2084 Quotes

“Man thinks he can become God. But infinitely greater than that is the fact that God thought of becoming human.”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“We shall need all the wisdom from above that God can give us in this AI age in order to fulfil Christ’s directive that we should be salt and light in our society.9 We have often referred to the fact that we live in a surveillance society. Let us therefore live with the myriad cameras and tracers on our lives in such a way that even the monitors can see that we have been with Jesus.”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“Big Brother may not need a totalitarian regime to empower him if we simply open the door and invite him in. Indeed, it might already be too late for he is already here.”
― John C. Lennox (Author), 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“While primitive forms of artificial intelligence developed so far have proved very useful, I fear the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans . . . Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete and would be superseded. And in the future AI could develop a will of its own, a will that is in conflict with ours . . . The real risk with AI isn’t malice but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren’t aligned with ours we’re in trouble.12”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“Nick Bostrom explains that transhumanism is: “the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.”6 Many people (including Bostrom) believe that the word transhumanism originated with atheist Julian Huxley (1887–1975): “ ‘I believe in transhumanism’: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny.”7 But Huxley was not the first. The origin of the word transhuman is not secular. Historically, it was first used, not by a scientist in connection with science, but regarding the resurrection of the body by Henry Francis Cary in his 1814 translation of Dante’s Paradiso. It occurs in a passage where Dante tries to imagine the resurrection of his own body: “Words may not tell of that transhuman change.”8”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“Harari thinks that physical death has been reduced to a mere technical problem that is ripe for solution by medical science.6 In other words, he thinks that within the not too distant future, although we may die, we shall not have to die. A “cure” for death will be found. As if death were a disease – but is it? I would not be so sure for reasons that will appear later. At any rate, this claim seems very far-fetched.”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity

“The big question to be faced is: How can an ethical dimension be built into an algorithm that is itself devoid of heart, soul, and mind?”
― John C. Lennox, 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity