Careful Christian thinking on the AI revolution

Christians need to be aware of what is happening in their world – both the good and the bad. Recent developments such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the new digital technologies is one such area, with books now pouring from the presses on these issues. Christians need to be assessing and examining these things in light of the biblical worldview.

One Christian who has sought to do this is Oxford mathematician and apologist John Lennox. Some of you are familiar with an important book he penned on these matters a few years ago. But things are moving along so quickly in this field that he just released a new revised and updated version of it. The two books are these:

John Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity. Zondervan, 2020. (239 pages)

John Lennox, 2084 and the AI Revolution: How Artificial Intelligence Informs Our Future, updated and expanded edition. Zondervan, 2024. (359 pages)

Here I will focus on the enlarged edition. As can be seen, it has certainly expanded in size. The original 13 chapters have been expanded to 17 chapters, and plenty of new material is found throughout. As he writes in the Preface to the updated edition:

“The advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the four years since I wrote the first edition of this book not only justify its revision but also require a considerable expanded edition in order to try to keep pace with what is an unprecedented phenomenon of the early twenty-first century.” (xi)

He also says this about where he is coming from:

“My own professional background is in mathematics and the philosophy of science, not directly in AI, although I have been interested in the philosophy and implications of technology for many years.” (xiii)

And this:

“There is … widespread interest in getting to grips with the ramifications of the AI revolution – the so-called fourth industrial revolution – at the level of the public understanding of science. It is at this level that I have pitched this book.” (xiv)

And as he also mentions early on, not all the chapters in it will be of interest to everyone, so he advises being selective as to which bits the reader checks out. Following that advice, I will just selectively focus on a few chapters here to give you a taste for what is found in the book.

It can be said at the outset that Lennox is no Luddite, and he recognizes the many goods that have already come out of the AI revolution, but he is also no utopian, and he rightly warns of various dangers that exist now, and that lie ahead. The many goods range from helpful advances in medical care to things such as self-driving cars. The negatives are already known, from social surveillance systems such as in Communist China to eager transhumanists looking forward to the end of humanity.

Two of the book’s chapters ask, “Where Do We Come From?” and “Where Are We Going?” In the second one, Lennox discusses transhumanism. He notes how two wealthy and influential Americans differ on things: Bill Gates “believes AI has vast potential for benefitting humanity” while Elon Musk “thinks that AI risks ‘summoning the demon’ and is more dangerous than nukes”. (pp. 58, 60)

And Chapter 10, “Upgrading Humans,” is devoted to more thoroughly assessing the transhumanist agenda. Figures such as Yuval Noah Harari are discussed in detail. Many are hoping to overcome the human condition and obtain immortality. While advances in healthcare are welcome, the push for “longtermism” and the extinction of humans is obviously a major worry.

Some wealthy folks are paying big money for cryonics – having the body frozen after death until a time comes when most diseases and other issues have been eliminated or dealt with. Some transhumanists are even more radical, pushing anti-human agendas. Some welcome human obsolescence. Says Lennox:

Among them there are some eco-warriors, sometimes called Anthropocene anti-humanists, who have concluded that the end of the human species is imminent and that rather than resist it we should welcome it. For them, ending humanity is not a specter but a moral imperative: humans should cease to exist, because they have destroyed the planet. They also think that, in a kind of rough justice, humans will bring their demise on themselves by their profligate and reckless technological exploitation of the environment, with its resultant despoliation and climate change. These anti-humanists would rather have a world without humans than a world without nature. They long to return the earth to what they imagine to be its prehuman state, long before the human race began its technology-fueled destructive ways — a view captured in the title of philosopher David Benatar’s 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence. Benatar held that the disappearance of humans would not deprive the universe of anything unique or valuable: “The concern that humans will not exist at some future time is either a symptom of the human arrogance … or is some misplaced sentimentalism.”

Consequently, anti-humanists believe that research should be directed to terminating our dependence on biology by creating new kinds of intelligent artificial life based on some nonbiological substrate like silicon. They imagine that such artifacts will eventually colonize and reduce humans to the level we now assign to animals, or will exterminate them. (p. 171)

Others, such as Musk, want to ensure the survival of the human race – thus his desire to colonise Mars as a “life insurance” policy for humanity. (p. 174) And Lennox reminds us that “longtermism” has been around for a while, and it does not look very good, whether we think of the Nazi attempt to create Aryan supermen, or the Soviet attempt to create the “New Man.” (p. 177)

He of course refers to the warnings made long ago by people like C. S. Lewis in books such as The Abolition of Man (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). He also mentions the 1992 novel The Children of Men by P. D. James, which describes a world where there is an epidemic of infertility, and the last human child is born in 1995.

Writes Lennox:

“I cannot help thinking that there is a powerful religious symbolism here: the begetting of a living child holds out more hope than the construction of any machine. Long ago, one did and still does.” Yes, the Incarnation is our real answer to the issue of immortality.

Chapter 8 of the book, “Big Brother Meets Big Data” looks at the very real threat that AI poses to freedom and privacy. And it is not just something that might happen one day – it is occurring right now. We all know about looking up some product online, and the next thing we find is the exact same thing is advertised on one of our social media pages.

Surveillance capitalism and the harvesting of data is currently a very real and present danger. But it gets much worse than that with surveillance communism and thought control, as is happening right now in China. They already have a highly advanced form of a government social credit system (SoCS):

The basic idea of SoCS is that the Communist Party of China wishes to measure its citizens and corporations to determine whether they are “trustworthy.” To achieve this goal, each corporation and citizen is issued a standardized unique personal identity number. Each citizen is awarded a number, let’s say 300, of social credit points that can be added to by good (i.e., government-approved) behavior, such as paying debts (or fines) on time – a particularly important target of the system – using public transport, keeping fit, donating to charity, donating blood, volunteering, or reporting on someone you have seen with large amounts of foreign currency. As your points accumulate, you are granted more and more perks – access to our wider range of jobs, and wider access to contracts, mortgage opportunities, reduced utility bills, school placements for children, goods, travel possibilities, even reduced rental costs for bicycles….

Much of this control is exercised by advanced AI facial-recognition techniques working on the vast database of images channelled into a central computing center from millions of CCTV cameras….

[S]ince the objective of the system is eventually to have a unified record for people, businesses, and the government, which can be monitored in real time, it is readily conceivable that, if and when the SoCS is standardized, digitalized, and ubiquitous, it will facilitate a massive hacking of human beings that will take the world a scary step towards the perfection of a (potentially global) dictatorship, the setting up of an authoritarian dreamworld whose ideology could spread around the world like a virus and whose legitimacy is secured by the most comprehensive and powerful state surveillance apparatus in history. (pp. 117-120)

And not just Christians, but all decent people, should be concerned about how things like virtual reality pornography are being ramped up here. Warns Lennox:

[T]he technology developed so far, whether or not it has been completely successful, has served to facilitate addiction to pornography. In the previous chapter we recorded the horrific statistic that 99 percent of deepfake victims are women and 98 percent of deepfake videos are pornographic. We now face the frightening probability that unregulated AI chatbots will be used not only to spread highly addictive pornographic images but also to target and groom vulnerable children on an unprecedented scale. And not only children, since there already exist chatbots marketed as virtual companions for people who are lonely and emotionally vulnerable.

A great deal of investment is being poured into retooling the sort of large language models that power ChatGPT to generate online “girlfriends” and sexbots with whom a customer can interact. They are designed to provide some form of simulated intimacy. (pp. 155-156)

And again:

The potential for child abuse and paedophilia is frightening, and regulation is totally inadequate and lagging behind. Unbelievably, deep fake pornography was not criminalised in the UK until 2024 – a year that opened with a deepfake porn image of Taylor Swift creating outrage among her fans, but which was nevertheless viewed by 40 million people before it was taken down. This incident provoked renewed calls for making such an offence a federal crime in the US, where such legislation is not yet in place. It seems very difficult to set up guardrails to control the growth of this obscene trade because of its accessibility and relative anonymity.

Some people even attempt to justify AI porn, arguing that it is digital and virtual and does not involve real people. This argument fails through ignorance of the fact that AI has to be trained on millions of images of real interactions between real people, needing an unending supply of them. (pp. 156-157)

Several chapters look at how the biblical data understands the nature and value of humans, the quest for eternity, and the dangers of mankind and his new technologies apart from God. Consider just one quote, contrasting the Scriptural scheme of things with the transhumanist vision:

And the fact that God did become human is the greatest evidence of the uniqueness of human beings and of God’s commitment to embodied humanity. Humans, original version, are demonstrated to be unique precisely because God could and did become one. And those of us who have received him will one day at his return be gloriously “upgraded” to be like him and share in the marvels of the eternal world to come. (p. 274)

The two final chapters of the book examine how the scenarios played out in biblical prophecy in general and the book of Revelation in particular might tie in with the AI revolution. And I understand that all this might be the subject of a new book that will be forthcoming by Lennox.

As mentioned, believers need to be up on the latest developments in so many areas: social, cultural, scientific, technological and so on. All these things need to be considered through the lens of biblical faith. Lennox does an excellent job of doing just this in regard to the AI revolution. It is a welcome addition to the growing library on this intriguing but worrisome subject.

This article was originally published at the Culture Watch blog.