Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Promise - Dr. John Lennox

you [Music] evening and welcome I'd like to invite you to come in and find a seat welcome to our event tonight artificial intelligence threat or promise we're glad that you're here we think this is going to be a fascinating conversation but it's one we don't just want you to listen to but also to participate in so if you have a way of connecting to the internet a phone a tablet or even a laptop if you would pull that out now we're going to be using a service tonight called pigeonhole to use this you'll type in pigeonhole dot 80 into the web browser once you get there it'll ask for a passcode our passcode for this evening will be UF QA again that is pigeonhole dot eighty and the pass code is going to be UF QA you'll have two ways that you can interact with us tonight one is as dr. Linux presents you can ask a question the second way is you can get on there and see the questions that others are asking and you can upvote separate questions so at the end of the night the questions that are most relevant to the topic and that have the most number of votes will be asked to dr. Linux so again that is pigeonhole dot eighty passcode UF QA and we welcome your participation tonight to introduce our speaker is the president of the University of Florida dr. Kent Fox good evening welcome to the Philips Center for Performing Arts and indeed I am Kent Fox and I have the privilege of serving as president of the Florida Gators I also have I also have the privilege of introducing our speaker this evening dr. John Lennox is professor emeritus of mathematics at Oxford University he's also a fellow in mathematics and the philosophy of science at green templeton College Oxford he's an associate fellow in the Syed business school Oxford University and he teaches in the Oxford strategic leadership program he's written a large number of books and I wanted to list just a few of them in nineteen excuse me in 2009 God's Undertaker has science buried God in 2011 God and Stephen Hawking a response to the grand design and then in 2015 against the flow a book that talks about the lessons learned in today's society from the life of the biblical figure Daniel and he also has a book coming out in 2019 in title can science explain everything this is my second time I've had the privilege of welcoming dr. Linux to the University of Florida my first time was in the winter of 2015 and I would ask that you join me and welcoming back to the University of Florida dr. John Lennox thank you sir [Applause] president and mrs. Fox ladies and gentlemen it is an extreme honor for me to be invited to come once more to the University of Florida and the president did me a great honor this evening in that he pinned to my shirt a little alligator so I am I qualified to say go Gators about a month ago I debated someone from Florida State University of which you may have heard and he was a philosopher and I debated him in London it was a very interesting debate you can see it on the web but he wrote me the most interesting letter afterwards he said what a wonderful debate I've rarely ever debated this is what I remember of the letter anybody who is so spectacularly wrong so ladies and gentlemen as someone voted by a Floridian as spectacularly wrong you're taking a great risk in this thing to me this evening but as they say it is a pleasure to be with you and we're going to look at this topic of artificial intelligence threat or promise both words refer to the future and in these times of very advanced technology moving at a speed that most of us can't keep up with there are all kinds of fascinating ideas being spread around I'm going to start with you Noah Harare his book homo Deus homo man Deus God has sold in millions it's called a brief history of tomorrow like every other author he has got his own background philosophy in his cases his atheism I am a Christian and so we're going to compare two philosophical reactions to questions of the future of humanity his naturalistic starting point is very interesting he makes three major assertions first of all war is obsolete you are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict secondly famine is disappearing you are more at risk from obesity than starvation and in thirdly death is not just a technical problem I quote humans don't die because God decreed it or because mortality is an essential part of some great cosmic plan humans always die due to some technical glitch every technical problem has a technical solution we don't need to wait for the second coming in order to overcome death and with this background he says that in the 21st century there going to be two major agendas firstly there will be a serious bid for human immortality that is more precisely that we shall engineer things to defeat physical death you won't have to die you may die but you won't have to and then the second thing is the intensification of the pursuit of human happiness and in order to get there Ferrari says it would 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 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 Deus it is a very ambitious trajectory and he claims further that for close to a billion years four billion years every single organism on the planet evolves subject subject to natural selection not even one was designed by an intelligent creator the biologists are right about the past but the proponents of intelligent design might ironically be right about the future I think he just might be 180 degrees wrong in both of those statements but what he thinks is this that humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design and extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic now this kind of scenario comes under the heading of artificial general intelligence that is the human engineering of something that may be a combination of biology and technology that can do essentially everything that an intelligent human can do and there are a number of people driving this kind of project reycarts file is very famous for his prediction that in possibly as few as 30 years AI robots will overtake humans in their intelligence and capabilities or nick bostrom of oxford the first ultra intelligent machine is the last invention man need ever make provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control and that statement implies of course that these machines or whatever you want to call them our intelligence decoupled from conscience and the whole business of the ethics of what will be made or constructed is increasingly a matter for serious discussion one of the most serious writers on the question is Max tegmark of Princeton and he says that success in the quest for artificial intelligence is the potential to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls in creating a I were birthing a new form of life with unlimited potential for good or for ill and Max tegmark said that in a TED talk earlier this year and there are serious voices on both sides of the Atlantic one of our most distinguished by far and away scientists in the united kingdom is lord reece the astronomer royal we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligence is a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of the way we behaved and when you get voices at that level of science and culture saying these things and they're books selling in hundreds of thousands if not millions people are listening and their minds are being geared to asking questions at least about where humanity is eventually going now we've been talking about AI but what is a and we need to distinguish two kinds there's narrow AI and there's AGI artificial general intelligence and an AI system uses mathematical algorithms that is sets of step by step instructions embedded in computer software and we learn often at school the Euclidean algorithm and so on but these algorithms and sift and sort and select going through typically huge databases and the systems can learn to identify an interpreted digital patterns images sound speech text data etc and then computer applications are used to statistically analyze the available information and estimate the probability of a particular hypothesis so a machine learning system takes in information about the past and makes decisions or predictions when presented with new information and we're all massively familiar with this because narrow AI is what we're carrying around with us all the time on our smart phones our digital assistants Siri and Alexa who jump ever increasingly rapidly to respond to our desires because they have sorted through a vast database of what we've done in the past online shopping you look at Google you look up certain things and the next day you find a whole list of them appearing on your screen medicine the results have been amazing an x-ray for example of lungs a great database of x-rays of lung diseases and now the systems are so defined that if I take my x-ray and they put it into the system it can diagnose what's wrong with me with an accuracy often increasing that of the best human doctors of the world autonomous vehicles well we know all about them job searching job interviews goldman sachs now has people applying but they're applying to a robotic AI interview and people are really concerned said the times last week because now instead of facing a human being interviewing them they are facing cameras that are watching their every emotion their every blink their every attitude and they're working out what you are like and some very highly qualified graduate students say i never get near an interview then of course there's AI used for crime prevention the face recognition systems that are blossoming all around the world and we can see that positive value in identifying criminals and terrorists but then it spills over into the potential for social control as in the system that is currently being rolled out in over 13 chinese cities where the cameras are watching you all the time and you're given so many social credit points and if you do something you do something questionable and then internet you lose points and then you discover you can't go to your favorite restaurant or you can't get a ticket to go abroad or you're walking down the street and suddenly your picture appears five meters high and your name is called out and you're denounced as a socially undesirable person this is actually being rolled out and they're hoping to extend it to the whole of China the time article on it is quite scary reading the ideal setting for a complete surveillance state and the author says be careful because all the ingredients for this are already present in the West except that most of them are under independent control there'd be one company with surveillance and closed-circuit television there'll be another check in your credit and so on but all that has to happen is that these get fused into one then there's a vast moral problem of autonomous weapons and there's a lot of ethical discussion about these things the thing is vast and trillions of dollars are being put now into narrow AI and as you look at that list you can see but a lot of these things we welcome them you like your smartphone you like the fact that it's making predictions and so on even though you often don't realize that you're giving away more and more of your capacity to choose to a machine now this is a problem in this whole area with language the term artificial intelligence or thinking machine can be very misleading and Roger shank of Northwestern wrote some time ago cognition means thinking your machine is not thinking when people say AI they don't mean AI what they mean is a lot of brute force computation but the one I like best and I think it's a marvelous one-liner the artificial in artificial intelligence is real have you got that it seems to me says professor mellichamp that a lot of needless debate could be avoided of AI researchers would admit that there are fundamental differences between machine intelligence and human intelligence differences that cannot be overcome by any amount of research in other words the artificial in artificial intelligence is real I started with Harare but my attention was drawn to a rather unusual source for me and that is Dan Brown have you all heard of Dan Brown well he's written a number of blockbusting novels at salad millions and I was intrigued to discover he's written a book called origin and in this book called origin he focuses on two questions where do I come from and where am I going to it's again the origin and the future of humanity but he's quite open about his motivation it is to see if God can survive science and when this was pointed out to me I thought I need to read this and one of his main characters is a billionaire computer scientist and AI expert called Edmund Kirsch who claims that by using narrow AI he has solved these two questions and the intriguing thing is the way in which this is done facing the first question where do we come from he revisits the famous miller-urey experiment of 1953 where they put a mixture of chemicals which he thought simulated an early earth atmosphere they sparked them with electricity and they got some amino acids and Brian discovered and what he discovered is quite true that those test tubes that were used have been put away in the laboratory and they've been sitting for 50 years and someone took him out and analyzed the chemicals that were now in them after having sat for 50 years and discovered low and hold that there were more amino acids than they'd find in the first place so Browns novelist 9 got going and he thought okay if 50 years produces more what would a hundred years do what would 500 years there what would a thousand what would a million what would a billion years do so he sets the huge database and he sets a I to work on this and lo and behold as he watches the thing moving on the screen he watches chemicals combining recombining all this kind of thing and believe it or not there appears on the screen the double helix structure of DNA now I have a lot of things to say about that or they've written about it because natural processes do not generate language like intelligence but that's not my subject for tonight it said this is getting to the public mind now when it comes the future what Kearse this computer expert does is look at all the various structures that have been proposed for evolution and laid them all right and fed them into an enormous database and then extrapolated into the future and as he watches the screen and the AI system operates he watches a curious thing starts to happen this is a bit of a spoiler by the way so you better close your ears if you don't want to hear this what comes next what happens on his screen is he sees a new species of emerge and then it absorbs humans and he calls this new species Technion because it is a merger of biology and synthetic life and technology so he solved the two questions and what he's done you see is to use narrow artificial intelligence on databases the kind we can do except that what he does is highly speculative and predict artificial general intelligence and when his scientist announces it to the world he said new technologies like cybernetics synthetic intelligence cryonics molecular engineering and virtual reality will forever change what it means to be human I realize there are some of you who believe that you as Homo sapiens are God's chosen species I can understand that this news may feel like the end of the world to you but I beg you please believe me the future is actually much brighter than you imagined so here is this particular scenario so that we're facing two things really there's the big scale predictions in which there's a vast amount of science fiction and imagination and height but we all love it because it's interesting and partly scary Kurt's Val's singularity homo Deus Technium and then there is narrow AI doing many things which are extremely useful to us but with all kinds of built-in ethical dangers of course the question that that raises is what exactly is a human being and what is it that we are trying to make are we attempting simply to use technology to enhance our capacities are are we trying to fundamentally change what a human being is now I said that Harare and Brian come to this from a worldview perspective that's what we all do I come to this with a worldview perspective they are both atheists as many people this filled our and I am a Christian and your worldview that is your set of answers to the big questions of life they help you or hinder you navigate these questions and my teacher of quantum physics at Cambridge John Polkinghorne makes this point if we're to understand the nature of reality we have only two possible starting points either the brute fact of the physical world of the brute fact of a divine will and purpose behind our physical world now Sean Carroll who is a physicist like Polkinghorne comes now from The Naturalist atheist perspective and he says 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 the intimidated complexity of the world around us the meaning we find in life is not transcendent and of course that's reductionist physicalism and in the end of course it leads to the idea that since life has simply emerged from materials by unguided natural processes surely this can happen again but not in the biological sphere but possibly in biology combined with silicon but there's strong objections to these ideas because it is one thing to say that the brain functions like a computer it is an entirely different thing to say that it is a computer and a former editor of Psychology Today wrote this Computers do not play games like humans play games computers do not create like humans create computers at their most fundamental level do not even solve computational problems like humans solve computational problems and sir roger penrose arguably one of the most distinguished mathematicians alive he argues that the brain is more than a computer because they can do certain things like formulate girdle's theorems in mathematics which no computer can do and leon kass who's always worth reading a former presidential advisor in the united states here and a public intellectual of the first order writes we have paid some high prices for the technological conquest of nature but none so high as the intellectual spiritual costs of seeing nature as more material for our manipulation exploitation and transformation with the powers of biological engineering gathering there will be splendid new opportunities for similar degrading of our view of man if we come to see ourselves as meat then meat we shall become and of course there he's alluding to the famous statement that the brain is a computer made of meat now i want to turn from the Atheist perspective to the perspective that informs my worldview now obviously we will be mixed in our worldviews i learn a great deal by listening to people that disagree with me and debating them and I hope that this evening that you will at least listen to certain aspects of the Christian perspective to see at least if they make any sense and only then are you in a position to judge the case we got to listen to a person's case and then we make our own assessment now the biblical perspective on creation is the exact opposite off the naturalistic perspective first of all in the beginning God created the heavens of the earth that is to say that God is primary and the universe is derivative that is to say that super intelligence exists and has always existed and that super intelligence was responsible for creating human intelligence it's the exact opposite way round to this AGI perspective which is that human intelligence is on its way to creating super intelligence and the initial chapter of Genesis which is utterly profound from any perspective points out that the universe is created by a series of speech acts and God said and God said and the idea behind that of course is the idea of information it's not simply matter and energy its information and of course we've lived to discover that information is one of the fundamental concepts of science and it's one of my main reasons for rejecting the materialistic view so with this idea we see that there are certain emphases in that text and there are two of those famous creation days on which God speaks more than once the third and the sixth and on the third day God speaks to differentiate between the inorganic and the organic there follow me carefully according to the Bible at least you do not get from organic inorganic to organic without an input of information and energy from outside the open system which is the earth and God's earth and on the sixth day you don't get from animals to humans without and God said so it's indicating that there is a fundamental informational distinction between the inorganic and the organic and between animal life and human life now that is the claim and of course we have to think about whether that makes more sense than the idea that the opposite happened that unguided natural processes bridge both of those goals and once you get there you find that there is a second and complementary more detailed unpacking of what human beings are I'd love to have time to go through them because they're fascinating human beings are so much material they're made of the dust of the ground but they're more than that they're alive but they're more than that they have an aesthetic sense they're curious they follow the rivers to find out where they go and that's what many scientists and others of this universe of they do know what I do we're curious about where the rivers go and we try to follow the research fields then humans were given work to do and so on and as we look at these things we can parallel to them attempts being made to produce something similar artificially starting with the dust of the ground material fine but no one has ever created a living organism artificially what would it mean for AI to have an aesthetic sense and curiosity well those things are coupled to intelligence and now we come across the idea that God linked intelligence and consciousness with human life what artificial intelligence does is to separate intelligence from see the robot that makes your BMW hasn't the thought in its head but it makes the car it does what normally an intelligent human would do but it doesn't have to be conscious to do that and the fascinating thing about human beings is as created by God I believe is that intelligence and consciousness are linked now there are huge numbers of things here that need to be unpacked for example work there's enormous fear in the world about robots and eventually AI taking over our jobs and some of the estimates are really scary 70% early robots the usual figure was one robot took seven jobs from people and that's going to increase and increase and increase and so it raises a whole raft of questions what is going to happen to people who are put out of work by artificial intelligence I've just been in South Africa and they were really concerned there because they said we don't have the infrastructure to retrain people to be able to cope with the skills needed to work in the artificial intelligence field so one of the things we learned from this is secondly that human beings originally were made as moral beings they weren't only conscious they had a conscience and the famous story of the Garden of Eden where you read of the prerequisites for morality God gave them certain freedom but he for bad one thing they shouldn't eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and they were to have a moral relationship of God that was based on his command and then the enemy came and said look God's trying to suppress you intellectually and he knows that in the day you eat thereof you shall be as God knowing good and evil and there's the very first homo Deus project the idea was spread abroad and you can test whether it exists in Gainesville in the university that if there is a god he's against us as humans he's trying to take away our freedom he doesn't want us to rise he doesn't want us to become gods now you see the relevance of this to what Harare is saying and Dan Brown is saying it all fits together because the idea of humans rising is as old as history and it was suggested according to the Bible by the enemy of humanity there was also a second tree in the garden we come to that in a moment but you see polar bobbington who's an expert on AI says if we see the Genesis account of the fall of man as foreshadowing of fears about robots then Genesis gets the problem exactly right for exactly the right reasons it's a worry about autonomy itself what might robots do if we can't control them fully will they adhere to the same value system as us will they decide to disobey us what will our relationships with our creations be we can thank the Hebrew account of Genesis for pre warning us about this danger Tysons of years ago so it is a discussion about human autonomy and one of the geniuses of this area Rosalind Picard of MIT who happens to be a Christian believer has written the greater the freedom of a machine the more it will need all standards now I haven't forgotten her Ari's claim that we're going to gain physical immortality because you see in that Genesis story there's another fascinating thing and that was the tree of life and what we're told is this that when humans disobeyed God they were refused access to a particular food so that they couldn't live forever and you can't have wandering you see as you look over history whether the quest for the elixir of life in the past or the quest for artificial general intelligence in the future aren't really driven by that loss of access to the Tree of Life so there are a lot of things that we can investigate there Harare proceeds on two bases looking at this problem and he says that we cannot proceed without realizing that freewill doesn't exist and that individuals don't exist the first one is practical implications if organisms indeed lack freewill it implies that we can manipulate and even control their desires using drugs genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation secondly eventually we may reach a point when it will be impossible to disconnect from the old knowing network even for a moment disconnection will mean there and we can see with the concept of the network of things we're getting increasingly connected to endless things so that many young people and students if our smartphone is taken away from us we begin to feel withdrawal symptoms we find we just can't afford to be disconnected so that these are very real philosophical questions that all of us have to face now this idea of homo Deus is very old as we've seen but the Bible has a lot more to say about it than some people think because the central claim of Christianity is that there is a homo dales there is a man who is God and indeed the whole of the biblical storyline is a preparation for God becoming human the word becoming flesh homo dales and the story is the exact opposite of the Harare and brown scenarios because in their scenarios man becomes God the biblical scenario is that God becomes man and demonstrates that he is both man and God by his resurrection and his ascension now here's the central thing the lie is that if there is a God he's against us so we'd better get rid of God get rid of religion and everything else but just a moment why did God become man so that human beings could become what they were not by birth they could become children of God by birth we are creatures of God but the central message here is to as many as received him to them he gave the right to become children of God and now we begin to see that there's a parallel biblic scenario to the AGI scenario but it is utterly different first of all it tells us that the Hammoud ails Christ will return there ends to be a future visit of Homo Dale's this same Jesus shall so come as you saw him go the disciples were told at the beginning of acts and believers were told by Paul the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed this mortal body must put on immortality ladies and gentlemen many people are taking the AGI scenario seriously but what about this one that you can be transformed but not by the uploading of your brain into silicon to preserve it eternally the Christian claim is that those that trust Christ and receive him receive a new kind of life which is imperishable and my mortal body probably a lot sooner than yours will be planted in the earth there is a day coming I firmly believe that I will be raised immortal that is a spectacular scenario and we want to be pretty sure that it's true but then the evidence is both historical and personal historical in the life death and resurrection of the homo day or Caesars Christ do you see the parallels the hope is that your brain contents will be uploaded how far that will go we just don't know but here is something that is promised on the basis of very strong evidence now there is a final thing because there is to be another homo Deus and Paul talking to a church and he'd only been within three weeks wrote these words to them for that day will not come he's talking about a day of judgment unless the rebellion comes 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 and then 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 and we just need to pause before we write this off as absurd Paul was writing at a time when these people knew something like this he said this kind of thing is already operating in your society the Caesars demanded divine honors they were claiming to be homo vales and many Christians went to their death because they refused to bow and Paul says watch that at your society watch that trend because it is going to come to a harvest in the distant future and Jesus will come and destroy our home odious I just hang on to that for a moment because that seems a scary scenario but it corresponds with one of the super intelligence scenarios proposed by Max tegmark and he's got a whole group of them they're fascinating a libertarian utopia for human cyborgs and uploads and super intelligence coexist peacefully or a protector God's scenario please notice the use of the word we're essentially a mission to the omnipotent AI maximizes human happiness and so on and then there's the enslaved God there's a super intelligent AI but it's confined by humans but then the conquerer scenario where AI takes control and decides that humans are a threat and gets rid of them and then there's the enslaved god but the one he concentrates on is what he calls the Omega project and he imagines what could happen 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 now what is very interesting about this to me is that there's something very like it described in the last book of the Bible it talks about a beast that deceives those who dwell on earth telling them to make an image for the base that was wounded by the sword and yet lived and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the base so that the image of the base might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the base to be slain also it causes all to be marked on their right hand so that no one can buy or sell or less he is the mark that is the name of the base of the number of its name the total survey and state and it adds this very curious statement the number of the base 666 for it is the number of a man and people have speculated about this absurdly and they miss the point this beast that is described as being Antigone is a human so Paul in plain language in the first century said to people watch those movements and society that are pushing for the deification of man because they will lead to a slavery of a kind that has never been known before the book of Revelation says exactly the same thing and when I find people of the intelligence of back stag mark saying here's one of the scenarios and it overlaps beautifully with what the Bible says at least I'm going to take it seriously and not write it off as absurd speculation by John Gray is a famous atheist I've learnt a great deal from him and he says 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 in the scene instead there will be many different gods each of them a parody of human beings that once existed but he's wrong a homo Deus will appear from heaven and there is going to be a divine upgrade just as we have borne the image of the man of dust we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven writes Paul to Christians or again 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 mystery we shall not all sleep but we shall all be changed in a moment in the twinkling 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 body must put on immortality and often those words resigned from a graveyard and they give colossal hope to people that have pinned their faith on the Lord from heaven so how do we conclude well first of all fear of the scary scenarios should not prevent believers making a contribution to the positive aspects of narrow to the benefit of all Rosalind Picard again we've decided it's more about building a better human machine combination than it is about building a machine for we will be lucky that wants us around as a household pet I like to be up-to-date ladies and gentlemen so I read this today in Forbes magazine by one of the world's leading experts on AI from China and it's a very balanced statement a I can handle a growing number of non personal non-creative routine tasks but the skills that make us uniquely human are ones that no machine can replicate the jobs of the future will require creative compassionate and empathetic leaders who know how to create trust build teams and inspire service and communicate effectively now the points out elsewhere in his book that so much as speculation and myth so let's not confuse AGI the attempt to make a human being or something like it and narrow AI which is focused usually on one thing to do one thing expertly like read x-rays and so on so where does that leave us with humanity version one of which we are all members why do I believe that you and I are infinitely special here's my main reason ladies and gentlemen the ultimate affirmation of humanity version 1.0 is that God became one thank you very much [Applause] Thank You dr. Lennox as we transition to a time of Q&A two quick announcements one just a reminder the questions are still live so if you have not logged on to pigeonhole now would be a great time to do that we're getting some great questions already so please go on fill out a new question or upvote ones that you like again that is pigeonhole dot 80 and the passcode is UF QA also if you'll notice right under your seat is a response card and a pin this would be a great time to grab that and start filling that out just to interact more and give us some feedback on tonight's and then our moderator tonight is Michelle temper Michelle is a speaker for rzi own an organization that exists to dialogue about life's biggest questions and their intersection with the Christian faith she has worked alongside dr. Linux in similar events in Oxford Europe and throughout North America please welcome Michelle temporal questions we had a few explanations before we go into this time of Q&A with dr. Lennox there's no way that we could have let every single one of the questions come free to be voted on because probably that would have gotten one or two votes on every single one of them so we tried our best to group similar questions together we had lots of the questions that we put through for voting there are many similar ones so we tried to group them together and just to remind you that with the time that we have we will try to do our best to do the highly voted ones and ones that are on topic so thanks so much again for your submission so dr. Lennox to start off let's go with the highly the highest voted question tonight so man is made in the image of God but artificial intelligence is made in the image of man what are the consequences of this subtle difference and I'll bring that up for you to see as well well now thank you for all your questions I should have said at the very beginning that I'm writing a book on this topic that will and that's why I'm looking forward to these questions because what they're going to do is force me to think and maybe revise and add them into the book so thank you very much for asking them man made in the image of God that is the claim but AI is made in the image of man and one of the things that characterizes the image of God in human beings is our rationality and our creativity God is creative and he has delegated to us the ability to be creative with the materials that he is given within the world now what are the consequences of this subtle difference well it's difficult to know exactly what's lying behind the question clearly our abilities are limited God created a universe by speaking now that very first thing separates God vastly from human beings if I say let there be light nothing will happen unless you press a switch at the back of the soul but that's cheating and it's the same with materials we work with fascinating materials and we combine and recombine and produce new materials that is new to us but they're still combinations of what has been given and I often say that those of us who are scientists ought to be humble because we study a given that is the universe with a given so that it seems to me that the initial response to this question by the way this is Q&A you're going to learn how ignorant I am I can only begin to respond off the top of my head so to speak but it seems to me that in the very descriptors that we get there are parallels for example Genesis in this literary structure gives us God having a working week like we are working with but there the comparison ends because what God did and that week we cannot do so we have abilities now the question is how far will those abilities I suspect that is what may lie behind the question how far will we be able to go now that very strange text that I read to you from the book of Revelation talks about an image being made but it's unable to speak to such an extent that the entire planet is deceived ladies and gentlemen that is not some innocent little conjuring trick and you see there are some people say well God would never allow human beings to make something like that well if they think that and it happens they'll be the ones who'd be maximally to saved and the answer is I just don't know but there are indicators and some of those texts I've read that we need to be careful in placing limits and let's not view this as negative it is absolutely magnificent what human beings have been unable to do and we those of us are Christians thank God for it and the rest of us are thankful for it but we've no one to thank and it is important though that we celebrate that kind of thing but it seems to me somewhere in there there is a distinction we are not God and the same goes on I said that it's possible for a human being who trusts to receive a new life the very life of God new powers but they don't become God the biblical record is very careful to make those fine distinctions well this kind of goes along with it there was a question that's not by be quite as high but it it was asked many different times and it came along these lines and said would creating it I actually be replacing God itself many people think so this is certainly an idea that's out there in space because think of the network of all things and add to it artificial intelligence it knows more and more about you me and interestingly enough were voluntarily giving it information about ourselves all the time we're being tracked by GPS all the time we are at least in England every five minutes on CCTV the Chinese are installing 600 million CCTVs this year alone and the object of that is that there's going to be and essentially our mission all powerful all seeing those are some of the attributes that are often theologically associated with God and that is why in those scenarios for the future that I quoted you from Max tegmark two of them have got God in the title because to all effects and purposes this is AI replacing God now the ancient persons gods were not so much things that they loved but things that they trusted now we're finding more and more that there are difficulties with AI I have to get my credit card renew just a week ago why because British Airways was hacked and so many million deed all my credit card details we're dog just like that and so we realized that there are problems but we're trying to plug the problems and as we problem problems we're still giving the information because I still will have to use that credit card and give that information to someone so this is a very important thing what do we alternately trust is it going to be a human creation and that's what the ancient gods where they were made of stolen wood they were not sophisticated this is going to be much more sophisticated and in many people's minds it is functioning like a religion look at the hours that people spend on Twitter and Facebook and all this kind of stuff that's telling you something about the authority that we are voluntarily ceding to something that's outside of ourselves but it isn't transcendent it isn't God so the question we may have to ask is who is the God that we really should all allegiance to following on from now on who is the god this question came in it says if a eye reaches a point where it is more intelligent than humans and can design create and innovate on its own does the support or disprove the possibility of and on omnipotent God or creator well it's and of course this is the point most almost reporters all across the spectrum say that we're nowhere near this remember no one knows what consciousness is no one so we are apparently light-years from this so far away that there are many people who believe who are committed to research and AI believe this will never happen so it is a hypothetical question and hypothetical questions can be dangerous but the point is suppose that did happen well what does it prove well it proves that beings created by an intelligent creator can create beams of can create that doesn't disprove the existence of the original intelligent creator at all that's a good point well then how about this because it seems that there's a lot of questions around this we tried c1 focus them down into a few what if artificial intelligence reaches the point where it is intelligent enough that we can no longer control them and not a lot of speculation tonight dr. Lennox do you think they will decide to keep humans around or will they view us as too large or a liability this question you know was asked by Stephen Hawking the late Stephen Hawking he was afraid of this Elon Musk was afraid of this still is and there's been a huge petition going around the place to try to do ethically responsible research into areas of artificial intelligence much lower than this point but the move towards that point now do you think they will decide how could I possibly answer that question I think if I tried to answer you'd write me off I would I don't I simply don't know but all we can say at the moment about that kind of thing is highly intelligent people are thinking about these things and they're worried about the ethics why are they worried about the ethics because the technology moves much faster than the ethics this is happening in medicine and it's happening in this area rushes ahead you design autonomous vehicles what immediately the military want to use them and now you have a huge ethical problem even with an autonomous a driverless car you've a problem humans have to program what they will avoid and what they will hit and so inevitably people will get killed how do you make those ethical decisions because simply because the AI system let me put it this way doesn't have a conscience it will have to be given one and it will have to be given one by human beings acting on the ethical principles that they believe in but all of us are flawed and that's what creates the problem so policing this is going to be a huge problem so following on from that what would you say the moral responsibilities are for creators well we have to consider them because we are building things just at the simplest level I build a machine that puts a hundred people out of work should i implement it or not now there are people running factories in this country who could get rid of 70% of the workers they don't do it they could replace them by machines but they don't do it and it's very interesting reading what they have to say they say no my value system is those people have lives that families and so on and as long as I can keep going I will keep going other people say oh you love die you've got to replace some of the regimes that find other jobs well maybe but maybe not but it's quite clear that since AI systems they don't think the artificial and artificial intelligence is real so that the moral responsibility lies with the Creator not with the machine if a lion bites your head off it won't appear before the Supreme Court a normal robot but if you programmed it you will appear that's true so would you say if this ever got to be the case that a fully conscious artificial a I would deserve the same right human being people are considering this but fully conscious let me repeat no one knows what consciousness is we nowhere near this kind of thing so this is highly speculative and totally hypothetical and in to my mind it's so hypothetical that there's no way we can begin to answer but there are some people who are working on the legal rights as they do with the legal rights of animals they're working on the legal rights of machines but it seems to me this is going way beyond you tell me what consciousness is so maybe I'd be able to think about it okay so maybe he's trying to get away from some of the abstract and maybe here some of some more of your views they've been so helpful what are the ethical you have you've said very clearly there are moral considerations what are the ethical considerations of technological developments that are being used in attempts to augment human intelligence could you give us a framework of some sort what ethics you would think are this is this is again a huge area it depends entirely what you are trying to do some of the things that people are doing don't really raise ethical concerns for instance if I am born with a very weak muscle in my left arm and an engineer creates an exoskeleton of some kind that's augmenting my ability now the question refers to augmenting human intelligence and of course my first question to the Questor is what do you mean by augmenting human intelligence well we're attaching things to ourselves you see we have these things up Terry years most of the time we know where them on our watches it will not be long before they're implanted in our head so our brains and so on they'll get closer and closer to us and in a sense we are augmenting our intelligence with that kind of thing if you could simply think google and look something up in your head so it appeared before your eyes that would be an augmentation of intelligence and what are the ethical considerations the ethics of this kind of thing tend to be very complex indeed the trouble is the question is a generalist question you have to say specifically where what are you thinking of what actual thing and then you have to apply to it and of course it's just proliferate so rapidly so unless you can make it more precise there's nothing very much I can say we have someone who said just going on the precise way you say that AI is intelligence decoupled from consciousness what do you think about engineers creating mathematical algorithms that will begin to come to teach complex emotions will they ever achieve that goal I'm not a mathematician like you but I don't know if that's coming from less of a generalist so in fact for us with pickhardt is one of the world experts on building emotion into AI but now what does that mean in these interviews ai systems these are systems that are reading your face and they are being taught by humans of course what those things mean and then that's embedded into the system so the AI system isn't developing emotion it's the people that are programming the system our programming entered things that recognize so that if you put a certain person cv in and the interview it can say well that person's emotionally unstable and all this kind of thing I haven't read and I'm ashamed to say I happened a lot of rosalind Picard's work but her work on using AI to understand complex emotion has been enormously valuable in research of autism on autistic children in MIT it's a marvelous work she's actually single-handedly created a whole branch of artificial intelligence but we've got to stand back and remember the artificial in artificial intelligence is real the Machine doesn't experience emotion but it can recognize the significance of gestures that are emotional and make allowance for them and so on and describe them so the top motor on question right now kind of goes on from that it says can AI be given too much personality or emotion well again what do you mean by giving it personality defining what personality is is not an easy thing we all recognize it but it's like time we all know what it is but when you're asked to define it none of us can and an AI system just lets let's get her feedback down on the ground an AI system these days is designed to perform a single function usually that would normally be done by an intelligent human like recognizing lung cancer and so on so giving that kind er system narrow AI personality is almost a meaningless thing now what I think may be behind this is not AI but robots you know and you get these dear little creatures and you can buy them at vast expense and they'll come and they can behave like a dog but they don't poo and they don't make a mess and they're very friendly they don't die and you don't have to feed them and you don't have to give expensive operations to make them well but they provide emotional support just like animals do animals aren't human but they do provide support if that's what's meant I I'm not sure too much too little how would you measure that anyway I'd be really worried if my daughter's little live pet dog had too much personality I think that would scare her tonight I think one of the things that's being said because you'll notice in my list of what it means to be human one of the things is the man will run companionship and of course the idea of a companion robot that intelligent robot one of the points that the experts in this area are warning us about is the vast difference between a robot and a human is the robot doesn't care and that care and empathy is something that one of the experts I couldn't just doesn't believe will ever be produced so this links in to me to this question why do you think we as humans are so drawn to creating artificial intelligence or let's say robots what's the desire my own suspicion is that the biblical analysis is right there's a deep-seated human historical memory of that what happened in that garden situation in Genesis it's well worth reading leon kass honest because he's a brilliant hebrew scholar and he's a literary genius of the first order he's written a book on genesis and they points out that the origins of so many things in our culture today are there you have the idea of freedom are we really free the idea of seeking for autonomy of discovering that the autonomy we get leads to alienation between humans and God etc etc etc and the trigger of it is appealing to wonderful human capacities of reason and wisdom in the day you eat that you'll be as God God does not want you to raise too level there's a great deal of that feeling still around and that's driving it why should we not reach god why should we not build a human build a man that is a colossal bright it's like a very simple version of it is the drive to be build the biggest building every country wants the biggest building and someone who's well written behind every skyscraper there's an even bigger ego it's it's a very interesting kind of thing there's a project and there's another one the Tower of Babel project in Genesis let's build a tower that have might reach to heaven that kind of desire to move upwards and build something significant night we all want to be significant we want to make the best of our human intelligence but the danger is we get at the wrong way around we're seeking to create Amadeus when Homer they are so seeking to recreate us so going on with that image of God if we were created by God wouldn't we be considered artificial intelligence his intelligence being the original intelligence the big difference here is that he created a conscious intelligence you see being in the image of God doesn't simply mean we do the same things that an intelligent person would do but our intelligence is artificial see artificial snow what is artificial snow it's not real snow is it but it reflects one aspect and one aspect alone of snow it looks like snow do you see that's why it's artificial snow but we are not artificial intelligence we are real intelligence because God is capable of creating what I suspect we're not capable of creating which is real intelligence so that we can create he can speak we can speak he is conscious we are conscious but AI is nowhere near any of the things because it's artificial many of the characteristics you listed even maybe when you're talking about what real intelligence is what makes life life are also possessed by animals dolphin pronates etc so are we all really that different this is argued endlessly the thing that I would focus on is the nature of the linguistic capacity that human beings have now clearly some animals can go a certain distance but people who've really studied this people like Chomsky and so on they make the point that there really is a vast difference when it comes to our linguistic capacities under our ability to make extractions mathematics is one of the most very distinctly human activities now we can argue this again and again again but are we really all that different what would the point of saying that they what I mean by that is if there is a creator and he's built different levels of things well why shouldn't he in that sense my dog and I can enjoy a good steak but if I short a Picasso or a Rembrandt they might do all sorts of curious things to it that I wouldn't mention but it won't see the point of it so that again you can speculate but it's it's what are you getting up are you trying to tell me there's nothing unique about humans and I would come back to my very final statement human beings are so unusual and unique that God could become one I mean when you think about that is actually spectacular if it's true that's a good take on your dog and on human beings and what's different this this question is about to jump off the page at me so I'm gonna go ahead and ask it people want to know tonight professor Lennox do you have or who is your favorite fictional artificial intelligence character do you have one not really come on Gators well let you think if one comes to your minds here's another one do you think human employment and thus the economy will be or could be affected long-term by artificial intelligence I'm not an expert in Collins but I try to read what people are saying what I notice is that they major economic surveys that are made on this there's one done Cambridge there's one done recently over here are fairly highly varied some people think that 70% of jobs in the United States are at risk in the next 20 or 30 years some think it's longer some think it's thou'rt or the answer to the question is of course yes everybody agrees but what the total effect would be some are very optimistic especially in developed company the countries of the capacity of the educational system to cope with retraining people and moving them into these areas and some even think that more jobs will be created so it's a very open thing the most difficult thing to predict you know is the future that's very true that's a Yogi Berra quote by the way it's not me and professor likes you've been so patient with what to me seems to be a lot of generalist questions so as the final kind of couple of questions tonight we got quite a few around these type of topics have you tried to look at what other religions said about this objective I would say other subjects of to strengthen your argument there was another question that came in that said do you actually believe that artificial intelligence is the mark of the beast and how can you believe these things in the Bible so as as we kind of close our evening tonight have you looked into other faiths in other worlds of course what makes you want to kind of you argued so heavily from a Christian and even if you were if you weren't listening tonight you'd have noticed that most of the people I quoted were atheists or people of other religions of course there are people from all kinds of different religions that look at these things and philosophies and worldviews now in my life I have in the public space most often been confronted with meeting atheists like Richard Dawkins and so on and so what I tried to do and what I try to do tonight is to be fair I think I put it tonight to Christians out of all the people I've mentioned so I hope that's an indicator that I'm listening to what these people are saying and it's not some much religion it's philosophy and and where the divide comes is is the question of poking horn put it in one of those earlier quotes the starting point comes down to this you either believe that there's transcendence of a creator god or you believe that this universe is all that exists and everything crawls upwards so to speak by mindless unguided processes and as a scientist I simply don't believe the atheistic and naturalistic worldview I have argued this elsewhere but I'm not sure quite you mentioned a couple of things do I think AI is the mark of the base well no of course not but what is the mark of the beast according for that is a human being who takes planetary control by using very sophisticated AI surveillance system but to say the AI that is used in examining lung cancer slaves as a marketing that's just foolishness but I'm not sure what you're asking about other religions so perhaps you want to make it a bit more precise I'm bringing back that question we've just seemed to have quite a lot of questions around I guess why do you mean so heavily oh and because you pulled from very Christian very biblical even passages even though you were very ecumenical and going across the different scholars that you spoke about I want to know what's true and I was brought up in a Christian home but my parents loved me enough not to force their Christian convictions down my throat but give me space to think and they were the first to encourage me to read my first alien world view which is communism and Marxism and I owe them a huge debt they allowed me to think because they loved me and because I come from a country with a bad reputation for Christianity I'm from Northern Ireland if you didn't guess and many people say to me of course you're Irish and everybody but even got there and they fight about it often to the death and I met that at Cambridge a great deal so what I've spent my life doing and I started in my first week as an undergraduate I'd heard this Freudian objection so often you believe in God because you're Irish well it's the kind of thing you hear sometimes you say that because you're a woman or you say that because you're you know the kind of thing which is a very illogical kind of argument but I'm not going to go into the philosophy of it now but what it did for me he was I decided that I would befriend people not just get to know them but befriend people who didn't share my worldview and I've been doing it for all of my life so for over 60 years I've been talking to people and being vulnerable about my worldview and you see when it comes to religions and I have friends and all religions and as you look at religions you find well there's a shared morality that's very clear the world would fall apart most religions believe in honoring their parents in the value of truth and they're not murdering see as Lewis pointed that out long ago but where the differences come and I think that maybe behind the question why should I be a Christian kind of thing well my reason is this that what I find in religion is that generally speaking they're like the University of Florida but what I mean by that is you it's hard enough to get in there's a doorway to get in this is a good University it's pretty hard to give you this look folks you're pretty pleased you got in and then you study and you've got gurus and professors and their moms and priests well you got professors to teach you they can't guarantee you're going to get a degree because you face a horrific thing at the end called final examinations if you heard of that so there's a door at the beginning to get in and there's a path to be followed and there's a day of judgment at the end yep you've got it now when I talk to many people and ask them to describe what they mean by religion that's what they say to me and I say but you see if that's what religion is then I'm not religious at all and they say what do you mean well they said you think of that situation I'm a University of Florida student I'm a gator and I'm trying the best of the professors are very kind but they cannot guarantee me getting a degree why because it's based on my merit and you will find if you look at religious ask people that's a way to find out but that's what they'll tell you even some professed Christians will tell you that I do the best I can and I hope that one day God is going to be kind to me and relax his law of it and let me and you know that kind of idea millions of people believe that but I hear it's utterly radical I don't believe that so as I sit here let me put it very provocatively I read certain statements to you about the resurrection of the body and I believe as I sit here that one day I will be raised from the dead why because I'm something special no because the basic principle of Christianity is not merit that could you understand that this is so important to get this otherwise you never understand what it's about you see Christ offers me something that no other religion offers me he offers me forgiveness not up to day of judgment but now he tells me that if I repent and trust him I receive at that very moment a new kind of life I receive forgiveness I receive peace with God and I receive the certainty that one day I will be upgraded into heaven not because of what I've done I can't learn that but because of what he's done now there's the vast difference between religion and true Christianity it's telling me that I can have a certainty here and mine I'm not waiting for the final judgement to decide what's going to happen to me ladies and gentlemen because I know what's gonna happen well it might be a strange thing for you to hear an Oxford professor and the other one say but it's true the heart of this thing the biggest thing in my life is that God loved me and Christ died for me and as I say let me put it very clearly and lovingly Jesus Christ competes with no other religion because he offers me something that none of them do it's as simple and as profound as that so that it is a very very big issue and therefore I do look at these things all of us are biased of course but we have to ask are we biased by reason of evidence or prejudice and you have to examine the facts and decide for yourself and the reason my faith in Christ has strengthened over the years is precisely because I've looked at all the alternatives and spent a lot of time doing it and in the present culture of almost institutionalized naturalism in the Universities of the Western world I've been up against it really up against it but it seems to me that naturalism doesn't answer the facts and science of course does not explain everything so that would be my response self question thank you for your candor okay let's give my hand when you've given us so much to think about on the topic of artificial intelligence on the topic of consciousness and the difference and also left us with a great challenge so thank you again for coming to the University of Florida we are so grateful and I'm gonna invite correctly come back out thanks again it's mathematics hey thank you a couple announcements as we close thank you a couple announcements as we close one if I could bring your attention back to the response card that was under your chair that you were filling out earlier there are two boxes there in the middle one of them says simply count me in we invite you to check this if you're ready to have more of these conversations just how God intersects some of life's greatest questions we would love to engage in further discussion around that so you can in you can check that box the second one says tell me more we invite you to check this one if you want to hear about future events that we have coming up one of these in fact will be this January 28th to February 1st it's hungry week this is the second year we're hosting this a number of campus organizations here at UF partner together to bring us this week it is 15 separate events that ask thoughtful and engaging questions about life faith science and culture you can expect free lunches live Q&A and great conversations so please check that out next semester finally if you have some further questions or like to dialogue we invite you to do that there would be some people around in black shirts some of them have the hungry shorts on those are great people to continue the dialogue if you want to do that this evening and finally just a big thank you to dr. Linux for an engaging conversation this evening thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: First Presbyterian Church of Gainesville

Views: 1,608

Rating: 4.6923075 out of 5

Keywords: Gainesville, Florida, church, protestant, Presbyterian, Jesus, God, Lord, holy spirit, savior, praise, pray, prayer, worship, hymn, youth group, college group, bible, scripture, holy, pastor, ministry, disciple, gospel, religion, religious, christian, glory, the word, believe

Id: zPeebKuZ_no

Length: 96min 47sec (5807 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 23 2018