And that is his biggest fear about AI: that, in encouraging such worship, AI enthusiasts and the tech bros in Silicon Valley who make billions (and, in the case of Elon Musk, trillions) are turning AI into a god created by humans. “In other words,” he points out, “the absolute opposite of the Christian message.”
Lennox was raised in Ireland’s ecclesiastical capital, Armagh, on the border between the Republic and the North, as the eldest of four boys. His father, Jack, ran a department store but was, he wrote in his recent 500-page memoir My Story, published in April, a “frustrated academic”. It was from his mother, Florrie, a teacher, that he seems to have inherited his happy countenance. “She would stick a handkerchief in her mouth to stop herself laughing in church.”
The family worshipped in an independent Evangelical church rather than as part of any larger denomination and that has been Lennox’s pattern ever since. Yet he rejects religious separatism or one-upmanship. “I don’t acknowledge any particular label. I stick with ‘Christian’, by which I mean that I am a follower of Jesus Christ. Through my life I have preached in almost every kind of church there is.”
Alongside his stellar academic career, in which he also completed a PhD in philosophy and an MA in bioethics, Lennox managed to fit in extensive travel behind the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, distributing banned bibles in the Soviet Union and surviving a poisoning attempt by the secret police in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania.** **It is his first-hand knowledge of totalitarian states that feeds his fears about AI today.
All great technological advances, he acknowledges, have a positive and negative side. “It’s like a sharp knife. You can use it for surgery or you can use it for murder. In medicine, you can see AI developing new vaccines, new drugs, robotic surgery, the logistics to reduce the NHS waiting lists. But it also brings us facial recognition. That is wonderful at picking a terrorist out of a football crowd, but not so good if you are suppressing an ethnic minority in Xinjiang in China. That’s the scary side.”
Scary is a word that peppers our conversation. “The danger is that AI will encroach more and more on people’s privacy. You get the huge tension between governments saying, ‘If you want us to keep you secure you will have to give up your privacy’, and an authoritarian government that sees AI as a wonderful way of encroaching into people’s private lives. And we give up our privacy so easily.”
He reserves particular criticism for what he refers to as the trans-humanist movement, those who advocate merging man and machine into some sort of “superbeing”, notably, Yuval Noah Harari, the scientist and best-selling writer, whose books include 2016’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. “He is saying quite openly that, with AI, we will turn human beings into gods and I want to say, ‘Be very careful of that because it misunderstands what a human being is.’
“The crucial thing is that AI is just a machine that is computing. It is not a conscious machine. It doesn’t have consciousness or any of our five senses. God, I believe, has constructed human beings by integrating intelligence with consciousness. No one in the AI world is even attempting to produce consciousness.”
For all those who share his concerns about AI he has a simple message. “Talk to your children and grandchildren first of all, then to your families and friends to generate discussion. Constant engagement spreads and gets a groundswell going.” By such time-honoured human processes the end of history may yet be avoided. God, AI and the End of History (SPCK, £29.99) is out now