scene instead there will be many different gods each of them a parody of human beings that once existed I will come again and will take you to myself that where I am there you may be also and if we're going to understand what's going on we need to take a world view perspective my late teacher of quantum mechanics was Professor sjon ping horn in Cambridge and he wrote If we are to understand the nature of reality

we have only two possible starting points points either the brute fact of the physical world or the brute fact of a Divine will and purpose behind that physical world and the difference between those two worldviews is colossal Sean Carrol physicist we humans are Blobs of organized mud which through the impersonal workings of Nature's patterns have developed the capacity to contemplate and cherish and engage with intimidating complexity of the world around us the meaning we find in life is not Transcendent that's bottomup reductionist atheism but there's such a thing as top- down Christian theism in the

beginning God created the heavens and the Earth God made humans in his own image so there's a choice to be made in transhumanism humans become Gods by trusting techn technology Christianity is the exact opposite God becomes human in Jesus Christ and through trusting him humans become children of God have you ever thought about this why are humans original model that God created so special I'll tell you why God became one the word became flesh and dwelt Among Us this ladies and gentlemen is what it means to be made in God's image and the tragedy of

many of these futuristic scenarios is the Fatal flaw that they tried to create Utopia by bypassing the fundamental flaw in human beings and that is sin they have no cross we have hope because there is a cross and the word who became flesh gave his life for us and God raised him from the dead that's what gives me hope and at my age now I want to try as best I can in the time left to really try to get across to my fellow Christians but to the world in general the fact the central hope

of Christianity that Jesus Christ is actually going to return thank you very much indeed professor John Lennox is not only the distinguished gentleman that was introduced but he's also going to be the distinguished research fellow at the um lanir theological library and Learning Center in yaron Manor so you've got every excuse to go over there thank you very much okay there are a boatload of questions and we'll just have to get through them as best as we can if absolute truth were established and agreed upon would we need to fear AI as much we live

in a fallen world and absolute truth is not going to be agreed the whole problem with our world is a rebellion against God and we are called upon to witness to the one who is truth and it's a hypothetical question and I think looking at the world with all the thousands of years of educ ucas the world's in a bigger mess than it's ever been so I don't think we're going to have to face that one but what we should do is deepen our conviction that when Jesus Christ said I am the truth he wasn't

merely saying I say the truth he's the ultimate answer to every question what's the truth about the universe well there are galaxies and planets and stars what's the truth about them well they're made of chemicals and atoms and molecules what's the truth about them those questions do not go back forever ultimately you're going to find Christ standing behind them and saying I'm the truth that's a huge claim um there are a couple of questions here that fall into the same category it's it's a category of concern that I've got so I'm going to start by

Framing my question and then we'll we'll work through a couple of permutations of that here I I have read uh a number of people say we need to get a six-month moratorium on developing AI we need to come up with these ethical guidelines for AI we need to come up with ways we can um agree that we will use AI ways we will limit Ai and I'm all for the idea of getting control and keeping control of AI but I have a concern that there are people in the world who will not stop nefarious development

of AI and we put a a hold on what we're doing for six months or we hedge what we're doing in with guard rails of of certain protections and meanwhile there's a government in North Korea that's going to do everything they can to circumvent all of that they LeapFrog us because all of a sudden we're 6 months behind or there are um people worth bazillions of dollars who are developing this in order to basically become that evil ruler that we've seen in all the James Bond movies um do you have a concern about how we

try to navigate in waters where there are some sharks swimming in the water I have huge concern for uh for the same reason as you have Point number one Vladimir Putin said a few years ago the state that controls AI will control the world that's number one number two ethics in general because God has been rejected particularly in the west is an ethical view called preference utilitarianism utilitarianism simply put is the idea that you should always base your ethics of the maximum benefit for the maximum number of people now that's flawed Hitler thought that the

maximum benefit for the maximum number of people was to eliminate the Jews so that's a huge problem but utilitarianism works if you're dividing ice cream among children if you want to keep the kids happy you have to divide it exactly equally among the kids now the problem that underlies what you're saying and I don't see an easy answer to this that utilitarianism works if you've got a world consisting of a number of roughly equal centers of power so suppose you're in control of one of them and I'm in control of the other we set up

ethics and I say well if you do this I'll do that and that kind of tip fortat analysis which leads to agreements and treaties sounds wonderful but if you go back to Hitler when he was a political infant he made treaties but once he got the power he didn't bother because you see if I get enough power and you say to me well look if you do this I'll do you'll do what I've got the power and that's exactly the problem you're expressing and I don't know any easy answer to it I think it's very

important though to realize that we're not in a total moral vacuum even in situations where God has been rejected why do I believe that Lewis in his book the abolition of man has a an appendix at the end that's well worth reading and he researched all well 20 or 30 40 philosophies religions all around the world and he discovered that they all had a common moral base and in particular particular he discovered that every single one of them including Roman Pagan religion humanism Christianity and so on had a version of The Golden Rule do unto

others as you would be done by now that tells me as a Christian that Paul in Romans indicates in modern terminology that human beings are all hardwired with the built immorality they've got some moral compass and if that weren't there the whole of humanity would just fall apart instantly so we can at least work with that but because we have the ability to rebel against our inner moral convictions you face this huge difficulty so I'm torn in two directions one yes let's work let's have the best lawyers in the world like yourself to write these

rules and people are trying to do it and to at least save us from something but but let's realize that rules are not enough every business executive I've ever talked to tells me it's one thing to put the moral and ethical mission statement on the wall in the boardroom it's another one to get it into the hearts of the executives so there's a lot of work but this is why finally we Native Christian Believers working in this area there are some wonderful examples Ross Pickard of MIT with her a I lab a whole discipline invented

by herself that smartw watch that can recognize if a child or an adult is about to have a seizure and save its life that's wonderful stuff to be working on there are many positive things we need people in there with scientific qualifications but who are ethically strong and of course it's the old problem Socrates thought that education was enough to make people ethical but Aristotle realized the ethics were fine but he hadn't the power to do it and that's where the gospel comes in because the gospel doesn't simply give us ethics as you know it

gives us the power to live and a transformation and we need to be emphasizing that one of the most popular books of the Renaissance Era was the prince by nicoo makavelli yes and in chapter and and he's writing to um instruct a dedich young man who's going to become the ruler and he's telling them how to be a good ruler and in chapter 18 He says you're going to rule with Vice lie when you need to lie go back on your word when you need to go back on your word no good ruler rules virtu

virtuously but you must appear to be virtuous especially religious so that people won't question you while you do these vices so I take it the next step with this next question friends of mine who endorse transhumanism seem to take it for granted that smarter people will make good decisions what are the odds that transhumanism can overcome sinfully poor decision makers what are the odds zero as you were speaking this this evening I was reminded of uh Thomas malus yeah an economist in the late 1800s who determined that we would run out of food to feed

the masses and he postulated that you really need to let people starve to death because if we try to feed the needy they'll just keep breeding and there'll be more needy people so actually utilitarian wise he said everyone you kill today will spare 10 from dying in the future yeah that's exactly right and that led to the Eugenics program all around the world and you see what's happened with it now we have it dressed up in Oxford as oddly effective altruism and long-termism it is absolutely incredible but we've now got the technology to do things

we could never do before and that's frightening because the Germans tried this and they tried to create an Uber mench as you know nature you the Russians tried to do it create the new man and as I think I said on another occasion I'll never forget a a member of the Academy of Sciences in Siberia saying to me John you know we thought we could get rid of God and retain a value for human beings we discovered too late we couldn't what would be your advice to Christians considering careers in artificial intelligence consider them very

carefully and go into something you see they're most likely to be offered career in narrow Ai and there you can make ethical decisions because you're not likely to go into something that is doing something that you know is morally illegal there are huge fails of narrow AI in medine particularly but not only there that are doing an awful lot of good or if you're an nist you could go in and contribute there and that's very very important to dat I mean you have at this weekend great Gretchen hoer who's working on that very thing and

her work is very important and others like her oh Gretchen where there there you are would you stand up so people know who you are because they may want to accost you with questions afterward um some of these questions I I I chuckle at and I'm not going to read so the one that says what is your cell number I would like you to be my mentor I will not read you mean my cell number in prison yeah um a related question uh that to what we were just saying what advice would you give to

high school students in this day and age I always say to high school students to play to their strengths first of all and at any stage in life ask yourself what can I I do now to maximize my potential for the future now I notice a huge difference as you heard I'm very old when I was young I hadn't a notion not a notion of the kind of job opportunities that are available today not only University education but apprenticeships and high-tech industry and all this kind of thing and what is marvelous and I'm sure they

exist in your schools career advisers who who really know about these possibilities if you're a Believer a Christian believer then there's an extra question to ask how can I so serve God in my work that I can maximize my witness and I've got a long answer to the question and you yourself sir have been very kind in endorsing my latest book which is called a good return you want to get a good return on your investment of life I endorsed it because it was a good book well there we are it's called biblical principles of

work wealth and wisdom and it's already available and that I'm encouraged to say many young people have found it helpful but you know talk to people find out what their jobs are like and inform yourself early and if you want to go to university go and visit the department talk to the people because universities like people who are actually interested so there are lots of little practical tips that you can follow all right how is um hold on do you believe that AI can develop a mind well since we don't know what a mind is

and we don't know what Consciousness is I certainly believe it can simulate some of what the human mind does but you see we're talking about a machine and machines at the theoretical level all of them past present or future can be simulated by what's called a touring machine it's it's a mathematical object and this is the subject of a very brilliant piece of mathematics called The Church touring thesis and I tend to be sympathetic with Roger penrose's arguments in his book He's a brilliant mathematician that used to work with Steven Hawking that there are certain

things that the human mind can do that are not algorithmic so they will be never you can never put them into a machine and I think there's a gap there but since we haven't a notion of what Consciousness is and Minds as we understand them our conscious then I I I think it's hard to even make sense of what the question would mean um so what are your thoughts on the sightings in many countries of UFOs from Another Universe Wormhole well I I believe they are what they say they're unidentified so we don't know what

they are do you view it against God's will to modify human genes that remove the imperfections that sin caused in the first place well there's an assumption there that by modifying the genes we will do that I think I take very seriously what I said in the last few minutes that humans are so amazing that God could become one that is utterly awesome you know the heavens declare the glory of God they weren't Made In His Image you were and therefore to take God's specification and to do something that's going to re-engineer it I think

comes under Lewis's criticism that what you now produce Is Not a Human Being but an artifact it's subhuman h and therefore trying to do that is a essentially Rebellion against God bless you and that's nothing to sneeze at it's brilliant isn't it sorry I'm I'm sorry sorry sorry beta minus yeah how do you view the soul in all of this the Soul's a complex thing because looking at scripture the word Suki from which we get psychology which is usually used for soul has a spectrum of meanings I I've always find this theologically fascinating that the

big words have a spectrum of meanings so a soul the soul can stand for the whole person in Noah's Ark eight Souls were saved not some disembodied Spirit but eight people or John can write to a lady and said I hope you're well even as your soul is well so he makes a distinction and I've thought about this and I've asked myself so what what are we meant to learn from scripture about the soul and Peter comes to our help because he is the only one that talks talks to us about the salvation of the

soul and that is a concept that the Lord taught him and I used to learn as a child and I couldn't understand it because I was told You' have a soul to be saved if you want to save it you should lose it and then I lost it at that point I couldn't understand what that meant but thinking of it in its context as an adult I think it's very powerful you see the soul one meaning of seems to me to be life in the sense of what makes life life and when Peter resisted the

Lord when he was predicting that he was going to die on the cross that'll never happen to you it was in that context that Jesus taught him what the salvation of the Soul meant Peter had spent three years investing his life his time his energy his money in Christ and now Jesus says I'm going to go to Jerusalem and be rejected Peter thought he was losing his soul his life life was being drained out and Jesus said look you think you're losing it but if you invest It For Me In My Kingdom you're going to

save it so the Practical meaning of the soul for me and I'm sure it it was not perhaps behind the original question but I find it a thrilling thing that we can invest life in Christ and we'll never lose any of it now you see here's a practical example you've invested how long nearly an hour and a half wasting your time coming to this meeting in the opinion of thousands of people in Houston who would waste the time when they could be watching a ball game for goodness sake they think you're wasting your life but

it's an investment for eternity that that's what I think it means that means something to me and that's something that AI will never have it looks like it but it might help me to invest my life properly because if it saves me time when I go to get an x-ray and I get cured faster and gives me a few more years to serve the Lord then you know it's a good thing yes exactly would you join me in thanking John lenx all