John Lennox: Should We Fear Artificial Intelligence?

[Music] good evening everyone a couple people think it's a good evening it's great welcome to the zecharias Institute welcome to those of you who are here in person welcome to all of you who are watching around the world @rz I am we love questions many of you who know this ministry will know that questions mean that your humble enough to learn questions mean you respect others enough to think that they might have something to teach you questions mean that rather than looking to attack the people who think differently than you that you actually want to pursue truth together with them we think that our culture could do well to place a greater emphasis on questions in light of this it's my pleasure to welcome you to trending questions tonight we launched a new series of evening events that are going to be focused on the most critical and the most challenging questions that our culture is facing today in the coming months the lineup of trending questions that we're going to be considering here at the zecharias Institute include how can I know my gender is Christianity a white man's religion what does the Bible have to say to the me to generation is suicide an option a question that we get increasingly at all of our open forums am I just my brain and tonight to kick us off we have the privilege of hearing from Professor John Lennox on the question should we fear artificial intelligence John Lennox is emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Oxford he has so many academic degrees that if I actually stood here and read you his entire academic CV there would be no time left this evening for him to give his talk in fact professor Lennox is the only person I know who literally has more letters after his name than in his name I actually counted and that is literally true he has published more than 70 mathematical papers and he is the co-author of two research level texts in algebra he's written extensively at the interface of science theology and philosophy including his books God's Undertaker which has the subtitle has science buried God a God and Stephen Hawking and also gunning for God professor Lennox has debated prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer his next debate will actually be with a robot on whether or not artificial intelligence is possible just kidding about that although although it is funny that you weren't sure which shows the timeliness of tonight's topic not a bad idea we're gonna think more about that John is also a lover of languages as if I wasn't already impressed enough with John last year I heard him speak on science and religion at a russian-speaking community and halfway through his talk he paused and kindly corrected the translator in Russian all that said what I admire most about John is that he's been a faithful friend to many people including me he's been a faithful husband in fact him and Sally have just celebrated 50 years together and he has and John has truly been faithful in his pursuit of God he has read and studied the Bible consistently for decades and actually of all of his writing and all of his teaching some that I think is richest and most profound is the work that he's done on the Bible and I think that's because for him God is not just an abstract theory but actually a relationship that he pursues daily why don't we give a very warm welcome to Professor John Lennox as he comes to share with us [Applause] welcome John it is so wonderful to have you here and to be together on this side of the pond after quite a number of years on the other side of the pond the nice thing is you don't see them when they walk out and you know it feels the same at the end as at the beginning thank you very much for having me back to well it's great to have you here and I just want to ask you a few questions a bit more about your life just to give everyone in kind of a sense of the person that's going to be speaking to them and teaching them tonight John you grew up in in a Christian home you grew up in Northern Ireland at a time where there was a lot of hostility centered around religion tell us a bit about how that cultural background informed your journey of faith in your perception of religion and Christianity I grew up in the middle of what became I tonight terrorist violence on both sides both Protestant and Catholic and what was life shaping for me was the attitude of my parents because they taught me Scripture they got me thinking about Scripture but in particular when it came to business life my dad believed that every person no matter what their worldview was was a human being of infinite value made in the image of God and so deserving of respect and he put that into practice by trying as far as he could to employ people in his store he had maximally about 40 people from both sides the religious divide they got bombed for it but it puts something into me that was very important I left to go to Cambridge before things got really difficult but of course my brother was seriously in in a bomb and it lived with me at a distance and all I can say is there were a number of people like my dad whose Christianity transcendent religious rivalry and local politics that was infected with religion and that was a model for me fantastic as as you experience that at what point when you grew up in a Christian home and you had that model was there a point at which you would say you became confident in the truth of Christianity and how did that aspect of faith - but again my parents played a great role my parents didn't have a a very high level form of Education but dad loved the Bible and he loved reading and my first impressions of Christianity were that it was mind-expanding and dad fed me books by CS Lewis that got me hooked but also he loved me enough to give me space to think but he didn't only do have theoretically I remember when I was about 14 he handed me a book I said what is it that he says the Communist Manifesto oh I said really have you read it no he said but you ought to I said why what he said so much of the world is influenced by this worldview and if you're going to understand your world you need to read it that was his attitude so there was a very strong question-and-answer dimension to our home and the last thing that would have occurred to me was that Christianity was boring it was fascinating and interesting and that is where the first sense that this is not only something to shape a family life it's shaping family life because it's the truth that's great Joe Joe and I are pregnant with our first child that I'm taking notes here as I'm listening to some of the ways that your parents created space for you to develop such an inquisitive mind and one that pursued truth I mean very encouraging to hear were there ever times where a book that you were given by your parents or or a question that you were digging into was particularly challenging or particularly difficult or or even caused out at some point through your journey well let's take the last cut first I spent my life opening my faith to its opposite yes so people say do you ever die I say all the time but it's not the kind of dite that people imagine a black hole everything's going wrong no it's questioning and I've found that my confidence in Christ and Scripture and in the message has grown over the years the more I expose it to criticism the stronger it is got but there were indeed significant things dad discovered near Christianity and he liked it so much he used to keep a stack of them in a glove compartment of his car in those days there were hitchhikers it wasn't dangerous to do that but I suppose was there ever a question yes there was there was a question in Cambridge very early on in my first year where a student asked me did I go to church I didn't know him but he knew I was Irish and he paused he said sorry oh dear he said I shouldn't have asked you that you're Irish and all you Irish believe in God and you fight about it now I'd heard that many times but what it did was it fine-tuned the trajectory that has gone on until today because I thought you know in Ireland I've met people who are very religiously polarized and if they were atheists there'd be either Protestant atheists or Catholic atheist you know that kind of thing but at Cambridge I was able to meet people who genuinely held different world views to me and I decided after that encounter to deliberately go out of my way to befriend people that didn't share my worldview and I did that and one particular friend I talked to him for two years and then one day he wasn't listening to the maths lectures and I said what's happened he said last night I knelt down in my room and they gave my life to Christ now that was huge and I tell you what was huge I keep meeting people who tell me that you'll always stay within the worldview that you grow up and the first person I saw change their worldview I saw it's possible for someone to change the world view and that has had an immeasurable effect on my life and it really has has shaped it that leads to just one more question John there are likely people here tonight who are still trying to figure out what to believe about God and there are certainly people watching on the livestream who are still wrestling through that what advice would you give to someone who's trying to figure out what to believe about God I think I would encourage them to keep asking their questions and if they want to know more about God read but talk to people that you feel have credible lifestyles and claim to be Christian and probe them and question them but above all start to open the Bible say something like the Gospel of John the fourth gospel in the New Testament because very often people have if they've been exposed to anything have just been exposed to very little in school but usually not so they've never read it as an adult and asked your questions to scripture you don't have to start by believing what it is but what you have to start by doing is to say what can I find out here here's a book that claims today God's speaking to us so you might not accept that at all at the beginning but you can at least read and see if it begins to answer your questions and again and again I've seen a life of people who come skeptically they start to get hooked on some of the fundamental ideas that come up the very first statement there in the beginning was the word well what could that possibly mean a beginning and a word and the word was with god of the word was God and then they begin to get an impression gosh this is a huge plane and it captivates the imagination because I would want to contend that far from Christianity saying less than other philosophies it says a great deal more and it says it convincingly because it parallels our experience of life mmm-hmm I'm smiling so so big job because you're speaking of my story and the story of many who was where I was challenged to read the Bible while studying philosophy and started out crossing things out and adding things in the margins and as I wrestled and wrestled my way through scripture slowly by slowly I have to erase some of those cross outs and I found myself you know in love with the person of Jesus I met a man in Siberia and when he was 16 he was given in school a dictionary of eight years of my used eviction of them and it would say Christianity a birds way of philosophy developed in the 4th century and so on but in that little book he discovered statements that he finds stunning I say unto you forgive I say unto you blessed are the peacemakers and as a 16 year old he thought no mere man could have said that so he cut them out of his and pasted them in a book yes and he came to faith in Christ without ever having met a Christian or seen a Bible just through cutouts from communist dictionaries Wow and then Wow and those thoughts bring us you know right back to the beginning of your story where we started the hostility over a religion and then the the nobility and the beauty of word of the words of Jesus love your enemies that's right right for those who persecute you yes great well John it's been such an encouragement to hear about your story why don't we thank John one more time I have just a few quick logistics as John just prepares to speak to us first if you are on Facebook whether in the room or watching this maybe you could take out your phone and just share the live stream of this event it's on the arsy I am Facebook page we would love for as many people as possible to hear from John tonight second the hashtag for this evening is going to be hashtag trending questions hashtag trending questions if you think a hashtag is something that you order for breakfast then you can just disregard that statement third if you're watching from home I want to encourage you you can watch tonight and you can discuss tonight's talk in rzm connect rzm connect is the online home for the global R Z I am family and you can watch and discuss by going to our Z I am connect org right now and after tonight whenever you do have a faith question whenever you have a difficult question of faith I hope you'll go to our Z I am connect we think that it's better than Google it's a place for your deep questions of faith where you can get personal and credible answers and you can do that by going to our Z I am connect org fourth we will be accepting questions tonight for John for the Q&A session later and we'll be accepting them through pigeonhole this is how you get at pigeonhole go to pigeonhole dot eighty pigeonhole dot eighty and the event passcode is just trending in all capitals that's trending that will allow you both to submit your questions and to vote on each other's questions so that later we can pick some of the questions for John that have been most popular finally last thing that I have to say before I turn over to John I just want to recognize that this evening was made possible by a generous gift in memory of Henry Walker halt Henry Walker was from Fayetteville North Carolina he was a family man he was a man of deep faith he was a man who took opportunities to serve others of special note he was a founder of the airborne and special operations museum Henry Walker died on August 11th at the age of 78 he did so while trusting in the words of Jesus that he who believes in Me will live even though they die so we are extremely grateful to Henry Walker and to the Holt family for giving us this wonderful privilege of hearing from John tonight John please do share with us ladies and gentlemen our title tonight is should we fear artificial intelligence and I want to start with something familiar to us and that is robots what is a robot a typical robot in an automotive factory it's designed to do one or a few other jobs that used to be done by an intelligent human a robot itself is not intelligent but it simulates intelligence there is no learning involved in what it does and one of the most important things is that it's simulated intelligence is decoupled from consciousness it is an unconscious machine and we move on now to artificial intelligence which is not robotics robots are increasingly being fitted with a systems but in the abstract today our system uses mathematical algorithms that is set of step by step instructions they're embedded in computer software and the effect of it is to sort filter and select from and this is crucial a huge database artificial intelligence involves learning in inverted commas the system can learn to identify the turret digital patterns for example images science speech text data etc and then it uses computer techniques to analyze a huge database statistically and estimate the probability of a particular hypothesis so what this system does is to take information about the past a lot of it and makes decisions or predictions about the future now that sounds all very abstract but we're totally familiar with it Alexa and Siri our digital assistants are AI systems and it's perhaps easier to understand when we just go back a step to online shopping for example with Amazon each one of us leaves a track and it's a track of data what we bought when we bought it and that is built up and built up as well as the information from millions of other people so that when you just dip into Amazon and you think you're going to buy a new yacht and so you have a look at the latest yachts in Bermuda it won't surprise you tomorrow if suddenly up pops a little window and says by the way would you like to look at our latest range of yachts that's an AI system that has been following you tracking you and filtering through all the information and predicting something that you might like to be interested in in mention the achievements are spectacular AI systems have now been developed that for example you get an x-ray of your lungs because your doctor suspects you may have some illness the AI system compares that x-ray with hundreds of thousands of others and comes out almost instantaneously with the diagnosis and the diagnosis is usually much more accurate than the best human doctors on earth and we're moving in the direction where diagnosis will be made routinely by artificial intelligence systems autonomous vehicles they are run by artificial intelligence systems and they raise increasingly ethical questions because the system has to be programmed with some kind of morality because no machine is a conscience and so what do you avoid what do you allow the car to hit that's a hugely difficult problem and people are working on the ethics of autonomous vehicles then we come to job search and professional people these days are faced with an additional complexity when it comes to their job seeking because the human interviewer is now regarded as not adequate so you go in for interview but you're interviewed by a battery of sophisticated cameras that are watching every move every blink of your eyelid every pulse in the arteries in your head and they are assessing your emotional stability so now professional people are finding they have to prepare themselves not simply for facing a human interviewer but before they get anywhere near a human interviewer they have to overcome this hugely complex hurdle of passing these kind of artificial intelligence tests and you can see there is danger of bias and Prejudice so an enormous amount of work is being done to try and filter the prejudice out so that for example the system doesn't prepare irishman over everybody else then there's crime prevention face recognition has achieved great strides and we are of course thankful that that police could pick criminals out of a crowd that's the upside but every technology as a downside and the face recognition and CCTV cameras that are used to catch criminals can be used for social control and surveillance in England at the moment there are more closed circuit TV cameras than in the whole of North America China is putting six hundred million CCTV cameras into its country this year and they are developing social control it's already operating in 13 cities and the basic idea they will probably modify it a little is that each citizen is given 300 points and people are tracked they're observed and if they're seen buying something that the authorities think might be a waste of time are going to a questionable place they lose points and then they begin to discover that their credit card won't be accepted or that they can't get onto a train or they can't go to their favorite restaurant or they do things that are regarded as good their points score goes up and they may be able to buy a new car and there's been a time argument Time article about it that makes really scary reading it's saying it's setting the stage for the most thorough form of surveillance the world has ever seen and setting up the perfect conditions for an absolute dictatorship but then at the end of the article the writer warns he said by the way all of these systems exist in the West the only difference is they're not centralized yet you have credit surveys when you want to buy something you have the police checking you as you drive down the toll roads there are all kinds of things happening to us socially but they are checked by different agencies it could all come together so that you can see that AI which is excellent for crime prevention could threaten privacy as it has already done with Facebook and so on then we move on to things that raise even bigger ethical questions that is autonomous weapons killing people simply by computer and the AI systems themselves deciding what the targets are going to be and dealing with them before there's any human intervention at all all these things are already operating and I'd like to emphasize that this is what is called narrow artificial intelligence remember an AI system does something that normally requires an intelligent human it simulates intelligence but it does it in a very limited area it might be face recognition it might be dealing with x-rays etc it's a limited area and it decouples intelligence from consciousness now we need to therefore remember as roger shank of Northwestern University wrote cognition means thinking your machine is not thinking when people say ái they don't mean AI what they mean is a lot of brute force computation perhaps the man who said it best is a professor from Alabama who gave a remarkable lecture in 1985 in Yale and he said it seems to me that a lot of needless debate could be avoided if 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 and that was the title of his article and very interestingly he was a Christian and there were several Nobel Prize winners at that lecture in Yale and one of them was the famous Sir John Eccles who thought this was an excellent presentation the artificial in artificial intelligence is real so much for the things where we can see positive benefits but dangers but now we're going to come to something very different and that is the quest for artificial general intelligence that is building an AI system that equals or exceeds human capacities in other words constructing our super intelligence and that is often referred to as transhumanism we go beyond the human and these ideas are being spread abroad prolifically around the world in many books but notably a number of bestsellers the first one I want to bring to your attention is Hamada us by Yuval Noah Hari and Israeli historian it's called a brief history of tomorrow now I think this is so important that the ideas I'm presenting you tonight are going to appear very soon I hope in a book listen to her Ari's analysis of where we have got to in global society first of all he says 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 thirdly death is now just a technical medical problem this is very much like Steven Pinker's thesis now there are loads of questions that we could ask about this because it's not a thesis that is admitted by everybody by far but let's look at what Harare builds on this granted that these things are so he says in the 21st century we have two major agenda items firstly there's going to be a serious bid for human immortality not meaning that humans won't ever die but meaning that they won't ever have to die the technical problem of death will be solved and therefore humankind can concentrate on the second agenda item which is an intensification of the pursuit of human happiness how is that to be achieved it would be necessary he writes to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and 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 now this book is selling in millions and influencing millions of people and so he reaches the state where his view is this humankind is poised to replace natural selection with intelligent design and extend life from the organic realm into the inorganic he's not the only voice the director of engineering at Google is a very famous brilliant scientist called reycarts vile he's written a book called the singularity in which he argues that within the foreseeable future possibly as few as 30 years it's always just about 30 years I had this AI robots will overtake humans in their intelligence and capabilities another very serious and brilliant physicist is max tegmark of Princeton success in the quest for artificial intelligence has the potential he writes to bring unprecedented benefits to humanity and it is therefore worthwhile to research how to maximize these benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls and in a TED talk earlier this year he said in creating a I we are birthing a new form of life with unlimited potential for good or for ill and perhaps one of the most eminent scientists in the world today is our Lord race who's the astronomer royal we can have zero confidence he wrote recently 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 now this is not some fictional writer this is one of the world's top physicists and astronomers and people are taking this kind of thing seriously there are other people taking it seriously maybe you've seen that name before and I was interested to have Dan Brown's latest novel drawn to my attention and when I opened it I discovered that what he's doing in a fictional way and influencing millions because millions read his books so we need to take seriously what the philosophy is in them two big questions where do I come from and where am I going and he explains and interviews his motivation is to see if God can survive science now of course I have dedicated a large part of my life to point out that God could not only survive science that science points to God and it doesn't make sense without him so it intrigued me that here's a novelist using a fictional argument to try to explore these two questions it gets very interesting because the hero if you like or the antihero of the book is a billionaire of course entrepreneurial artificial intelligence expert called Edmund Kirsch and what he does is to use narrow AI of the sort that works and we're familiar with to predict AGI and here's how he does it the first question is where do we come from he goes back to a famous experiment for which Miller and Urey won the Nobel Prize in 1953 they took a simulated prebiotic atmosphere put it in a test tube and passed electrical sparks through it and they discovered a residue in the test tube of several amino acids that are necessary for Biological life so what he now does it's actually very clever but what he now does is do a little bit of research and discover that those test chips know this is actually true this happened those test tubes were put away in a cupboard for over 50 years we're now into the 2000s and they were taken by the Jeremy England of MIT a brilliant scientist and just out of interest he had a look at what was in the test tubes and he discovered to his amazement that there were quite a few more amino acids that hadn't been there 50 years before so Brown gets his mind working and says right let's put an AI system to work that's what it was like in 1953 that's what it was like in the early 2000s let's make a database and calculate well what's it gonna be like in a hundred years five hundred years a thousand years a million years ten million years a billion years and so on now of course a lot of it is hype and imagination but the point is as he watches his AI system work on this database and he's watching it and lo and behold in front of his eyes the double helix of DNA suddenly appears so he solved the mystery of the origin of life well he hasn't actually and you will find a very detailed expose of this in my book but it's attractive to people because it seems like the kind of way you would do it I reject his arguments completely for a very simple reason that the DNA double stranded helix is a linguistic shows linguistic features it's a code and natural unguided processes do not produce code but that's another big story but man has come to the next thing what about the question of the future well of course he starts off because he's an evolutionary atheist and he starts off with the points in his database representing as he understands the development of animals and so on in the past and then he starts of course to project him into the future so he watches his screen as the AI system filters through all this and he suddenly notices something very odd I'm afraid this is a spoiler if you don't like spoilers you better stop listing because as he watches the screen he sees another species of emerging and this new species grows and grows until it swallows up humanity he calls it Technium because of his technology taking over from biological life now what is said in the book is fascinating he announces this to the world that he says new technologies like cybernetics etc and virtual reality will forever change what it means to be human and this scientist says I realize there those of you who believe as Homo sapiens you are God's chosen species I can understand that this news his 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 think now what's at the heart of this ladies and gentlemen is a drive to refashion human beings and that raises profound questions for someone like me who is a Christian and it means that we need in light of this although most of it is hype and speculation it's capturing the minds of people so I think we need to inject into the debate a rethink of what human beings version 1.0 actually are so we've got AGI the singularity hamid a orson Technium all speculation were very little way down the road but people can now see possible because of the success of narrow AG I so what is a human being how are we going to think about humanity well I was taught quantum physics years ago at Cambridge by Professor Sir John Polkinghorne and he writes if we're to understand the nature of reality we have only two possible starting points either the brute fact of the physical world or the brute fact of a divine will and purpose behind that physical world two worldviews either the Atheist worldview the physical world is all that exists or the theistic worldview well the atheistic material worldview we humans as physicist Sean Carroll are blobs of organised mud very flattering which through the impersonal workings of nature's patterns have developed the capacity to contemplate and cherish and engage with the intimidating complexity of the world around us the meaning we find in life is not transcendent now I want to just pause here for a moment and say to you why this stuff is really serious is that most of the thinkers so far as I can ascertain who are working on it are coming from a naturalistic atheistic perspective and you can see that if you believe that biological life happened without any divine intervention or input then surely with human intelligence we can create artificial life based on silicon we can enhance by intelligent design the humans that we are at the moment it's very logical from a materialistic point of view it is not logical from the biblical point of view which is in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and God made humans in his own image I will hold that in their heads for a minute and just think of a very important thing it's one thing to suggest the brain functions like a computer it's a very different thing to say it is a computer Roger Epstein was the editor of psychology today and he is very much against this idea that the human brain is simply a computer made of mate computers don't play games like humans play games and so on they don't at the most fundamental level even solve computational problems like humans do and I think one of the most important warnings comes from your own professor leon kass one of those brilliant public intellectuals of the u.s. a chicago presidential advisor on ethics and he says this we have paid some high price for the technological conquest of nature but none so high is the intellectual and spiritual costs 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 will become now against that background I want to think very briefly with you of the alternative worldview the biblical perspective and the Bible announces that we do not have to wait for super intelligence because it already exists God the word the one who created our universe by speaking it into being so that mind and God and word are primary and the physical universe is derivative that's exactly opposite to the assumption that the physical universe is primary and everything else is derivative and the intriguing thing about the Genesis account of creation is the two days on which God spoke more than once the third and the sixth and on the third day the distinction was between inorganic material and life you do not get in Scripture a transition from inorganic to organic without the words and God said now what's that telling us in modern terminology it's telling us that the world we regard as a natural world is not a closed system of cause and effect it was built stepwise by God speaking energy and information from outside an open system and building it up the second occasion on which God spoke more than once is to differentiate between animals and human beings you don't get from animals to human beings without and God said now I'm going to leave that because I've written a little book on it that's shameless advertising but I want to come to this key statement you see artificial general intelligence will be something created in human image what we're claiming is that human beings like us were made in God's image and Genesis lists a whole fascinating collection of properties off what it means to be made in God's image now we can spend ages on each of them humans are made of the dust of the ground there's so much material sewer robots so our artificial intelligences but then humans are alive and of course AI systems are not alive will they ever be that is the question human beings have an aesthetic sense and as you look down the list you will discover that many of these properties depend and and are integrated with the fact that human beings are conscious but we've already seen that robots in the first place and AI systems they are not conscious and we could pick out a number of fascinating things here where attempts are being seriously made to imitate some of these properties think of the human language facility that we can name things do you know that AI systems regularly write sports reports for our newspapers that they are making film trailers that they are constructing art and it raises all kinds of questions where do you differentiate between the two you're going to be disappointed if you think I'm going to give you a lecture and how to sort all this out what I'm saying is these are things ladies and gentlemen we need to think about so on the one hand we have the appearance of intelligence but it's not conscious and God does something that machinery and clever scientists do not do he links intelligence and consciousness and here's the big barrier in constructing a super intelligence that biggest hurdle is consciousness because no one no one has any idea what consciousness is but there's something more you see I said that self-driving cars don't have a conscience so some sort of morality has to be built-in that's the morality of the programmers so self-driving cars separate intelligence and conscience AI separates them but God links them because in the Genesis account we have a tree of the knowledge of good and evil please it's not the tree of knowledge God didn't want to keep people from knowledge there was loads of it in the garden this kind of knowledge is a knowledge you don't want to have and the analysis in Genesis is something that is way beyond any capacity or beginnings of a capacity of an AI system because here God explains to us what it means to be a moral being in simple terms they had freedom to eat of all the trees God said don't eat of that one that freedom to eat otherwise the prohibition would have been meaningless and of course we know the story that they disobeyed God the first morality was vertical it was determined by God now this is a huge problem if you reject God and you're building all kinds of systems that interact with human beings what morality you're going to build into them where are you going to get it from because if there isn't a god I would want to argue that morality ends up being essentially subjective now that's another huge topic but it's important that we see again what Genesis says because this creature that God built in His image grasped at autonomy and brought sin and disaster into the world do you know what many people in the Robotics world an AI world fear exactly the same thing happening to their creations and introducing Lea enough a leading scientist draws the parallel and and she says if we see the Genesis account of the fall 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 fully and there of course she's thinking of robots with AI systems together we can thank she says the Hebrew a kind of Genesis for pre warning us about this danger thousands of years ago so there has been a conference of some of the world's leading thinkers to try and get people to agree to impose morality on any of these developments lest something gets out of control one of the leading researchers in the world of artificial intelligence is a Christian believer at MIT her name is Rosalyn Picard and she uses AI systems to get into the inner heart of autistic children and she's done wonderful work in helping those children and she writes a general point the greater the freedom of a machine the more it will need moral standards so Genesis raises the morality question there is concern about it even when talking about hypothetical super intelligent machines but there was another tree in the garden and that is the tree of life and we remember that one of her Ahri's propositions was that in this century we are going to solve the problem of physical death are we because Genesis raises some very interesting points it tells us that what humans disobeyed God he removed from them a source of food that if they had had access to it would have kept them physically arrived forever that's what the text says and you begin to wonder if the search for physical immortality all goes back to this story that God excluded them from it and you've probably read in classical mythology the search for the elixir of life and now the modern Merson is the search for homo Deus so Harare projection to the future and his idea is that we're going to upgrade humans into gods the biblical answer to it is spectacular because there is a homo dales a man who is God but it's not man becoming God it's God becoming man and the heart of the Christian faith is that the word became flesh and dwelt among us evidenced by his resurrection and his ascension there is a homo Deus we don't have to wait for Harare or Kurt's file or anybody else to create a man who is God there is a man who is God isn't it interesting ladies and gentlemen that when someone like Harare or Kearse says this is going to happen people say oh that's fascinating but what we claim that there is a man who's God or they say you couldn't possibly believe that that's the Bible isn't it and what I want to argue to you tonight seriously is this we have come to a very important moment where we can see in our culture ideas that are parodies of what we've already got of the Bible which gives us a remarkable opportunity to speak into what's going on now one of the hopes of these people you've probably heard it is to upgrade ourselves and become more intelligent and all this kind of thing but you see there is already in existence a divine upgrade and phase one is that any one of us by trusting Christ as Lord and Savior who died for our sins can become what we were not by nature a child of God that is a spectacular divine upgrade isn't it and that can already happen we don't have to wait for it we can receive the life of God and perhaps by looking at it against the background of AI we can see just how remarkable this is we have something to say to our world they're searching for it they're nowhere near it they're trying to get there but we can say look God has become man there is a man who is God He is risen from the dead and he invites everybody to become children of God receiving a new life eternal life by trusting him as many as received him he gave the right to become children of God the serpent said in the day you eat thereof you shall be hamada you shall be as God's here's the biblical answer to that God doesn't want to suppress anybody he wants to make us his children in his family with the same kind of life as he has got but there's more the homo Deus was here he's left he's returning and publicly to his judges jesus said you shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of God and coming in the clouds of heaven privately to his disciples he said this same it was said to his disciples this same jesus shall so come as you saw him though homo Deus is going to return now let's listen to a famous atheist John Gray who's always worth reading humans very 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 he's wrong I will come again and I will take you to myself that where I am there you may be also so how far have we got the AGI people are speculating on the creation of humor Deus by human engineering and intellectual ability scripture claims that a super intelligence has always existed God and God has become human and there is a hummel Deus Jesus the god man the word become flesh but there's more and now it becomes even more fascinating because the Bible talks of a future commodious that is evil this is Paul writing in the first century to a church at Thessalonica listen to what he has to say and bear in mind when I read it that he was only in this city for three weeks and he reminded the people that when he was there he told them this stuff what had he told them for that day will not come that is the day of judgment will not come until 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 and then the lawless one this is not civil lawlessness this is spiritual lawlessness it's a rebellion against God 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 full signs and wonders and deceptions now that's chilling reading but I want to put it in the context of what fessor of physics at MIT is saying about the future max tegmark a very bright man and when he comes to AGI he's got various scenarios of what might happen for example human cyborgs uploads and super intelligence might coexist peacefully there might be a protector god that is where AI becomes essentially omniscient we don't want to ignore that ladies and gentlemen many young people today cannot do without being connected to the machine that knows everything more or less that they've ever done it's called the Internet of Things and AI will become very rapidly and has become a substitute God that's another big social story but then he's got another idea for the enslaved God a super intelligent AI is confined by humans but then the next one is AI takes control decides that humans are a threat a nuisance or waste of resource and gets rid of us by a method that we don't even understand and he's got 12 scenarios here's the one that interests him most I was intrigued when I discovered this he calls it the Omega project 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 he goes on to indicate this prometheus one massive feature is complete social and economic control of buying and selling now listen to the book of Revelation written 20 centuries ago now this is imagery but listen to it it that is the base deceives those who dwell on the earth telling them to make an image for the base that was wounded by the sword and yet lived and it was allowed to of 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 beast of his Lane also it causes all to be marked on the right hand so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark that is the name of the beast and the number of his name people often laugh at that but this is the very scenario that will flow out of the current social control AI systems in China which tegmark singles out as an example of what might happen in the future people say but this is energy but just a minute they obviously haven't listened to CS Lewis because see as Lewis points out that imagery and metaphor always stand for reality there's always a reality behind them so if we ask what is this based the book of Revelation gives the answer in the very same context let's listen to it this calls for wisdom let the one whose understanding calculate the number of the beast for it is the number of a man and his number is 666 please notice what it's not saying it's not telling you who it is it's telling you what it is the Beast is human that is the central message of this you know historically people have tried to decode this game atria putting numbers for letters and work out who it is and they've been spectacularly successful Hitler has been in Stalin's Volyn virtually everybody but that isn't the point because you see if this human who behaves like a beast is revealed by the power of Satan and controls the whole world you not have to play guessing games with numbers to know where it is it'll be obvious the 666 will simply be a check do we take it seriously this is the way that tegmark starts his book talking about prometheus here we have it in Scripture why shouldn't we take scripture seriously I see no reason why not to I see increasing reason to do that that's the negative side and it clearly is not a very pleasant prospect although we can see what's happening in our world is moving very rapidly towards it it is highly credible and it's credible because Paul said to these people it's already working in your own society the Caesars were calling themselves gods and they were insisting that the Christians bow down and worship and many a Christian lost his or her life for refusing to do it now he says you watch the trends in your society this deification of emperors watch where it goes this is where it's going to go to and here are the AGI people telling us exactly the same thing on the basis of our speculations I think we need to take these texts much more seriously than we've ever done in the past but there's good news you know because there's a divine upgrade phase two phase one is becoming children of God through receiving Christ phase two is spectacular because it is a transformation it's not bioengineering this is what it is 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 must put on immortality that is a wonderful hope in the midst of all of this now let's just concluding now come down to balance here is a statement of a book that came out just recently one of the world's top AI researchers and here's his honest assessment 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 empathetic leaders who know how to create trust to build teams and inspire service and communicate effectively so I would sum up ladies and gentlemen by saying firstly that fear of AGI should not prevent people of any worldview making a contribution to the positive aspects of narrow AI to the benefit of all and Rosalind Picard put it this way we decided it's more about building a better human machine combination that it is about building our oisin where we will be lucky if it wants us around as a household pet in the middle of my talk I went to Genesis why do we believe that humans are special here's why we believe it the ultimate affirmation of humanity version 1.0 is the fact that God became one the word became flesh and the result of the incarnation the death of the reza and the resurrection of jesus that instead of speculative hope that one day we can upload the contents of our brains or we can be bioengineered to live forever we have assured uncertain hope based on the true homo Deus that to as many as received him to them gave you the right to become children of God and we can lift up our heads in confidence for the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we shall be changed this mortal must put on immortality that is the future of the Christian believer ladies and gentlemen and it is light-years more credible and better than anything speculative AGI has to offer thank you very much indeed [Applause] welcome everybody this is Cameron McAlister here at the zacharias Institute I'm here live with my colleague and friend Jill Cara teeny one quick reminder by the way you have five more minutes to get your questions into pigeonhole so make sure you do that I know that I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of good questions generated by that talk and I knew that this is new territory for many of you so Jill and I are going to discuss a little bit and we hope this will be helpful to you and informative so Jill you know the first thing that comes to mind here is that was a pretty somber talk on the one hand and you know there are some pretty creepy elements to it as well but it's funny because I think the first time I really started hearing about the transhumanist word words transhumanism or artificial intelligence obviously they've been circulating for a while but I think I started hearing them a lot maybe three years ago or so and I'll be honest at the time I thought this sounds a little bit sci-fi sounds like Skynet from Terminator or something and I thought it was a bit of a fringe movement so I was kind of inclined not really to take it that serious I'm wondering if what your experience was it was with it Jill when you first heard about it no absolutely I would say it's about three years ago was a about the time that I started hearing it more and you know even the question you know should we fear artificial intelligence like there's a part of me that wants to say I don't have time waiting when you other things to do like I don't have time to fear that but like I definitely think that he pointed out some really fascinating reasons why we should be cautious but but there is that that sense of how do we balance this like should how do we seek wisdom how do we be honest and realistic about about the places that we might be going with this but also recognize that we don't need to stand in this posture of fear but that is not at all what were called to do as Christians I think well part of the I think part of the fear aspect for me at least when some of the anxieties creep in has to do with what appears to be initially novelty here and I'll expand on that a little bit this is where I think sometimes this is this is an ironic fact but studying ancient heresies can really clue you in a lot to some of the new the new quote trends that are circulating and I know I've heard professor lennox say before that transhumanism as a movement really it's got its roots in an ancient heresy heresy known as Gnosticism and so I guess that that sort of amplifies the scriptural you know the the really helpful saying from Ecclesiastes that there's nothing new Under the Sun so we have these even though it may appear very cutting-edge and in some ways these are unique challenges but in other ways they kind of go back to ancient ways of thinking absolutely yeah there were several times over he was quoting modern writers that were saying things about sort of degrading like those how can we get out of our bodies and how can we this sort of degradation of the flesh and that this is our last obstacle and you I mean that sounds like right out of the playbook from the Gnostics and the second century so really you're right like we should be encouraged so as Christians that that this isn't entirely new like even though it's new to us and it's scary in some ways this was a heresy that the church saw fit to address with firmer doctrine and meetings coming together so we can we can rest assured that in this historical wrestling with these very concepts there were answers the church had answers and we we still today confess them together as a body or think about I guess another another notable feature I guess yeah you had that you had the church is convening councils and taking this so that actually demonstrates that of course down the ages Christians have been taking these questions very seriously so I don't I don't want listeners to think that we're being dismissive here but on the other hand the notion that some sort of hidden not realm of knowledge that's accessible to a select or elite you that it's just it has an ancient pedigree but it's also got it's got a number of I think again kind of creepy connotations connected with it there is that elitism and we can we can talk a little bit more about that in a second but I guess part of what is drawing what when I when I started to finally wake up to the importance of this line of thinking I think was when I realized the way it was captivating the popular imagination as well and you see you see it I mean you've been in many ways you there was a proliferation of films that were all about the integration of humanity and technology especially in the 80s there was terminator there was Robocop there was Blade Runner II the list goes on and and that's continued and now you've got shows like West world and so on so there's been a lot of anxiety in the popular realm for a while but what has struck me for years and I'm curious about what you think about this as well Jill but as I've traveled around one of the strengths of Christianity is how robust and full of a vision it is and one of the relative weaknesses often of different forms of skepticism whether it's all out atheism or agnosticism is that it feels so thin but that's not the case here with with transhumanism this is this is a much more full vision and it seems to offer it's in many ways it's a it's a whole alternative eschatology and it makes it a whole lot more appealing a whole lot more powerful yeah I mean I have you I'm wondering what some of your thoughts are there Jill because I mean again it's somebody who's very interested in the arts and literature and the way the arts captivate our imagination mm-hmm yeah what's your read a little bit on the way transhumanism seems to be drawing people in on a deeper level yeah it definitely seems to be I mean there's a compulsion there that I think is is contagious I love how dr. Lennox said we we need to be aware of these blurred worldviews that are that are pulling our imaginations and shaping our imaginations and that that is is very much part of what's happening here and why it I think it gets so deeply into our our imaginations there yes we've got terminator in our minds but then we have Alexa listening to us as well and so it does it seem like a leap very far so yeah I I mean we talk a lot about imagination and and the power of imagination even in the apologetics realm and how we need to take that seriously as apologist and yeah what are what are some of the things that you would say with regard to imagination here how can we counter these powerful imaginations and these blurred worldviews that he's talking about yeah I think it's a it's a serious challenge but again it's not a new one it was CS Lewis who of course said it so well he said that for me reason is the natural organ of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning so the imagination plays a crucial role in how we put together our experience of life in reality and in recent years there's been such an emphasis on and there are many different complex factors here so we're only scratching the surface of course but you've got the growing individualism in our culture which is really pretty radical that kind of views human beings as as really the expressing themselves is sort of the highest good and the way to do that is just to make your own pure choices you're not really there's no real specific Tilos or anything it's basically just a sort of consumer model of how you express your freedom so there's that and there's the end there's the growing view that human beings are characterized by autonomy now there's some real internal contradictions here when it comes to a naturalistic outlook and these views on freedom we can compare in a second but that notion is kind of widespread and and it's really I think it really takes root first in the Romantic movement which kind of sees human beings is more not so much and I know you've got strong feelings here Jill but not so much sub creators as Tolkien would say but creators so it's its first it's it's William Wordsworth and samuel taylor coleridge you actually start to go as far as to say now human beings are actually creators our mind plays with reality we put together new combinations well you know years and years and internalizing that we tend to believe just on a default setting that we call the shots and we largely when it's be you know when it comes to our own small little circle of influence or households especially in affluent Western nations we do call a lot of the shots and so it seems very natural to assume too many people that man is the measure of all things and all I'm doing is trying to illustrate that the the tiny little thought patterns that creep in and sort of change our view of reality and so we tend to assume that we can we can shape our destiny and here comes transhumanism with some brilliant thinkers and they're telling you yeah that's right we will rewrite the script and we will and death death is now a technical problem as Professor Lennox was saying right right it's interesting because I think you're right that this is happening in and outside of the church and these sort of subtle shifts where were or even unaware yeah you and I have talked about this quite a bit but there's a there's a trend amongst artists to the Christian artists in particular that they love to say like I'm I see myself as co-creating or and I always try to be really careful with that because I think it's wonderful that they're finding fulfillment and participating there but I I think our language is so important there because we confess as Christians that only God creates out of nothing like you're not creating the paint that you're using to create the painting and that might seem very subtle but it's so important and I loved what dr. Lennox had to say about the the metaphors the important of some of these metaphors that are blurring the way we're seeing things because artificial intelligence is it really intelligence you know what what is going on with that these thinking machines are they actually thinking and what does that mean and how is that seeping into our imagination up in a powerful way you've done a lot with metaphor - I know you you could say more there it's amazing the way metaphor often gets the best of us I think and of course he quoted that professor at the University of Alabama giving that lecture I believe in 1985 their repression but saying that we need to put an emphasis on the artificial component here and I know we can get into some really fine distinctions between artificial intelligence artificial general intelligence artificial general intelligence in the narrow sense artificial general intelligence in the broader sense and of course there's a spectrum of views and of course we've moved from truth transhumanism right now to talk about artificial intelligence and you've got to make a distinction between a robot and artificial intelligence as well and if you go back to those slides professor Lennox points out that artificial intelligence actually has to do with mathematical theories and algorithms but back to the metaphor component the way our language just tends to run away think about something as simple as your smartphone well is it really a smart phone yeah I mean I mean these are these are use we use a lot of personal language connected with machines what does your does your computer really think no does it really have memory no your computer doesn't have memories it's got it's it's it's got programs it's got silicon and circuits but that doesn't stop many of us from from really being carried away and it's it's pretty natural to do that and if you want a really grumpy and lengthy repose to some of this thought David Bentley Hart as some of you know can has a tendency to indulge in polemics from time to time but his book the experience of God he's got a it's about a hundred plus page section which is essentially a rant on consciousness okay and he he adds actually some very if you can if you can kind of bracket the tone he had some very clarifying remarks about the difference between the way the human mind works and the way a machine works and as Professor Lennox pointed out one of the thorniest problems you also have to put it in quotes that they that many of these people were on the more optimistic side remember there's a spectrum here when it comes to eat AI proponents some people are very skeptical think we should be deeply afraid for instance some of people know Sam Harris the avowed atheist very popular speaker he's given a TED talk about the dangers of AI for instance but it's pointed out often that we just we need to remember that the thinking is something that is exclusive to human beings in the real sense so solving consciousness that it's it's kind of disingenuous often to say that I think you've got books Daniel Dennett's consciousness explained for instance most of some of the some of the most decisive Minds out there Thomas Nagel comes to mind Thomas Nagel is of course an avowed skeptic he's he's at New York University wrote a book called mind in cosmos he argues that consciousness is from his point of view at the moment on it's not solvable and that all of these are gross over generalizations it remains a mystery and so there are some problems that some really smart people believe are insuperable present insuperable challenges to this kind of viewpoints so I think we need to we need to recognize that there's there's a range of views as a spectrum here right and there are some who are cloning ly optimistic namely a couple of several really brilliant people in Silicon Valley and maybe Oxford University but there's a lot of people who express really healthy skepticism here I think no I think you're right I think you're absolutely right I loved the quote that he gave from leon kass oh yeah or he because i think i think you're exactly right in pointing to these things and he's a literature guy right so we these these things do seep into then how we define what it means to be humans even like is it it's is it strictly consciousness that makes a human a human what what is happening there and I'll read this quote I thought it was so thoughtful we said we have paid some high prices for technological conquest of nature but none so high as the intellectual and spiritual cost of seeing nature as a mere mature for our manipulation exploitation and transformation with the powers of biological engineering gathering there will be similar opportunities for our degradation of humanity so there's that consequence if we see ourselves as meat than meat we shall become that degradation of material is is really close to then the degradation of humanity that that leap is not that far away and as Christians I think that's one of one of the powerful things that learn it that dr. Lennox said was pointing to the fact that the Incarnation is is a very bold declaration against that against the degradation of humanity against the degradation of material God's so valued this creation that he loved it so much that he stepped into it and then and then how does that influence the way we start talking about these things and does that set us apart with a different sort of imagination to wrestle through some of these concepts I think I think it absolutely does and it leaves me hopeful I know we talked about the difference there like though the techno pessimists and the techno optimists but I feel like there's a third place that the Christian has to has to stand with a different sort of imagination yeah I think so it's it's remarkable because the the cast quote is very very similar to CS Lewis's the abolition of man which professor Lennox brings in as well and in the abolition of man toward the end of the book a really slender volume but extremely powerful I think to my mind one of the most incisive things Lewis wrote and he talks about the fact that when we've set ourselves the task human beings that is of conquering nature our conquest of nature and Lewis always had a very ambivalent attitude toward the Natural Sciences he would he would insist that he know I love science properly practiced but certainly there's Anna slowest had a very interesting attitude when it came to technology he and Tolkien both did but one what he points out is if we've set ourselves the task of conquering nature and let's say we finally feel that we have vanquished natural the nature of the natural order then he argues the final conquest the man will be man to try to solve the riddle of our own nature and it seems to me that when you look with moving past the the AI and a AGI discussion to transhumanism again I think transhumanism is really the more important topic of conversation here because this is sort of the culmination that's that the AI is sort of a step in that kind of trajectory but with transhumanism you've got the the real picture emerging I think that they're what makes this so compelling I think to so many people if I try to step out of my own views as a Christian sympathetically and empathetically enter into this viewpoint is that we can save ourselves in a sense now I think that that is tickets for me to get I have to get somber for a second I think that's incredibly dangerous because if we look if we consult the history books we don't have a very uplifting picture when we see instances of a select few with the vision for all of humanity CS Lewis calls those the conditioners in the evolution of man and it's always a select few because not everybody is a whiz and a genius not everybody can can have this kind of education necessary for this kind of these kind of pursuits own ends ends up being a real small coterie of brilliant people shaping the future of under any many untold people and the idea that they know what's best somehow that they're going to act in an ethical way that we are in the position even to control that much be in that kind of position with that kind of power it just I think we've got a lot of really sobering examples to look at there in history yeah and I think that ought to put a little bit of a check on on some of just just maybe a pause for thought on some of this but I don't know Joe do you see have you ever had any conversations like this with any of your non-christian friends where they they seem really optimistic or maybe they're a little bit more skeptical yeah actually it doesn't yeah it's one of those conversations that I don't really feel like I've had lots of conversations with non-christian friends about it transhumanism doesn't come up right no it doesn't it comes up more often with Christians actually yeah I think it's is interesting I don't know why I'm necessarily that would be yeah I'm not any ideas yeah well is your experience the same I think no actually well so it's come up for me most often when I'm at very specific university campuses okay so when we were in it should bill come as no surprise to you and I think most of the listeners that when I was in in California at the University of California Berkeley yes it came up quite a bit in the South not as much so there may be some some pockets where it's more prevalent obviously in the bay area of California it would come up but I do remember being in it in a two-hour conversation I timed it with the student this was pretty tiring who really truly believed that we were gradually getting better as human beings and we were going to gradually weed out all of the social problems that we're dealing with from poverty economic disparity racism warfare and also be able to you know maybe modify our bodies and all and for two hours I talked with him because this is what and here I'm curious what you think here Jill I think in these conversations even though Christians are often accused of being wishful thinkers it's here where I often find myself looking like the hardened realist because I'm saying cuz I'll say things along the lines of well I think we can make technological improvements perhaps but I don't think we're getting better right I don't see any evidence of a future where you won't have to lock your doors at night or where you won't need a police force or military to protect you and so I've actually been accusing well you're just you're really negative you've got a you got a pretty pessimistic view of human nature and I think I have an exalted view of human nature but any experience there wow that's interesting it's it's I like talking to my colleagues for this very reason because I realize how different circles really do it make an impression on the kind of ministry that we're doing because most of of my ministry is directly with artists and I don't think there's there's an optimism there at all like it seems very much like there's a possum of them that they intuitively sense which I think makes sense for artists are very intuitive people but yeah so I think for those conversations that I'm getting and it's it's definitely like why why is there hope and so that's a very different look at humanity and so can we use our art to challenge or to create community or to challenge some of the social and justices can we use art there's very much an activism with regard to like how can what I'm making with my hands be something that becomes a positive force for good even amongst artists that would say this is all there is so that is what you're singing it's fat okay that makes perfect sense that just said that here's another fascinating aspect and I've actually I've I've made this claim before and what you've just said seems to bear it out so if you're going to make a serious art and all I mean by that is art that aims to that is not exclusively commercial all right let's just live that could be a whole discussion in and of itself then so this the stuff I'm most interested in is is not so much the visual arts it's more literature and and movies you can't afford to misrepresent human nature because it won't work what come across is realistic sentimental it would be sentimental and it's funny to me because as a person whose sensibilities have been very deeply shaped by literature I read a brilliant mind like Steven Pinker a man who's certainly much smarter than I am and yet my impression is this is a pretty sappy sentimental vision of reality it doesn't seem to it doesn't match my experience of human beings that certainly doesn't match my experience when I'm driving down the road and somebody cuts me off now but this sunny kind of it's almost pollyannish and I don't mean this in a dismissive sense even though it sounds that way I just this is this is purely descriptive this is how I've received this and it seems that a lot of our entertainment is not as sunny and as optimistic from Mad Men and Breaking Bad to West world this is this gives us a vision of human nature that seems to corroborate the fact that we that were fallen right wow that is that is really quite interesting but yeah I think I think ultimately then what what do we walk away with from a conversation like this where it's so easy for people to either go off into it a pessimistic crowd or often to an optimistic crowd as Christians do we have that ability to stand with one foot in both realities and say that Christ descended in order to help us ascend but there is that sense that he came down into the muck of humanity like it's not making it waxing eloquently and making humanity all great it's admitting that they were suffering but how can we be elevated out of that I think Christ provides the way and so for me like that's why I think the Christian has hope all right so I think in the end where I usually come is yeah the the Incarnation is the affirmation the Ascension means that there's a world to come and we need to be saved we don't need to lose hope but we need to recognize that the final hope is not human beings but thanks so much for tuning in guys and appreciate as you listen to this discussion and I hope that you will enjoy the Q&A I know many fascinating questions this is a topic that could easily really take a week so thanks for tuning in and we hope you have a wonderful evening absolutely thank you it's our gift to you go to our zi m connect or today sign up and introduce yourself that's our zi m welcome back everyone your sword we have received dozens of fantastic questions thank you for submitting them and without further ado I'm going to put some of them to Professor Lennox and the first one one of the most voted on ones I'm going to take some of the highest voted on questions and then some that were a bit further down but help us get a range of topics throughout this Q&A and so the first question John is this isn't artificial intelligence only as powerful as it is designed by a human to be and so the issue is really not in the artificial intelligence but the people writing the code the very interesting thing about that question there's a famous quote that you get in almost every book that the first super intelligent machine will be the last invention of humankind for the simple reason that it will go on making other machines so I think the general verdict would be no that isn't correct what is important in that question I think is that the ethical side but we probably come to that and some of the other questions but if you're thinking of AGI as distinct from narrow artificial intelligence then of course there's no knowing what these intelligences could go on to do and leave behind and you saw one of those scenarios was that they treat humans as household pets or else annihilate them and it's important to say that people are treating a whole range of these hypothetical situations very seriously there are huge tomes written about this stuff so that's how I'd respond to that by the way this is a Q&A as you see ladies gentlemen and the Q&A is one of the most inadequate things you could ever think of because what you're about to do is plunge the depths of my ignorance because all I can do is respond off the top of my head to these questions but that's no harm because as like you're not you'd be dissatisfied with the answer that's where you start to work if you've asked the serious question that you're interested in you won't be content with what I say you go back and start doing work on it and that's where you really learn so some of the approves of that idea but only one but anyway could be worse okay off you go if we're plunging the depths of your ignorance John the rest of us are in real trouble question number two quite a personal question here my spouse an astrophysicist turned from Christ the first year of college being ridiculed by a professor and students that the Bible has many contradictions that smart people don't believe how would you respond the question is it is so general it's full of contradictions or there are many contradictions what are they because for centuries now serious thinking people have discussed and written very intelligently and rationally about alleged contradictions and usually most of them fall apart so when I'm asked a question like this I can only respond generically what contradictions and what smart people don't believe in them because of course smart people usually don't believe in contradictions but you've got to establish that there are actually contradictions and there are many books written by highly intelligent highly qualified people on Al contradictions in the Bible so that if I were not situation I would immediately want to know what are these alleged contradictions and if I didn't see my way through them myself I go to a resource and I would find one within two minutes on the internet that will deal with these questions this has been written about endlessly an amazing thing is that so many of them disappear and people become Christians when they discovered that they disappear there's a very famous case of someone who could see that Luke as a writer was claiming to be historically accurate and he thought well this is the way to destroy the New Testament all I have to do is to check the allegedly factual claims about places about geography about cities that look right so he started and his objective was to destroy Christianity but he ended up becoming a Christian because he find that Luke was right in every case and came to the conclusion he was one of the most brilliant ancient historians and I think when people study the contradictions they're very likely to disappear the Bible has stood the test of time for centuries and the interesting thing is people have taken it seriously and I think there are real answers to these things and I'm just sad when I hear that this happens to people but unfortunately it does hmm yeah I sometimes think that a little Bible study can push someone away from God but a lot of Bible study very often draws someone back oh that's absolutely right and you see in my own life and I suspect in yours it's facing difficulties and questions that are raised in connection with the Bible that actually have strengthened my confidence in its truth and reliability yeah that's great so we would say push into those supposed contradiction I heard a very nice example recently I think it was about who first recited the declaration of Independence publicly and historically there were two different accounts to different people turns out when you dig into it that one of them did so but he had a weak voice and then that second person got up and did so with a louder voice so that the entire crowd could hear many of the supposed contradictions in the Bible or just like that they're seeing the same thing from two different perspectives let's move on to the next question John do you envision a I to advance to a point to achieve cognitive consciousness and awareness would this cause problems with the doctrines of Christianity I don't think it would cause problems with adoptions of Christianity the short answer is I just don't know and one of the reasons I just don't know is that in all my reading about consciousness and studies the serious people just say we just don't know what consciousness is how it is that in some sense our material bodies of something in them that clearly is not Material that's a big difficulty for pure materialism and therefore it's very difficult to speculate since we're still at Ground Zero with understanding consciousness on the other hand what I was saying from Scripture tonight I find intriguing because I got a lot of questions about it for instance this man who is the base that's a metaphor and there are two bases a very complex situation and an image is made to the first beast and the image is given a capacity to speak and to be able to kill people what does that mean and people say well you know if it is referring to any reality it'll be very simple no old if the whole world is deceived by it this will not be a simplistic business and there are dangers you see if you say God will not allow people to get to this point if it happens you'll be the first to be maximally deceived so we need to be very careful the second reason we need to be careful is not all scenarios of AGI are evil you saw the tegmark several of them and some of them are good and there's a kind of Alliance among a number of leading people to try to ensure that however far we go what is produced is benevolent unkind also there's nothing theoretically that limits you to simply one AGI although if there is a superintelligence it's hard to say that it would bring heavy rivals it's easy to speculate it's interesting to speculate it's actually important to speculate because everybody else is doing it and if we don't think about these things then we won't have anything to say now from the perspective of Scripture people take different views there are people that say look God intervened in the first homo Deus project Genesis 3 he intervened in the second one the Tower of Babel let's build a city in a tower that had can reach to heaven so they reckon that God's always going to put a stop nothing shall be impossible to them it says in Genesis and God stopped it but I think there's a risk there because it simply tells you what happened on those occasions and I just suspect that the book of Revelation is warning us not to be so certain that human artifacts won't advance to such a stage that the entire world is going to be deceived you don't deceive an entire world with something extremely unsophisticated and simple that's great such an encouragement and I I took it as a really significant encouragement John even that you started your answer with I don't know and and I hope that's a model for all of us I think it was a very lengthy way of there's a lightening I don't know to be fair but it is such an encouragement that sometimes we think to be legitimate Christians or to be Christians who can defend our faith we need to have the answer to every question and the reality is nobody's interested enjoying a community of know-it-alls they're interested in joining a community of people who take questions seriously say I don't know but then give the lengthy I don't know and are willing to wrestle through it together in the context of community the next question John is the deification of what or whom is the modern equivalent to the deification of emperors when we live in a time that often seems to place its science above all people and the Roman Empire they emperors some of them at least aggregated to themselves divine powers Caesar did for example and of course from a political and power-play perspective that is and has been all through history what powerful people have done to increase their power and that is to harness the human allegiance that should only be given to God for themselves now in the ancient world idols were not so much things that people loved they were things that people trusted and I think that gives us a hint as to where to look what is the contemporary equivalent well I did mention one thing that has colossal power in our contemporary society and that is the internet and being many of our young people have a sense that if you're not connected and Facebook and everywhere else you're dead you're of no significance and social psychologists and psychiatrists are writing about this as a very dangerous development just look at the incidences of suicide and self-harm when people are unfriended on Facebook and because we're all leaving a track record with our smartphones very rapidly the Internet of Things to which we can which we are connected can see omniscient it knows everything about us and in China those AI systems with closed-circuit TV at one level appear to be virtually omniscient they know lots of things about everybody enough to control them socially so that there is a real danger that we are birthing a monster now sensible people are thinking hard about the ethics of this how can you avoid it the I almost said the frightening thing and perhaps it is a frightening thing this point system and China is welcomed by people the amazing thing is they think it's marvelous and they go around saying their people to their friends I pushed my points up by 50 how are you doing all the time not realizing what it is talking about and in all of this I'm very aware that there are many hugely good things being done in narrow AI there may be some very good things that come in the other direction human enhancement you know watch people going down the street and they've got a human enhancement Trump to their ears of you notice that and they're not looking where they're going and if you're driving a car you afterwards and they just blindly walk into the street because there - this thing it won't be long before it's inside their head physically or by thought they will be connected to computers all of that will probably come and in a way I wish I didn't have to carry this wretched heavy thing here well you could say you should forget it and give it away but then I wouldn't get my emails but that might be a very good thing etc etc etc but you can say that some enhancements we readily accept if I had a very weak left arm and somebody gave me a very lightweight exoskeleton I might well use it and so on and so questions arise where do you stop or do you stop with these enhancements and those are not easy questions to answer when I watch some of the things that have been done for people with limbs that they've lost or faculties that they've lost to give them dignity in society I think isn't it marvelous there are people who are inventing these things to enhance and help human capabilities that have been removed but then there are questions should we engineer the whole germ line of humans so that we manufacture different kinds of humans is that beginning to play God these are very difficult questions the concern in my mind and I suppose is everybody's mind is if the legislation is being done by people who have no concept of the transcendent who have no concept of an absolute morality then flawed human beings are going to build flaws and bias and prejudice into the systems they create John here's a very concrete question and in an area of business that business ethics which I know you've researched in and taught in as well at Oxford's business school the question is how should I handle my company's pursuit of AI technology as a Christian it all depends on the technology and you could leave out AI technologies any technology all the work raises moral questions usually on day one and that's why we need Christians in work and in these fails and doing things that's why I mentioned Rosalind Picard a couple of times tonight because it's wonderful to see Christians at the cutting edge of these new technologies and I didn't mean what I said towards the end we shouldn't be afraid of this I think it's fantastic that my medical diagnosis say will take far less time than they ever did before because of an intelligent AI system I wish I'd thought of it and been in at the invention of it and we must not be afraid of give of using our god-given skills to reflect his image by being creative he's a creator he created us he gave us skills and human creativity is one of the most marvelous reflections provided we build ethics in as well and of course that is where we demonstrate our maturity so my answer to that person is they should be in a way very thankful that they're in at the cutting edge of new technology and then they should think what are the ethical issues that are being raised can I contribute to the company's ethical mission statement or attitudes and they might get involved in all kinds of interesting things so I would be very positive I certainly wouldn't run out and get a job doing a play basket weaving or something like this to avoid the problems every job will raise ethical problems actually this is the sphere for the vast majority office where we learn about God's ruling government the famous statement by our Lord seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness is stated in the context of what we do to earn a living God gives us work to do that will raise ethical problems so that we can seek his kingdom and when I first learned this very many years ago it enhanced the value of work you can go into your work tomorrow morning saying God you've given me this to do I want to seek your rule in this teach me something about yourself today and seeking God's kingdom in the work doesn't mean going in and sending the verse for the day round all the partners it means learning to be moral and upright in that work there's not a job at all the world whether it's paid or not that doesn't raise moral problems usually on day one and this is immensely important so I would really encourage that person to see what they can contribute now in any company if you are told well we develop this technology it's got a major flaw but we mustn't tell the public that well you've got a choice to make and it might be a very painful choice there's a wonderful statement of the scripture those that honor me I wanna learn that's a great job I appreciate that encouragement not to flee from secular work when it gets challenging and it's just thinking about the fact that Jesus even in his adult life he probably spent what about eighteen years involved in secular work before his public ministry well that's the point there is no division in the Bible between Christian work and non Christian work it's all work and whatever you do says Paul do it has on to the Lord people sometimes say to be you should go into full-time work and I say what am I on part-time work oh they say you should go into full-time work well I said it's far too late and they say it's never too late I say listen I've been in full-time work since I was a teenager and now part of it is being husband part of it is being a father part of it is being a professor of mathematics part of it is teaching Bible part of it is intellectually defending Christianity it's all work and it's all done or should be done for God that lifts life right up that's great wonderful the Hebrew word abode are for work also the word for worship so we can also respond to someone that you should go into a full-time worship two more questions I think we had time for John here's a challenge from one of our questioners you only need a God in an objective sense in an objective existence in a subjective existence such as ours the beholder is God as the beholder defines what they see via their perception gosh I wish I knew what that meant you only need a God in an objective existence in a subject of existence what do you mean by a subject of existence the very word exists as opposed to non exist seems to imply some kind of objectivity straightaway so that I'm afraid I do not really understand this question what may be behind it is that the need for a god that word need reveals a lot of things to me that idea that some people need a God and some people don't the issue is not do we need a God or not but the issue is is there a god or not and the kind of Freudian subjectivism that says well you're weak and you need a father figure in the sky so you invent a god in your subjective mind and of course as human beings we do have a subjective dimension and we have an objective dimension and we most of us hold to that and we realize that when somebody kicks us that there's something more to us than what goes on simply in our imagination but it's very important to realize that this idea that you need a subjective God because you are somehow wanting a father figure in the sky it sounds brilliant and it's a very good argument if there isn't a God you see the Freudian answer is great provided there is no God then his explanation that religion is a wish fulfillment works but what Freud forgot is that the flipside is true if there is a God then that explanation explains atheism beautifully as a wish fulfillment of never wanting to meet God and be accountable now various people have written about this and it's an objection I meet all the time and the point that's very important is this because it works both ways and gives us good an explanation for religion as it does for atheism provided there is a God or there isn't a God the question that will not deal with and cannot deal with is is there a God or not and that's the key question John this is our final question for the evening so feel free to answer this question but also if there are any final thoughts you want to leave us with at the end of it please please do add them we've been so blessed by the evening and the question is if an AGI arrives and it's as powerful as they say then is all hope lost did jesus lose and if not how does this tie into his return now it's hypothetical but let's run along with it for a moment suppose the book of Revelation and Thessalonians which I quoted and please notice Paul's statement and Thessalonians is not imagery it is straight theological text revelation says the same thing in terms of imagery and then tells you what the reality is behind the imagery now I don't know exactly what the book of Revelation means by saying that they based one of the base there are two of them there is an image made that has gives the impression of being alive and can speak and so on suppose for a moment that is an AGI just suppose for a moment it is is all hope lost well no it's going to be destroyed by the second coming of Christ so what is happening is we are told in plain straightforward that there is going to be a trend towards universal social control and unfortunately it's going to be evil and our Lord pointed this out to his disciples you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars evil men will wax worse and worse there'd be a trend does that mean that we give up all hope along the way of course it doesn't because Paul was being very wise when he said to the Christians and Thessalonica this kind of philosophy is already in your own society that will lead to that in the future now what about your society some of them have to give their lives for this but you look at life very differently if you're on a theist without hope and if you're a Christian who believes in the resurrection of the Dead and you see Paul didn't say right the Caesars are claiming to be God you might as well pack up and give up Christianity No thank God for it because we're here and we become Christians and so we must get the right sense of proportion but having said all of that it seems to me it's inescapable that there is to be a harvest of evil and it's plausible by dint of many of things I've mentioned tonight these trends are in our societies we can now easily imagine social control where we couldn't have believed at 20 years ago but Christ won't lose he will destroy this and according to my reading of Scripture the world will then be subject to his perfect rule but that's another story for another time wonderful shall we thank John one more time [Applause] John we can't thank you enough thank you for all that went into investing so deeply in our hearts and our minds this evening we've been very blessed and as we close out our evening together I just want to encourage you wherever you are whether you're here whether you're watching wherever you are in your faith journey I do believe that questions are the way forward if you're a Christian keep asking questions keep asking questions because questions are the way you get to know someone and Christianity says that God is personal and that he wants to know us and if you're not a Christian and you're here or you're watching I just asked you to consider this if if there is a God and if he made you with the mind that you have then he would want an honest intellectual search to point in his direction that is exactly what I found in my life that's exactly what John found in his life and that's exactly what I hope that you'll find in your life as well to our online audience thank you so much for being with us tonight I hope you have a great night and keep asking questions

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Views: 249,017

Rating: 4.8271766 out of 5

Keywords: RZIM, Ravi, Ravi Zacharias, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, apologetics, evangelism, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, Christianity, Christian, Christian Apologetics, philosophy, God, truth, Bible, gospel, Lord, salvation, john lennox, artificial intelligence

Id: njU4u2hMFnE

Length: 129min 26sec (7766 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018