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Artificial Intelligence

Media- A Space Odyssey

John Lennox:
I’m all for technology being used in a good sense. I often say to people, AI is like a knife, a very sharp knife. You can use it to operate with, or you can use it to kill people.

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s the infamous computer Hal from A Space Odyssey 2001, followed by my friend Professor John Lennox reflecting on the dangers of our topic today. Artificial Intelligence is the buzz phrase of the 21st century. For some, it’s a welcome step into a future that promises all manner of good … like the best-intentioned members of the Star Wars cast…

Media – C3PO

John Dickson (Studio)

For others, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is damaging at best… and, at worst, a step towards our own destruction, … like Terminator’s infamous defence computer Skynet. 

Media – Terminator

John Dickson (Studio)

And that’s what we’re here to work out – is Artificial Intelligence an under-estimated threat… or the saviour we’ve been waiting for? I’m John Dickson and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

John Lennox is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow in Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. He took his MA and PhD in mathematics at Cambridge University, and for his later research was awarded a Doctor of Science by the University of Wales in Cardiff. When he moved to Oxford, he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy as a matching honour for his Cambridge doctorate – that’s a weird and ancient practice in the Oxbridge tradition. Oh, and in his spare time he also punched out a Masters in Bioethics from the University of Surrey. Most important for our purposes, he is also the author of 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity – the product of years of research and reflection …

John Dickson: 
John, I remember a few years ago, now you telling me how excited you were to be writing a book about artificial intelligence and felt it was really important. Can you, can you tell me, like wind back, why did you feel it was such an important topic to address?

John Lennox: 
One of the main reasons that brought it to my attention was the fact that I could see, I’ve always been interested in this kind of thing, but I could see that increasingly the issues being raised by artificial intelligence were encroaching on the fundamental existential question: What is a human being? What is human life, and it came to a head when a fairly senior Christian leader asked me to give a talk in London to a large group of Christian leaders on Genesis and artificial intelligence. And I, in one sense, I said, look, you’ve got the wrong person. And they said, no, we think that you’ve got a lot of insight into Genesis and we’d like you to relate it to the developments. And once I started doing that, it was immediately clear to me that this deserved a much deeper investigation. And so I put together a lot of stuff I had already read and then did a great deal, more research. And it ended up with this book,

John Dickson: 
Which is a fantastic book. Can you give us a lay of the land? Where are we up to in artificial intelligence? And what’s just around the corner?

John Lennox:
Well, I can’t see round corners, even though I’m an Irishman, but let me put it this way that AI has got two very distinct aspects to it. The first is the AI that actually works is being used all over the world and there’s been used for some very good things and some very questionable things. A typical AI system used in medical diagnostics consists of a powerful computer, a very large database, say of pictures of lungs, which have diseases, and all the pictures, let’s say there are a million of them, are labelled with the diseases they represent by the best medics of the day. And then you get pains in your lung an x-ray is taken, and the AI system compares the pattern in your lungs with those million others and comes up with a diagnosis. These days, that diagnosis is liable to be considerably better than you would get at your local hospital. So what is it doing? It’s not really intelligent, but it’s doing a single thing. One thing only that normally requires human intelligence and that has been rolled out all over the planet. And there, as I say, there are lots of good things, but if you just tweak this slightly you’re into surveillance and pattern recognition, and of course for a police force, it’s wonderful to be able to recognise terrorists and criminals in a football crowd. But unfortunately, this kind of surveillance technology lends itself to oppression. And there are very serious breaches of human rights in China that most people around the world know about. And it’s extremely intrusive artificial intelligence. And so we need to be able to discriminate. And so there’s a whole ethical matrix of questions that go along with it. That’s the stuff that actually works. And in fact, the book is called 2084, which was a suggestion by Peter Atkins by the way, my atheist colleague at Oxford. And it fits because 1984 was the book where George Orwell gave us Big Brother and all this kind of thing that’s already happening. So the first sort of AI is stuff that’s already being rolled out, it works. The second kind is much more science fiction-like stuff for we’re talking about creating superintelligence and will superintelligence make humans redundant, or keep them as pets or rule the world or destroy humanity as many people fear. And that more speculative type of thing of course attracts a lot of journalistic attention. So I thought in the book, I would like look at that because scenarios about the future are actually important. And as a Christian, I felt that the Biblical worldview has things to say that interestingly enough relate very strongly to what some AI proponents are claiming. 

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s right, if you didn’t already know, John Lennox is not only an internationally respected mathematician, he’s a world-renowned advocate for the Christian faith. And, like the great scientists of old (Boyle, Newton), he sees Christianity as enhancing not obscuring his study of the world. More from John later. Professor Lennox talked about two different types of AI. The first is a tool … that’s where manufactured intelligence does tasks humans can do … only faster and more accurately … like the replicants in Blade Runner … the explorer robots in Interstellar  … and, of course, everyone’s favourite clean-up bot…

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John Dickson (Studio)

The other kind of AI is more confronting. It’s the sort of artificial intelligence that exceeds our own. It could be benevolent, just a lot smarter .. like the self-aware operating system from the film Her.

Media – Her

John Dickson (Studio)

Or it could decide it no longer needs humanity, like the Avengers’ technological villain, Ultron.

Media – Age of Ultron

John Dickson (Studio)

We don’t know which we’re going to get. And some people fear that the day we’re going to find out is, technologically speaking, just around the corner. It’s called ‘The Singularity’. And it was defined at the Singularity Symposium of 2019 as “a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilisation.” Technologists like Elon Musk are a little worried.

John Dickson: 
Elon Musk, uh, in the New York Times recently said, and I quote, we’re headed toward a situation where AI will be vastly smarter than humans in five years, things will get unstable and weird. Do you agree with that time frame? And you know, where do you see AI in five to 10 years? I know you can’t see around the corner, but in terms of the trajectories, what are people straining toward?

John Lennox: 
It’s pretty clear that the technology will keep advancing, but ideas that are to be smarter, than human beings, we need to subject that to a little bit of micro analysis. What do we mean by that? Because, artificial intelligence is artificial. One of the best summaries of it is the title of a paper by actually one of the early pioneers who happens to be a Christian, where he said the artificial in artificial intelligence is real. It’s not real intelligence; no, real human intelligence is coupled with consciousness. And if you’re talking about something being smarter than a human being, what are you claiming? It’s either one of two things. One of them is this: That your AI system can do everything a human being can do, but do it faster and more efficiently, et cetera, but not itself be conscious that it’s doing it. The other thing is that some people think that they’re going to construct a conscious artifact. Now that is so far away from any reasonable hope, for a very simple reason: no one knows what consciousness is. And so it’s very difficult. That’s the big barrier in the way of truly constructing something that represents the kind of intelligence we humans have. Now, clearly you can add one AI system to another and have competence in many levels. But I think Elon Musk is pushing his boat out a bit far when he thinks it’s within five years. Ray Kurzweil, one of the great gurus of this field, he always puts it about 30 years hence. It’s always been 30 years hence, and there are very differing opinions. There is, of course the Sci-Fi squad who are not scientifically qualified and write novels about this kind of stuff like Dan Brown, and to a certain extent, Yuval Noah Harari, with whom I’ve interacted for the simple reason that he’s influencing so many people, but then there are some leading scientists who take these things extremely seriously, notably Lord Martin Race, our Astronomer Royal, who thinks that down the years, but he puts it at centuries I think that the beings that exist will have very little memory of us, so to speak and may well be controlling the planet. There’s enough fear out there among the intelligentsia to produce a real scramble for ethical controls that are international. And of course, that’s proving extremely difficult.

John Dickson (Studio)

People have been discussing the ethical limits we should place on technology for as long as we’ve been dreaming about technology. Futurist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote his Three Laws of Robotics that need to be programmed into every advanced intelligence. This became the basis for the film I, Robot.

Media – I, Robot

John Dickson (Studio)

Ethical discussions don’t just centre on what robots should or shouldn’t do, but on what we should or shouldn’t do with all the advances coming down the pipeline. One of those tricky issues concerns sex. Dr Grenville Kent gave a paper at this year’s ISCAST conference (a meeting of Christians who are professional mainstream scientists). Grenville’s paper was titled, Sexbots, Love and Marriage. I asked him about the use of artificial intelligence in the sex industry.

John Dickson: 
How serious are people experts, industry about sex and relationships with robots?

Grenville Kent: 
Yeah, look, um, if you’re asking for the market research surveys, something like about 30%, 40% of Americans and Europeans think they might have sex with a robot sometime in their life. Um, if you talk to the enthusiasts, Oh, it’s going to be the best thing since sliced bread. You know, there’s, there’s whole books now since about 2017, when the scientific journal Nature asked academics to get into this field and take it seriously. There are books they’re promising you the most incredible sex and relationships of your life and deep intimacy as you stare into the glass eyes of this, of this robot. I think most people realise that there’s a bit more to, to go in terms of AI before we will have things like conversation, empathy, uh, rationality, freedom of choice, uh, personhood

John Dickson: 
But are there University research labs, working on this, or, or maybe industry research labs working on this?

Grenville Kent:
 Oh man, there are so nerds working on this at the moment. It’s hilarious. I mean, take kissing. For example, if you wanted to kiss your beloved from a distance over the internet, you’ve got a whole bunch of different options. You’ve got to think of the tele tongue, which is basically a pair of plastic lollipops. They sense the gestures that you’re doing with your tongue and the sound of it. And they transmit that across the internet to your partner. And that’s the, um, the, the two nerdy scholars who write about this, they say a problem with this device is the unnatural and rigid UI user interface. The straw of the device essentially serves as the tongue of the remote kisser, however its shape and texture do not bear any resemblance to a human tongue. The body of the device is also in the form of an unappealing plastic box, making the kissing experience too mechanical and less affective. Moreover, interacting with tongue is only suitable for romantic sexual kissing. This limits the potential target audience to romantic couples while friends and families could not benefit from this application. So, so the best way you compare that to a passionate and loving Moonlight kiss, um, and it, and it’s a plastic straw rattling around in your mouth. That’s the best we’ve got on the market –

John Dickson: 
But have they gone beyond sex dolls? I mean, I know sex dolls is quite a thing, but have they gone beyond that to sort of partly robotic sex dolls?

Grenville Kent: 
Well, yeah, mechatronic, I mean, th they’re, they’re kind of mechanized. They’ll move a bit. And um, and I guess they’ve got the conversational skills of Siri or Alexa. You can put it that way. So no, not really convincing at all, unless you want to suspend disbelief, you know, as we do and we watch fiction, we watch some fiction film, we go like, I’ll play along. You can do that. But, but when the, when the reporters describe interaction with the dolls in one of the many brothels, interestingly, which are popping up across America in Europe and Asia, um, they described it

John Dickson: 
No, um, brothels with non-human.

Grenville Kent: 
Correct. Full sex doll, brothels all over there’s one called, um, uh, something to do with dollies. I forget what it’s called in, in London. Yeah. It’s no cheaper. Um, and there’s almost no human contact, um, there, but they they’re growing in popularity. I think probably because you don’t have to talk to a person. And yet it was interesting in Barcelona, the sex professional association said, they’re no threat to prostitutes because quote, they do not communicate. They do not listen to you or caress you. They do not comfort you or look at you. They do not give you your opinion. There’s like, so there’s not a person there and alarmingly there’s reports of serious violence done to those dolls, like repair people going in there and fixing rips and breaks and punches. Like some people, just some, some pretty sick stuff is done. Um, in those, um, in those brothels, it seems from what we,

John Dickson: 
So maybe that is the attraction to the non-human.

Grenville Kent: 
Yeah, potentially that you can just unleash anger and pain. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Yikes! Artificial Intelligence allows us to demean ourselves, and others! Vicky Lorrimar has a degree in genetics and biochemistry, a Master of Divinity, and now a doctorate in theology and science from Oxford University. She studied under the wonderful Alister McGrath – a guest on the show last season. Anyway, Vicki is back in Australia and teaches at Trinity College, Queensland, where she focuses on theological understandings of the human being and how that relates to human enhancement technologies. She reckons there are significant ‘justice’ issues we need to be thinking about in all this. 

Vicky Lorrimar: 
Well, I don’t buy into the notion that technology is, is completely neutral from a moral standpoint. So, so I don’t think it can be as simple as saying, well, technology can be used for good and for evil. Um, but I do think it can be used with different motives and intentions. So I think there is always the potential for technology to improve lives. And, you know, if you speak to technologists, like many of them are, are really idealistic about making the world a better place. That is the goal. So, you know, I think some technological developments might help, uh, might help people survive in harsh environments. It might improve nutritional efficiency, all kinds of things that they’re really would really improve the life of the poor. But then I think we have to start asking the question of who’s developing the technology and, and what is the vision of the good life that sits under that? And, you know, without being too pessimistic you’re, I don’t think we can necessarily engineer away our own sort of greed or, or completely do away with existing inequalities and injustices. I think these are kind of be brought along with us if, if technology is the only kind of way forward.

John Dickson (Studio)

On the other hand, there are strong hopes that these new technologies are going to elevate us, make us better human beings! That’s after the break…

Media – The Terminator

Break

John Dickson (Studio)

It’s easy to see how artificial intelligence could be a threat to humanity’s future … But many insist that technology is the key to humanity’s salvation! Since our earliest days, people have seen technology as holding the potential to lift us to god-like status. Think of the sword in the Old English epic poem Beowulf. The sword gets its own name, Hrunting, a bit like the way we name AI computers and robots:

Reading

And another item lent by Unferth at that moment of need was of no small importance: the brehon handed him a hilted weapon, a rare and ancient sword named Hrunting. The iron blade with its ill-boding patterns had been tempered in blood. It had never failed the hand of anyone who hefted it in battle, anyone who had fought and faced the worst in the gap of danger. This was not the first time it had been called to perform heroic feats. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Then there’s the ancient Jewish story of the Tower of Babel, a piece of technology specifically designed to elevate humanity to god-status.

Reading

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shine-are and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’”

John Dickson (Studio)

Reaching to the heavens … making a name for ourselves … ensuring our longevity … there are some who think this dream could be fulfilled soon. Yuval Noah Harari is an Oxford-educated Israeli historian and technology philosopher. His famous 2016 book Homo Deus (literally ‘man god’) describes what he sees as the probable emergence of a new race of supermen and women, endowed by technology with supreme abilities, including, perhaps, eternal life.

John Dickson: 
Harare seems to be, you know, sort of off the dial, uh, in his expectation of the utopia that, um, AI can produce.

John Lennox: 
Yes, he’s the first name that came to thinking, but more accurately you say he thinks that this movement, this techno movement may contain the seeds of its own destruction. And I find a bit of equivocation with Harare that as you go through his book, Homo Deus. And of course, once I saw the title of that book that resonated very much with the quest to be gods that begins in Genesis and there’s going on and the AI community of the Harare type, I think he is in one sense, an optimist, but there are warnings in his book that this thing may sow the seeds of its own destruction. So I find it a bit hard to pin down actually.

John Dickson (Studio)

Vicky Lorrimar points out that this quest for god-ness through technology has already taken on a religious vibe.

John Dickson: 
You’ve said that, um, technology tends to occupy the roles, uh, uh, normally attributed to deity, what do you mean by that?

Vicky Lorrimar: 
Well, I think know for people who have a religious worldview, uh, God offers hope God offers a way to be redeemed or glorified, you know, gives understanding for why things aren’t the way they ought to be. You know, this means to sort of lift ourselves to elevate ourselves out of whatever present condition we’re in. So, um, if, if that is a hope that’s traditionally offered by religion, I think for some technology has become a substitute for that. So we can almost engineer that for ourselves. We can make our lives better through our own, uh, ingenuity. So I think that’s an enormously hopeful vision for some people yeah.

John Dickson: 
Even redemption. I mean, do we see, do we see that longing for redemption in technology? Do you think?

Vicky Lorrimar: 
That’s an interesting one because I think, you know, even if God is not a part of someone’s worldview or, or their explanatory landscape for how things are, there’s still this universal sense, I think that we could be more, or that we want to be more and we might call it different things. You know, Karl Ranna talked about the longing for the infinite, that’s universal. We have different ways of describing that kind of longing to be more than we are, that sense that we could be more than we’re meant to be. Um, what I think is interesting with trans humanism is actually it appeals to some classically Christian language. So we have words like transcendence and angelic and becoming godlike and all of this language that for centuries was reserved for religion. And then your after that was almost not permitted language in the public spaces now coming, coming back in again under a different guise, uh, you know, I think that’s really interesting. 

John Dickson: 
What, um, what are you most concerned about in the, the rush to leap forward in artificial intelligence and indeed transhumanism, which we’ll get to specifically in a moment?

John Lennox: 
Well, the rush is the right word. Technology advances much more rapidly than ethical thinking. And it’s noticeable that the ethical thinking is not going very fast at all. Although there are people – Hawking was involved. Musk is involved. I think about 6,000 people were involved in constructing what are called the Asilomar uh, ethical principles. 

John Dickson (Studio)

The Asilomar Ethical Principles are a list of ‘shoulds’ and ‘should nots’ endorsed by 12-hundred or so AI and robotics researchers. The list goes way beyond Asimov’s three laws. It’s the 10 Commandments of tech – except there are 23 of them … stuff like …

• The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence.
• If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why.

And:

• AI systems should be designed and operated so as to be compatible with ideals of human dignity, rights, freedoms, and cultural diversity.

I suppose some people will see this as moralising getting in the way of technology. I’d say it’s putting humanity before our stupidity. 

John Lennox: 
And they’re all wonderful, but I’m involved in the business school here. And how many chief executives have said to me, it’s one thing to have a mission statement on your office wall. It’s another thing to get into the hearts of your executives. And that’s exactly it. How do you get real agreements? Since there are sufficient number of people in the world to who take the view, if it can be done, it should be done without any concern for ethics. And so there’s a problem. And that’s one of the reasons, incidentally, that I encourage bright young scientists who are Christians to get involved in this stuff, because there’s a lot of good that can be done. Witness the work of Roslyn Picard at MIT, helping autistic children and so on. There’s so much good that can be done, but we need people who are articulate about that and have gone into the ethical dimension of this. 

John Dickson (Studio)

We may have quite of time to work all this out. As Dr Grenville Kent points out, even the most optimistic developers of artificial intelligence are nowhere near developing the sort of God-like AI that some folks fear.

Grenville Kent: 
Well, the first thing to say is there are a lot of top AI people and I’ve interviewed some of them who say we will never achieve full AI, that what is happening in your smartphone … it’s just following algorithms that are programmed to do it. It’s not conscious. It doesn’t have any sense of like I do when I watch it and see that my team, which Manly Sea Eagles have lost again. And I want to jump under a bus. The phone doesn’t have any emotion at all. It doesn’t even know what football is. It’s not smart to that degree. Any more than a thermostat is smart when it goes, ‘Oh, it’s 22 degrees. I better switch the air conditioner on’. It doesn’t know what hot is or cold is it hasn’t felt it has no experience. And if that’s the case, um, you know, it’s one thing. Step one is to get robotic control and we’re pretty good at that. Step two is to get robotic perception. That’s really hard, but we’re getting there. Uh, that’s why we have, you know, on the internet, prove that you’re not a robot, you know, show all the bits of this picture that have a bus in it or whatever. But the third level that nobody has cracked yet is full AI. And we use the metaphors of intelligent machines and learning machines. But in fact, there’s no real mind there there’s no real consciousness there. There’s no real experience there. It’s all just, uh, following. ‘If this, then do that’. It’s ones and zeros. There’s not a thought there. So if that’s the case, I mean, I think what we’re really talking about, and a lot of scholars say this, what we’re really talking about is robots imitating human thought and human consciousness, and pretending they feel what you feel and understand you and agree or disagree with you and wanting to talk about your team’s progress in football, because you want to, but there’s really no one home. And it’s just kind of a, it’s kind of a Teddy Bear for grownups in the sense that you’d have an illusion, probably not a delusion, because part of you goes, ‘I know this is not real’, but you basically have an illusion that you’re suspended disbelief and the things actually a person when we all know it’s not.

John Dickson (Studio)

And Vicky Lorrimar reckons there are some things AI will never achieve.

John Dickson: 
Why do you think the Christian hope for immortality is something that we can’t manufacture for ourselves because some people reckon that, you know, just give enough time and we will actually be there through technology.

Vicky Lorrimar: 
This comes down to a crucial distinction between what is the Christian hope and what is the hope that underpins a lot of these sort of technological visions of immortality. And, and the key question around the Christian hope becomes sort of how does the future relate to the present? And if we see the future as just the continuation of the present is something that we will arrive at the, the eschatological future knew to give the Christian language for it, that sort of end time we will arrive at that, just with the passing of more time. You know, then that is that’s one understanding of the future. And that’s the understanding of the future that transhumanists operating on. We just more time we continue along the trajectory we’re currently on, or just be this, this ever upward kind of path of progress. Whereas the Christian hope says that actually this is not the future we’re anticipating. So we don’t say it’s entirely discontinuous with the present in some way, the present world, the present creation is going to be related to the new creation that we’re hoping for. But we also expect that God is going to break in the future that the Christians are hoping in is something that is unexpected, that, that breaks into the present in a way that just the passing of time on its own won’t achieve. So that’s where I think we can create all kinds of technologies. And they may actually contribute in various ways to building the kingdom in, in the, the space that we have now and with the responsibility we have now. But that final redemption that breaking in is something that, that God does. And it’s something that we can’t do on our own. And that time itself won’t bring abou

John Dickon: 
And it’s a, it’s a glorification, isn’t it? I mean, that’s what you’re saying rather than an extension.

 

Vicky Lorrimar: 
Exactly. It’s a trans transformation. I like, I like to think of in terms of your even time itself is transformed. So it’s not just something the future is you’re the final future of Christian hope is not just an extension of present time, present existence, but a transformation.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press pause… I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you. There are two very ancient traditions about how to elevate humanity. The first says that we can lift ourselves up, through brute force, human effort, and especially technology. Perhaps the most ancient example is the tower of Babel – people trying to build a tower to the heavens. There are hints at the victorious possibilities of technology in the Trojan horse story from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid – soldiers hide inside a giant mechanical horse, and take the city of Troy by stealth. Perhaps the most concrete examples are from the Roman Empire, where weaponry rapidly advanced, and military engineering was incredibly complicated and successful (just Google Roman battering ram, and you’ll get the idea – the Romans were incredible technologically). Then there’s the Roman engineer Vitruvius who even worked out how to pour and dry concrete underwater — he wrote a manual about it, and you can visit the ancient Israeli seaport of Caesarea to see a stunning example. In all of these examples, we catch a glimpse of humanity’s ancient optimism to lift ourselves up to be the saviours of our own predicaments. At the same time, there was also the occasional recognition that we are not able to lift ourselves up by our own shoelaces. In Greek and Roman literature we find another curious motif of Divinity stepping in to help where human prowess had reached its tragic limits. There are a few examples in Homer’s Iliad, with gods deciding on a whim to help out on the battlefield, or in the famous Roman epic poem the Aeneid by Virgil, where deities redirect humans to their safety or success. In Greek and Roman theatre this is known as ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός or in its Latin equivalent Deus ex machina, literally “God from a machine”. It refers to a staging device in ancient plays where a figure representing a god would literally be winched down onto stage. This would be the moment when everything in the story would be turned around. The plays of Euripides used this regularly (400s BC). And it became such a cliche that the slightly later playwright Aristophanes (300s BC) used it as comedy – the god appeared almost as a joke. And in one of his plays, Aristophanes makes a really good joke by having a figure of the playwright Euripides himself winched onto stage. We now use the expression Deus ex machina to refer to any dramatic turn in a plot – it’s the surprise occurrence that no one deserved or expected. Both of these ancient traditions tell us something real about the human situation. It’s right that we aim for the stars, or “fill the earth and subdue it”, as the Bible itself puts it. But it’s also wise to admit our limitations, technologically and morally. However much it might appear as a cliche, humanity does often need a Deus ex machina. Failing to acknowledge this is to fall into the trap of backing ourselves too much, of seeing ourselves as all knowing gods. And that is just as much an awful cliche as the comedic overuse of needing rescue from God. The Bible affirms the status of every human being as made in the image of God, called by the Creator to rule, explore, and curate this planet. The Bible applauds human advancement. The Bible also echoes the deep human longing for the Deus ex machina, the hope that God might come down onto the human stage, and lift us up out of the mess we’ve got ourselves into. As the Gospel of John puts it, in one of the most quoted passages of Scripture: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” You can press play now.