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. This was his title, well, roughly his topic, not his title. How is it that unbelievers persist in unbelief despite the clear evidences of the Christian faith?

Last year, Mark Lanier himself spoke from his book, *Atheism on Trial*. This time, John Lennox 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 program is a brochure that tells a little bit about an Academy on apologetics that takes place annually in Strasbourg. Now, it's amazing! We would encourage you to look and read more about that. While you're here, would you thank John Lennox for being here all the way from Oxford and give him a warm Texas welcome?

Are you sitting comfortably, 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 Lanier Foundation. 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 mind-blowing, but they're real, and I believe they're going to have a wonderful future.

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.

I should probably say to you, "How are y’all?" 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, near where I live, on a Sunday to preach. As he mounted the pulpit stairs, he noticed that there were only three elderly people in the congregation. Because he was, like me, frail, he was being helped up to the pulpit. As he ascended, he said to the local minister, "Did you tell them I was coming?" 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. E.O. Wilson is a brilliant American entomologist, and he said that the real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology. 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 Immanuel Kant. We have ways of dealing with this fundamental set of problems, even though they are terrifically dangerous. One brilliant way of formulating those answers was given by the late Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. He said, "Science takes things apart to see how they work; religion puts them together to see what they mean." 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, left us in a world where we understand how almost everything works, and we know the meaning of nothing.

So he's written a book called *The Matter With Things*. But what are these scary things? 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. For example, our astronomer royal, Lord Martin Rees, talking about our topic, 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 post-human 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: Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World* and George Orwell's *1984*. My title, *2084*, was given to me by a very famous atheist in Oxford who, when he discovered I was writing on artificial intelligence, 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: Orwell, 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 their capacities to think.

So Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. In our current culture, it seems to me that both things are happening simultaneously. We have a love-hate relationship with what's going on.

Now, the response to the technologically driven oppression in terms of surveillance reactions are very different. Some people think, and here's an example: A very famous web engine developer said that AI doesn't mean that the end of humanity is nigh. It's math; it's code; it's 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 its motivations will lead it to try to kill us is a superstition—a superstitious handwave.

In short, AI doesn't want; it doesn't have 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 any more than your toaster. Mind you, when my toaster this morning threw two bits of toast up two 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. Here's what he says: "But as soon as it gets really complicated, we don't actually know what's going on any more than we know what's going on in your brain. We designed the learning algorithm, but when this learning algorithm 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 it pessimistic, of the future. But what are we talking about? We're talking about artificial intelligence. But what is it? It comes in two sorts, as many of you will know. There's narrow AI. A narrow AI system typically does one thing and one thing only, and 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—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 they represent, and it then gives a diagnosis. That diagnosis these days will normally be better than what your local hospital can give you.

There's been a recent phenomenal development in adaptive radiotherapy for tumors. Artificial intelligence reduces two weeks of work to five minutes, and that kind of advance is spectacularly beneficial to human beings.

Now what we're going to find is this: like any technology, AI is like a sharp knife. A sharp knife can be used for surgery; it can be used to commit murder. 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 assistants—Siri, Alexa, and so on—online shopping. I buy a book; a few minutes later, a pop-up tells me that people who bought my book often bought another book. Then there's the phenomenal research conducted by people like Demis Hassabis, one of the geniuses of the AI world, who solved a problem that was thought to be completely intractable: how do proteins fold, 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 are 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. 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.

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. 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 gait from any direction: the back, the front—anything.

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 Xinjiang in China that is being monitored unbelievably and is being oppressed and suppressed by being subjected to the most intrusive and constant surveillance.

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? That’s a very difficult problem to decide.

So these technologies are being used particularly in Xinjiang to control a population and, in fact, to remove its ethnic roots and re-educate it. But, as a famous article 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 ChatGPT. Now, these are all just narrow AI; all of this stuff is working. It's in operation today. ChatGPT, as you know, is a very advanced version of the thing that used to drive me mad. My first simple smartphone kept telling me what I should write next. Do you remember those phones? They drove you absolutely out of your mind.

But now, ChatGPT—you can write into it and type a question, asking, "What does Biden think of atheism?" It’s read all his books, but it didn’t get permission from you for copyright, did it? As many of you know, there's a big class action being undertaken. It’s read my books. I checked that out; some of them it has given up, I think.

So there are all those problems. 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. A very interesting thing recently: ChatGPT was asked a series of very penetrating questions, "Are you an atheist?" After a whole sequence of questions, it came to the end and it said, "I’m an atheist." But the next question was, "Are you a Christian?" 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. 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 that can come in or out?

I tend to 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. The deep fake technology is already to such an extent that you might get a phone call—I wonder if any of you have—sounds like your daughter, and she’s stuck in Paris and she needs an air ticket. It’s on sale right at this 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 finances, they’ve got code words and code questions so that they can be sure they’re talking to their children.

Then there are, of course, autonomous vehicles and 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 Enigma machine and invented the bomb.

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. When people say that machines are conscious, they’re actually talking nonsense. They don’t even know what consciousness is. 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.

Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, authors of what’s regarded by many people as the AI Bible, *Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach* (Third Edition), said, "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 is 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. 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.

There are two directions of research in order to build a super-intelligent 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, as I know. The bones start to creak and all of that. Wouldn’t it be great to do without the biological stuff and just have the hard silicon, mechanical stuff?

Well, that’s one way people want to go now because it is futuristic, and it appeals to the imagination. There’s 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*, *Homo Deus*, which, being translated from Latin, means "the god man"—the man who is God.

The reason he’s called his book that is he believes that this century—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. You have people hoping that this will be solved, freezing their brains and their bodies, hoping that one day they’ll be woken up if nobody switches the power off in the meantime that’s keeping them cold.

The second agenda item is the intensification of the pursuit of happiness, making us happier people.

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