Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Interview: John Lennox Responds to Shocking Claims About AI || SLP630

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Interview: John Lennox Responds to Shocking Claims About AI || SLP630 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love to get your opinion on a talk.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Will AI challenge our supremacy?
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: What authority he has to say it?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: He probably got it from ChatGPT.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: If thinking really means putting words in order, then AI can already think much better than many, many humans.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: AI is very good at putting words in order, but the system doesn't understand the words.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Everything made of words will be taken over by AI.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's just getting away with saying what he believes without any serious logical justification.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: But your book doesn't deny the fact that a revolution is afoot.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: There are indicators in the Book of Revelation that human beings will, under the command of a totalitarian world leader, construct an all-controlling system that has lethal powers over the inhabitants of Earth.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be very careful.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_03: Professor John Lennox, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_03: You're the author of many books, including 2084 and the AI Revolution.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: I'd love to get your opinion on a talk that Yval Noah Harari has made quite recently in Davos to the World Economic Forum.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: And the first point he makes is that AI is not just a tool, it's an agent.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_03: Let's have a look.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: The most important thing to know about AI is that it is not just another tool.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_02: It is an agent.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: It can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_02: A knife is a tool.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: You can use a knife to cut salad or to murder someone.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: But it is your decision what to do with the knife.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: AI is a knife that can decide by itself whether to cut salad or to commit murder.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_03: So I've heard you say before, uh, John, that uh tools as they develop, as technologies, can be used for good or for harm.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Uh Yvalno Harari seems to be saying, okay, yes, they are tools, but here are tools that are themselves agents.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Does that change the picture?
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think it does, but I would want to hear a great deal more about what he means by the nature of that agency.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because the agency is something that is built into the system by the human programmers and the people that construct it.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh at what level is it an agency?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, these decisions that it uh they claim it makes autonomously, are they made within certain parameters?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh there must be boundary conditions that are built in, etc., etc., etc., setting its goals.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And and clearly AI has become very much more sophisticated.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I agree, my impression is that it is much more than a tool.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh my own exposure to Chat GPT uh 5.2 has impressed me greatly with the capacity uh that this particular package has.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no doubt there's something in this, but unless you describe exactly what you mean, it it doesn't sound very clear to me.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: What uh should we think about personhood, given that we have for so long considered uh Homo sapiens to be the wise ones?
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's that's what the the the word means.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: So sapiens, we are we are those who have wisdom.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: We have, at least since Descartes, um, considered the thing to separate us from the animal kingdom to be our rationality and our our powers of rationality.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: Does intelligence confer personhood and and how does AI make us think about intelligence and personhood in in new ways, perhaps?
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the crucial thing I think to um know about AI is that it simulates intelligence.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's not intelligent at all.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: One of the pioneers in the field, there's a wonderful man, a Christian man actually, who rejoices in the name of Joseph McCrae Mellichamp, he's still alive, and he he wrote a very cleverly titled technical paper many years ago, uh which was this the artificial in artificial intelligence is real.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: And uh reading the experts like Jeffrey Hinton and uh Peter Norvig and those kind of people who are right at the forefront of AI, they are playing what they call the imitation game, the famous film uh about Alan Turing.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: That is, they are not claiming to reproduce human intelligence.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: What they are trying to do and quite happy to do is simply simulate it.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, an AI system does something, and narrow AI, which is the one that's working at the moment, we haven't yet reached AGI, although there's a lot of hype about that, including on the part of uh Yuva Noah Harari.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: Narrow AI simply does one thing that normally requires an intelligent human being to do.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a simulation.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And in the book that counts as the AI Bible, uh written by Norvig and his colleague, he says we wouldn't even know what it meant to produce a machine that is uh intelligent.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the key thing, really intelligent, the key thing, Glenn, with me is God has linked intelligence with consciousness.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: No one at the scientific level has the slightest idea of what consciousness is.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was speaking a couple of days ago to Baroness Susan Greenfield, who's a world authority on consciousness.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: They don't know what it is.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very hard to speak of AI being intelligent in the human sense when you don't even know what intelligence is.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: We are far away.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The hype is entirely misleading, and the vocabulary is misleading us.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about machine learning, etc., etc.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: We talk about artificial intelligence.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we need to concentrate on the word artificial, and therefore it seems to me that the key things are the things that are actually on almost the first page of the Bible.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: God linking human intelligence with consciousness and making human beings in his image so that God as a person is stamping his image on people who are persons in many of the same ways as he is.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: And AI doesn't capture that at all.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: It simulates a small part of it.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: You've raised uh many things that uh Yuval goes on to talk about, including he actually uh mentions John chapter one in just a second, but he addresses the question of can AI think?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I'd love to get your uh impressions on his definition of what thinking is and what intelligence is.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: Here is from about three minutes on in the uh speech.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: The last four years have demonstrated that AI agents can acquire the will to survive, and that AIs have already learned how to lie.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_02: Now, one big open question about AI is whether it can think.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: Modern philosophy began in the seventeenth century when René Descartes proclaimed, I think, therefore I am.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: Even before Descartes, we humans defined ourselves by our capacity to think.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: We believe our we rule the world because we can think better than anyone else on this planet.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: Will AI challenge our supremacy in the field of thinking?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now that depends on what thinking means.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: Try to observe yourself thinking.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_02: What is happening there?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_02: Many people observe words popping in their mind and forming sentences, and the sentences then forming arguments like all humans are mortal, I am human, therefore I am mortal.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_02: If thinking really means putting words and other language tokens in order, then AI can already think much better than many, many humans.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_02: AI can certainly come up with a sentence like AI thinks, therefore AIM.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_02: Some people argue that AI is just glorified autocomplete.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_02: It barely predicts the next word in a sentence.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_02: But is that so different from what the human mind is doing?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: Try to observe, to catch the next word that pops up in your mind.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Do you really know why you thought that word where it came from?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you did you think this is a particular word and not some other word?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: Do you know?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: As far as putting words in order is concerned, AI already thinks better than many of us.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: Therefore, anything made of words will be taken over by AI.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: Gosh.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: So there there's a definition of thinking.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: If thinking is putting words in order, uh then our our new masters have arisen, John.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Thinking certainly involves putting words and concepts in order.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: AI is very good at putting words in order because it has been trained on writings by some of the best minds in the world and gleaning from the ordering of those words that the system doesn't understand the words.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: It has no concept.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is no concept of what any of these words mean, including I am.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: It can link them together.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as he says, it is a very powerful predicting the next word.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: But you see, when he says that, he expresses his ignorance of where the next word comes from in a human.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: With AI, we know it comes from statistical distributions and the training uh literature that it has been put on.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I am extremely skeptical, actually.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed at the beginning of that piece he said AI can lie, which is a moral statement, of course.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we all know this euphemistic term hallucinate, which simply means it tells lies.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: It it wants you to be happy with what it says, and it's programmed that way, so it will make up fictitious things, fictitious references to books and all the rest of it, in the hope of keeping you happy.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the truth question gets suppressed, which I think is a very dangerous thing.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I just don't find this convincing.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: I find its capacity impressive, but that's a different matter.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I do not find it uh convincing.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I myself am quite happy to use GPT to check things, just as I used to use Google and so on and so forth.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: But the warning is there all the time.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: You must check things yourself before you let them loose.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I I just am not convinced.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: I I I think this sounds terrific.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: AI can think.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: No, it's simulating one aspect of thought because we don't know what thought is.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Many years ago I met a Nobel Prize winner, a young German, who got his Nobel Prize for working out how the synapses of the brain functioned.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I said to him, Tell me, I said, what's your dream ticket?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I'd love to know how a synapse, if that's what does it, or the brain, held a thought for a second.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: We haven't a clue.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so Harari, who's not a scientist, he's a historian, is in a sense making vague and grandiose um claims.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what alerted me to that was the the agenda he has, which you're probably aware of for this century, uh, two big things.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: One to uh solve what he calls the technical problem of death, and two to enhance uh human happiness, and uh the latter to be done by AI genetic engineering and all the rest of it.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of hype I I find not impressive.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll have noticed as well that uh the singularity that Kurzweil projected to happen when in a sense AI or robots take over is always about 50 years in the future and never seems to get much shorter a low hint and thinks it might be dearer than we think.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm afraid uh that's my take on it.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: What's yours?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: I think we are running a really interesting experiment um that is that is it certainly resonates with Elvin Plantinger's uh evolutionary argument against naturalism and resonates with some of the things that sort of Lewis said.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and in brief, I guess Plantinger's argument is um if our brains have evolved merely to survive and to and to pass on their own genes, then what brains are tracking is not truth.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_03: What our brains are tracking is survival value, and those those two things are importantly different.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: Now, as as you've just said, um AI is also wanting to do something that's not exactly to track truth.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um AI wants to keep you at the computer.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_03: AI wants to appear convincing even if it is wrong.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you can still ask ChatGPT, I did this even this morning, uh, how many R's are in the word strawberry?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: And uh not only does ChatGPT get that wrong, which is funny enough, it doubles down on its answer.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it's and it says there are only two R's in Strawberry.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's something to do with the fact that that ChatGPT, the tokens that it uses, are pretty much at the word level level rather than at the letter level.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what what's not concerning, it's not concerning that it gets it wrong.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: What is concerning is that it keeps on trying to pass off lies as though they are the truth and then doubles down on it and then doubles down on it, which brings in the moral question that that you raised, John.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: And I just wonder if we are running an experiment in trying to prove Alvin Plantinger's uh evolutionary argument against naturalism, because it's it seems like, as you said, we need to check AI.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Like there needs to be a superintelligence above so-called artificial intelligence that is moral, that has other concerns, that that thinks we ought to track truths, and therefore there needs to be a kind of a superintelligence over and above AI in order for AI to do the job that it's doing.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_03: If that is true when it comes to the robots, I think you can, by parallel, say that this is kind of what we need in order to have human intelligence, that if our brains are just trying to track or or just trying to help us to survive, um, then really they would have evolved in different kinds of ways and and that thinking would be would be thought of merely as uh as as a survival instinct rather than as something that that tracks truth.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_03: So what do you think, John?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think I'm hallucinating, or do you think there is something to this comparison between what we're learning about AI and what Alvin Plantinger and C.S.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_03: Lewis were talking about?
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, absolutely.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: I I have long felt that the Lewis Plantinga type arguments are central and very important when it comes to establishing the truth of Christianity.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: The views of Lewis and Plantinga on the logical consequences of evolutionary naturalism or materialism are hugely important because if you look it's not only Christian philosophers and thinkers can see the difficulty there.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Thomas Nagel famously has concluded that evolutionary naturalism essentially shoots itself in the head, uh as has been wont to say, because it undermines the rationality of thought.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that is very important, I think, to present to the public around the place.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I like your idea of it being run as an experiment.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: It certainly is an experiment.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if you step back from it all, my impression is we spent a long time in trying to argue that human beings are merely animals, reducing us to the biological substrate, which is, I suppose, a slight advance from reducing us to a physical substrate, except that the biological reductionism does the same thing just in two steps.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: And now we're trying to abolish the distinction between human beings and machines.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in a sense, those are attacks on the very nature of humanity, and I think they need to be resisted, and they need to be resisted with a positive message, which is the message that we do not get from the natural sciences.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I would want to bring in here the work of Ian McGilchrist, because Ian, in his studies of the human brain and its two hemispheres, has come to the remarkable conclusion on the basis of hard neuroscientific evidence that one of the things that's happened in the past 500 years, and Harari is a classic example of it, is that we've concentrated so much on the left side of the brain that we quote end up in a world where we know how almost everything works and we can build a lot of things, but we know the meaning of nothing.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: We've lost the organ of meaning, and we need to get back to a worldview that incorporates both the left and the right brain.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems to me that with AI, there's a tremendous push underneath all of this to communicate uh a seriously reductionistic view of the human mind and the human person.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, I think so too.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: And and I think where Harari goes, and we'll we'll just have one more brief clip from Harare, because where he goes with it, I I think he assumes the Enlightenment split of the last 400 years, um, and assumes that AI is now going to take over from the left-brained kind of thing, um, and and is going to take over uh kind of intelligence and putting words in order and thinking in that sense.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_03: But what is left to us now as humans and our distinctive is now going to be feeling, um, which is kind of an an interesting way for him to to go.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: Let's let's uh hear him say it and uh and then let's respond.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_02: The Bible says in the beginning was the word, and the word was made of flesh.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_02: The Taotachin says the truth that can be expressed in words is not the absolute truth.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_02: Throughout history, people have always struggled with the tension between word and flesh.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: Between the truth that can be expressed in words and the absolute truth which is beyond words.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Previously, this attention was internal to humanity.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: It was between different human groups.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Some humans gave supreme importance to words.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_02: They have been willing, for example, to abandon or even kill their gay son just because of a few words in the Bible.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Other humans have said, but these are just words.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_02: The spirit of love should be much more important than the letter of the law.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: This tension between spirit and letter existed in every religion, every legal system, even every person.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_02: Now this tension will be externalized.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: It will become the tension not between different humans.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: This will be the tension between humans and AI, the new masters of words.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: Everything made of words will be taken over by AI.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: So there has been a split and AI is now the master of words.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_03: I I guess what is left to us is is kind of feeling.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_03: But just fascinating that he began that that section with John chapter one.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: It seems like the some of the answers to the questions that he's posing is staring him in the face.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is, and there's so much hubris about that.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's astonishing.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Trite statements like saying absolute truth is beyond words.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: Is it really?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: But we can grasp uh uh huge aspects of absolute truth because God is the word.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't tease that out at all.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not sure that he even begins to understand it.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea that AI are masters of words, that is false.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: They don't understand a single word.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: And therefore, to say nothing of the fact that they've no concept of qualia, and you were referring to emotions and what it's like to be a human or what it's like to be a bat, to quote the famous uh book by uh Jonathan uh by uh Sachs, uh Oliver Sachs.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I just uh find myself a bit stupefied at the at the vastness of these these claims.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he's just getting away with saying what he believes without any serious intellectual or logical justification.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_00: And of course it appeals to people.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: These books sell in millions, but what authority he has to say it, I don't know.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: He probably got it from AI, Chat GPT.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um but your your book, 2084 and the AI Revolution, um, doesn't deny the fact that a revolution is afoot, it's it's underway, we're we're kind of experiencing it.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: So if it's if it's so if it's not this sort of transition from Homo sapiens to homodaius, or or if it's not this sort of transhumanist revolution as we ascend into a a different kind of human, what what kind of revolution is it?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of upheaval are we undergoing?
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think it is an industrial revolution in a in a sense, and it really is a revolution.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think the world has changed forever, and it's going to have huge implications.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the immediate tasks is to get some grip on it ethically, because the technology for years has been developing and advancing much more rapidly than the ethical underpinning that's needed to control it.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I pay attention to leaders in AI who are quite worried because they don't understand what they have created, and they are afraid of what it may do.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I share that fear to a certain extent.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if they have that fear, we need to be very careful.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: And the experiment of simply letting it loose is a very risky one indeed.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's no question in my mind, Glenn, that we're going to enhance AIs and add them together and move towards simulating not simply one thing humans can do, but many things humans can do.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm very aware, because I've written about it in my most recent book, God AI, The End of History, my book or the Book of Revelation, that there are indicators in the Book of Revelation that human beings will, under the command of a totalitarian world leader, construct something that looks very like an all-controlling, particularly in terms of economics, system that has lethal powers over the inhabitants of Earth, which any uh dictator would love to put their hands on.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: And certainly a lot of AI is moving towards setting up dictatorships and uh with the aim, I suppose, and the end of world domination.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of things to concern us.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what Harari has just been saying, and I'm sorry I didn't see this uh speech, I watch it afterwards before we chatted.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it seems to me that he's at one end of the extreme hype.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_03: Can you bring this into conversation with um so in the abolition of man, um, Lewis kind of talks about technology, it sort of presents itself as as being something that is sort of above man, above humanity, but in in the end, it's it is a tool that that some men use over other men.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um yes, blank blanking on the.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis's book uh written in 1940, wasn't it?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: The abolition of man ought to be read by everyone.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's a seriously important work.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he does point that out that uh you get these technological abilities under the control of a few people, and then they specify the whole human race in the future.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: That is what we are risking.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that will end up, as Lewis chillingly suggests, what they produce is not a human being, it's an artifact, it's something made in the image of a human being.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: And here we're back with this idea that it'll be a simulated human being because it will be constructed by other brains.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the danger is it will lead to the worst slavery the world has ever known.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a huge concern because we are in a position biologically to modify the germline of all succeeding generations.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: And somebody's going to try it somewhere, I'm afraid.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Controls, ethic and controls, are very difficult to impose.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: As anybody in business will realize, getting the mission statement of the company down from the wall into the hearts of executives is a very difficult problem in any business, let alone at this level.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: Especially if there's an arms race and you think, well, maybe we won't do it in this country, but somebody else in another country might do it.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_03: And that that sort of pressure that everybody's living with will put huge.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a very serious pressure because we've uh we are already seeing AI being used massively in drone warfare and uh being developed uh in secret, I can imagine.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it's giving people a lot of power.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_00: After all, it's some years since Vladimir Putin said the nation or person that controls AI will control the world.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what the basic problem is, that it's a huge power struggle.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a struggle for control.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think to be fair to Harari, he realizes that.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: And it scares him a bit.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_00: But he's uh completely wrong, it seems to me, about many things, particularly his idea that we're going to solve the technical problem of human death.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: As if there was nothing more to it than that.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's usually in a story the the the person who is trying to solve death with some kind of elixir, or you know, they're usually the baddie in this in the story its kind of thing.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, they are, but the search for the elixir of life is a very interesting one.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me to go back to Genesis, where the story tells us that, God forbade, uh a tree that would have brought uh permanent life.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the search for the elixir of life may well be buried deep into that story that people feel that somewhere there's some kind of trace element or chemical or something like this.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And they still do.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: Think of those that have their bodies and brains frozen in the hope that one day they're going to be able to deal with them.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Mind the transhumanist project, I almost find amusing.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let me explain that.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I've talked to quite a few people who buy into it.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_00: And these two items, one to solve the problem of physical death, and secondly, to enhance human happiness.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_00: People who advance that to me, I simply smile at them and say, You're too late.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And they say, You're misunderstanding, we haven't got there yet.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, But look, this problem of physical death was solved 20 centuries ago when Jesus Christ was raised from the dead by the power of God, who is external to our physical universe.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: And as for enhancing human happiness, he made the promise to those who will face the mess they've made of their own lives, repent of it, and trust him as Lord and Savior, all of which words need to be unpacked, but they're seriously important words.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: He says that they will receive in that moment an eternal life, which is way beyond anything the transhumanists can offer.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: And talking about uploading your brains onto Silicon, the greatest uploading will occur according to the New Testament, when Christ returns, of which his resurrection and ascension give us credible evidence.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_00: That gives you a base for a discussion, Glenn.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: At least people think when they say that that I believe something, even if they think I'm crazy.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: I love I love that.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_03: And I I I love going back to Genesis as well, this this idea of Adam and Eve are driven east of Eden, and the way back to the Tree of Life is barred.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: And even as they are driven east of Eden, into a place where there are thorns and thistles, the the way on is actually the way into uh this this perishing condition and and through a valley of deep darkness, and and that Christ kind of meets us east of Eden in the valley of deep shadow, and through his death and resurrection kind of uh pulls pulls us into the future through our mortality and through our death.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it feels to me like some of the transhumanists um desires are are really to um to uh get rid of our mortality, to get rid of our frailty and our finitude, which are precisely things that God has dignified in sending Christ.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_03: Like the the Son of God has taken our flesh to himself, he has walked through that valley of deep darkness, he has dignified that journey through death and out the other side.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_03: And in in that sense, the the Genesis story is about people who are trying to unite heaven and earth without going through that valley.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: And and a key story, therefore, is the Tower of Babel, in which here is a different way of trying to unite heaven and earth.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's it's essentially trying to get get to heaven without having to walk through a valley.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_03: Let's build a tower.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: But that to me, John, gives gives uh a sense of I I do think um God sort of smiles or or laughs at, mocks perhaps our our attempts at uh you know the this intelligence that's going to transcend humanity and all that kind of stuff, in the same way that he he sort of kind of or or almost uh derides the the Tower of Babel and has to come down to see that Tower of Babel.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: I know it's almost it's almost humorous.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: The tower didn't reach heaven because God had to come down and see it.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Even to see it.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that it encapsulates something hugely important because all of this AI transhumanism is utopianism.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the key problem and your imagery about the valley of the shadow uh of death fits in perfectly.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's an attempt to build paradise without facing the problem of human sin and rebellion against God.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, without morality.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the key thing that's absent and is creating huge difficulty for these companies is their ethical uh stance, which they claim to be working on.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it seems to me here that every attempt to build utopia, avoiding the problem of human sin and rebellion against God, has led to spectacular bloodshed, witness the 20th century.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the Black Book of Atheism, um, the book by John Gray ought to be read by everybody that doesn't believe that.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: The track record of utopian thinking is horrific, both in Russia, Germany, and in China.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I fear that here we're powering up another uh utopianism which bypasses the guts of the question, which is moral relationship with the transcendent God.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's rejecting the transcendent in favor of projecting existing human beings by genetic engineering onto some kind of big man image in the future, where we are merged with machines essentially and uh take over the world.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's very interesting, I find, Max Tegmark, who's a physicist, I'm sure you've come across him, his book Life 3.0, where he outlines a number, I think 10 or so scenarios of what may happen in the future with AI.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's interesting that quite a few of them are essentially world dictatorships.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something we need to think about.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: In light of technology, I I was in a meeting with Peter Tiedle not long ago, the uh PayPal inventor, entrepreneur, and all the rest of it.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he's going around giving lectures on the apocalypse at the moment.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I asked him this question.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: I said, Peter, it seems to me, and I'd like your check on this, but it seems to me that as a tech entrepreneur, entrepreneur, you look at the advances in AI and you fear what's going to happen, in that they're going to move towards a surveillance state and via that to a world dictatorship.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then, because of your Christian background at home, you're immersed in biblical prophecy and you seem to see the same scenario there.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Would I be right in thinking that?
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Absolutely right.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it's interesting that you get someone like that who is putting the two things together and seeing them as mutually reinforcing.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, that's what I tried to do in my book, Glenn.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: My motivation was simple.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: I realized that people are widely prepared to take seriously these AI-generated futuristic world-state uh scenario proposals.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_00: And so my argument was: well, if you take that seriously, I would like to introduce you to a much older scenario.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's 20 centuries old at least.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's older than that.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: And see what you make of that.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's got a lot of the features that you think might happen, but it's got a lot more credibility in terms of the evidence for its truth.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think as Christians, we therefore have a very real message.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm amazed at the number of secular organizations who've come to me because of my book, 2084, and asked me to speak to their workers or to their executives and this kind of thing.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_00: No holds barred because they're fascinated.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: And it used to be one couldn't even mention these things without being written off as a uh as a peripheral prophecy freak.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_03: So just just as we close then, John, what what should our posture be towards the the this future that is upon us?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and and what are the sorts of things that we can say into this moment?
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_03: Because I I think we have phenomenal resources to be able to think about what actually are humans, how are we different from animals, how are we different from machines, what is intelligence, what is consciousness?
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um how do we make sense of mortal life and still maintain meaning?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_03: What about the moral questions?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: It it seems like all the things that we've been talking about are absent in some of the secular pictures of the future.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: They are woven into the very heart of the Christian story, so it seems like we've got so much to say into this moment, but perhaps we we need a bit of confidence, do we, in in in order to sort of take the opportunities that this moment is presenting?
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_00: Very much so.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's why I wrote the book, actually.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_00: I had several purposes.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: One, information, because many Christians, particularly, but not only, are scared of this kind of technology.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just they're just scared.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_00: And to point out, and I use the metaphor that Harari used in your first clip, that is AI, like all technology, is like a knife.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: You can use a good knife for surgery, or you can use it for murder.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to face the fact, and be thankful for it, that AI has brought enormous benefits in terms of medical research, in terms of the rapidity and the accuracy of medical screening, development of vaccines, etc., etc.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's also solved some of the deepest problems that were in front of the scientists, like protein folding and so on, and bringing immense benefits.
• 42:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's absolutely clear.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And we should be grateful for that.
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_00: The other side of that is it is raising increasingly the key question.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: What is a human being?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Is there anything beyond the human?
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: Are we all that exists?
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are we simply in a stage of becoming and being shaped?
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh several people have said, look, human beings are a product of evolution, but in the future there whatever is going to replace them will be a product of intelligent design, which I find quite abusing.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because uh I vehemently disagree with the analysis.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: But nevertheless, there's there's truth to it, and therefore, confidence seems to me to be a key thing.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: We need to inform the Christian public.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: We cannot shy away from this because we are all influenced by AI in subtle ways, but they're powerful ways.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: Many of us, including me, carry a tracker.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's called an iPhone.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_00: Dear knows what it's listening to and checking up on and all this kind of thing.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this kind of surveillance will increase and increase and be put into the hands of police forces.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: And before we know where we are, we're going to have credit systems rolled out as in China and be surveilled as they are in Xinjiang.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think people ought to be aware of this kind of thing and what is happening.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, Harari warns about a lot of this.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Not all he says is false.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to do our analysis, but above all, Glenn, I would say we need to seriously get into what Scripture says about the nature of human beings.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: We need to reopen Genesis and the whole biblical big story and see what value it gives us and where we fit in and have confidence in the lordship, leadership, and power of Christ to transform us in ways that will influence our society and give us credibility, as the dark shadows cast by AI loom larger and larger.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we need to get out there and put our heads above the parapet.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I just hope that some of my books will encourage people to do that.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: They certainly uh do that indeed, John.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: And uh if viewers want to uh go back and see some more of the things that uh John says about Genesis, that was the uh the topic of our uh previous conversation on this channel.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: We talked about uh Genesis chapters one to three.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh back on the channel, we'll put a link to that in the description.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and in the future, um, I'd love to have uh you back on, John, uh, to talk about my story, your autobiography that has just gone to the printers.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_03: Is that is it just come back from the printers, is that right?
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_00: No, just gone to the printers.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't seen it yet.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my gosh.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: It should be out in April.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you very much.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I very much enjoyed uh talking to you.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I'm grateful for what you're doing in this space as well, Glenn.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh wow.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's an absolute uh pleasure to kind of uh to step into some of these areas that you've been uh speaking into for many many decades.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_03: So we'd love to have you back on the channel uh to talk about more of uh your story.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: But uh Professor John Lennox, thank you so much for joining us.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Bye bye.