2084

Artificial Intelligence, the Future of Humanity, and the God Question

John C. Lennox

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780310109587
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion & Science

Will technology change what it means to be human?

You don't have to be a computer scientist to have discerning conversations about artificial intelligence and technology. We all wonder where we're headed. Even now, technological innovations and machine learning have a daily impact on our lives, and many of us see good reasons to dread the future. Are we doomed to the surveillance society imagined in George Orwell's 1984?

Mathematician and philosopher John Lennox believes that there are credible answers to the daunting questions that AI poses, and he shows that Christianity has some very serious, sensible, evidence-based responses about the nature of our quest for superintelligence.

2084 will introduce you to a kaleidoscope of ideas:

• The key developments in technological enhancement, bioengineering, and, in particular, artificial intelligence.
• The agreements and disagreements that scientists and experts have about the future of AI.
• The key insights that Christianity and Scripture have about the nature of human beings, the soul, our moral sense, our future, and what separates us from machines.

In straight-forward language, you'll get a better understanding of the current capacity of AI, its potential benefits and dangers, the facts and the fiction, as well as possible future implications.

The questions posed by AI are open to all of us, daunting as they might be. And they demand answers. 2084 is written to challenge and ignite the curiosity of all readers. No matter your worldview, Lennox provides clear information and credible answers that will bring you real hope for the future of humanity.

CHAPTER ONE

MAPPING OUT THE TERRITORY

We humans are insatiably curious. We have been asking questions since the dawn of history. We’ve especially been asking the big questions about origin and destiny: Where do I come from and where am I going? Their importance is obvious. Our answer to the first shapes our concepts of who we are, and our answer to the second gives us goals to live for. Taken together, our responses to these questions help frame our worldview, the narrative that gives our lives their meaning.

The problem is that these are not easy questions, as we see from the fact that many and contradictory answers are on offer. Yet, by and large, we have not let that hinder us. Over the centuries, humans have proposed some answers given by science, some by philosophy, some based on religion, others on politics, etc.

Two of the most famous futuristic scenarios are the 1931 novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s novel 1984, published in 1949. Both of them have, at various times, been given very high ranking as influential English novels. For instance, Orwell’s was chosen in 2005 by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Both novels are dystopian: that is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “they describe an imaginary place or condition that is as bad as possible.” However, the really bad places that they describe are very different, and their differences, which give us helpful insights that will be useful to us later, were succinctly explained by sociologist Neil Postman in his highly regarded work Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture . . . In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.¹

Orwell introduced ideas of blanket surveillance in a totalitarian state, of “thought control” and “newspeak,” ideas that nowadays increasingly come up in connection with developments in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly the attempt to build computer technology that can do the sorts of things that a human mind can do – in short, the production of an imitation mind. Billions of dollars are now being invested in the development of AI systems, and not surprisingly, there is a great deal of interest in where it is all going to lead: for instance, better quality of life through digital assistance, medical innovation, and human enhancement on the one hand, and fear of job losses and Orwellian surveillance societies on the other hand.

Even the pope is getting involved. In September 2019, he sounded a warning that the race to create artificial intelligence and other forms of digital development pose the risk of increasing social inequality unless the work is accompanied by an ethical evaluation of the common good. He said: “If technological advancement became the cause of increasingly evident inequalities, it would not be true and real progress. If mankind’s so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest.”²

Most of the successes so far in AI have to do with building systems that do one thing that normally takes human intelligence to implement. However, on the more speculative side – certainly at the moment – there is great interest in the vastly more ambitious quest to build systems that can do all that human intelligence can do, that is, artificial general intelligence (AGI), which some think will surpass human intelligence within a relatively short time, certainly by 2084 or even earlier, according to some speculations. Some imagine that AGI, if we ever get there, will function as a god, while others, as a totalitarian despot.

As I looked for a way to introduce these burgeoning topics and the hopes and fears they generate, three contemporary bestselling books came to my attention. The first two are written by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which deals, as its title suggests, with the first of our questions, the origins of humanity, and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, which deals with humanity’s future. The third book, Origin by Dan Brown, is a novel, like Huxley’s and Orwell’s. It focusses on the use of AI to answer both of our questions in the form of a page-turning thriller that is likely to be read by millions of people, if Brown’s mind-boggling sales figures run true to form. It is likely, therefore, to impact the thinking of many people, particularly the young. Because the book reflects the admitted questionings of its author on these issues, it forms an intriguing springboard for our own exploration.

In addition, I am aware that science fiction has been a stimulus to some people in getting them started on a useful career in science itself. However, a word of caution is appropriate here. Brown claims to use real science to come to his conclusions, and so, in spite of the fact that his book is a work of fiction, we shall have to be careful to test his arguments and conclusions for truth content.

That is especially important since he says that his basic motivation for writing was to tackle the question, “Will God survive science?” It was this same question in various forms that has motivated me to write several of my books. That work has led me to the conclusion that God will more than survive science, but it has also led me seriously to question whether atheism will survive science.³

One of Dan Brown’s main characters in Origin is a billionaire computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert, Edmond Kirsch, who claims to have solved the questions of life’s origin and human destiny. He intends to use his results to fulfil his long-time goal to “employ the truth of science to destroy the myth of religions,”⁴ meaning, in particular, the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps inevitably, he concentrates on Christianity. His solutions, when they are eventually revealed to the world, are a product of his expertise in artificial intelligence. His take on the future involves the technological modification of human beings.

It should be pointed out right away that it is not only historians and science fiction writers but some of our most respected scientists who are suggesting that humanity itself may be changed by technology. For instance, UK Astronomer Royal Lord Rees says, “We can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us – even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved.”⁵

In the same vein, Rees also said: “Abstract thinking by biological brains has underpinned the emergence of all culture and science. But this activity – spanning tens of millennia at most – will be a brief precursor to the more powerful intellects of the inorganic post-human era. So, in the far future, it won’t be the minds of humans, but those of machines, that will most fully understand the cosmos.”⁶

This is a topic that is not going to go away. It is of interest not only to people who are directly involved in AI research but also to mathematicians and scientists in other disciplines whose work and outlook are increasingly impacted by it. Indeed, since the outcomes and ideas surrounding work on AI will inevitably affect us all, many people are thinking and writing about it who are not scientists at all. The implications are such that it is important that, for instance, philosophers, ethicists, theologians, cultural commentators, novelists, and artists get involved in the wider debate. After all, you do not need to be a nuclear physicist or climatologist in order to discuss the impact of nuclear energy or climate change.

WHAT IS AI?

Let us start by thinking about robots. The word robot derives from a Czech (and Russian) word for work – robota. A robot is a machine designed and programmed by an intelligent human to do, typically, a single task that involves interaction with its physical environment, a task that would normally require an intelligent human being to do it. In that sense, its behaviour simulates human intelligence, a circumstance that has given rise to considerable debate as to whether or not it itself should be considered in some sense intelligent, even if that intelligence is not what we understand human intelligence to be – another large question in itself.

The term AI was coined in a summer school held at the mathematics department of Dartmouth University in 1956 that was organised by John McCarthy, who said, “AI is the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.”⁷ The term is now used both for the intelligent machines that are the goal and for the science and technology that are aiming at that goal.

Research in this area has taken two main directions. Broadly speaking, firstly, there is the attempt to understand human reasoning and thought processes by modelling them using computer technology, and, secondly, there is the study of human behaviour and the attempt to construct machinery that will imitate it. The difference is important – it is one thing to make a machine that can simulate, say, a human hand lifting an object; it is a completely different thing to make a machine that can simulate the thoughts of a human when he or she is lifting an object. It is much easier to do the first than the second, and if utility is all that is required, then the first is all that is necessary. After all, the aircraft industry involves making machines that fly, but it does not involve constructing an electronic brain like that of a bird in order for the aircraft to fly in exactly the same way as birds do – by flapping its wings.⁸

The idea of constructing machines that can simulate aspects of human and, indeed, animal behaviour has a long history. Two thousand years ago, the Greek mathematician Heron of Alexandria constructed a basin adorned with mechanical singing birds and an owl that could turn its head and make the birds go quiet. Through the centuries, people became fascinated with making automata, machines that replicated some aspect of life. An impressive collection of very sophisticated examples of such automata can be seen, for example, in the London Science Museum, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, and the Museum Speelklok in Utrecht. Interest in constructing such machines declined in the nineteenth century but continued to live on in fiction – like the 1818 novel Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It has been a staple diet of science fiction since the beginning of that genre.

One of the important human activities in everyday life is numerical calculation, and a great deal of effort has been made to automate this process. In the seventeenth century, French mathematician Blaise Pascal made a mechanical calculator,⁹ which he designed in order to help his father, a tax official, with tedious calculations. In the nineteenth century, Charles Babbage laid the foundations of programmable computation by first inventing the difference engine – an automatic adding machine – and then the analytical engine, which was the first programmable calculator. He is rightly regarded as the father of the modern computer.

During the Second World War, the brilliant British computer scientist Alan Turing used sophisticated electronic computer technology to build equipment, notably the Bombe, which enabled him and his team at Bletchley Park to decipher the German “Enigma” code that was used for secret military communications. Turing’s inventions and theoretical work led to his proposal of a “learning machine.” According to him, a machine that could converse with humans – without the humans knowing that it is a machine – would win the “imitation game” and could be said to be “intelligent.” Now known as the Turing Test, this definition provided a practical test for attributing intelligence to a machine. ...