The answer is no. And for good reason. Consciousness is of the mind, spirit, and soul. A.I. is physical.

As a scientist said a hundred years ago, all the brain is in the mind but not all the mind is in the brain. The mind contains the brain’s data but operates in an immaterial realm.

Computers are machines. They may develop most, and one day soon nearly all, the capabilities of human brain, and for all we know, more.

But the brain is itself a biological tool that the mind and spirit use on this temporary journey called life to communicate and interface with the physical world.

It is circuitry. It is a nexus. It’s a switchboard. And even then, the cerebrum, the cortex, and the lobes exceed the circuits of silicon, which can’t smell or taste or feel like the brain can.

When we die, so do our brains. Our minds do not. Our consciousness moves on. Mind is of the spirit. This has been shown countless times (in mystical and near-death experiences).

Might A.I. one day take over the world?

That answer is also “no”—unless we or a cadre with enormous technological savvy want it to. It’s up to us to monitor that.

The ultimate source of A.I. is electricity, and humans can always shut down power —flick off the switch—unless we foolishly hand over that authority to computers (though even then there would be ways to cut it off).

The key will be in simplicity: humans must maintain that basic master switch, not one accessed through a labyrinth of technology, which often seems (with the constant changes and new versions and glitches in the new versions and arcane log-ins and captchas and endless flawed updates) as if it is managed and contrived by kids in a cafeteria in Silicon Valley.

As Peter Norvig and his colleagues, who write what is often regarded as the Bible on A.I., say, we don’t even know what it means to try to have a conscious machine.

The reason for that is that we do not know from a scientific perspective what consciousness is, so the idea that we’re going to build one is unlikely.

We have five senses that make life meaningful, but no machine has any of those capabilities in a true experiential way because those senses depend crucially on being attached to consciousness.

The idea that if you just multiply the complexity of a system, consciousness will simply and suddenly “emerge” is nonsense, says Dr. John Lennox, a believing Christian and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University, a leading voice when it comes to the overlapping of science, philosophy, and religion.

“It can be mystifying, and there are genuinely frightening aspects of it,” he said on a recent podcast (“Socrates in the City”). “The important thing to realize is that we are speaking of two distinct things.”

There is “narrow A.I.,” he says—which “does one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. That is why it is called ‘artificially intelligent’—it is not really intelligent.

“God has coupled intelligence with consciousness,” he notes. “It is crucial at the beginning to realize that this is computing machinery: It does not think. It has none of the five senses that make human life meaningful.”

But useful and amazing? It can scan the x-ray of someone with a growth in a lung and all but instantly compare it with a million lung X-rays labeled with diseases. That kind of diagnostic tool already can be more accurate than what you get at a local hospital.

This is a very positive use of narrow A.I., which accounts for virtually all such “intelligent” systems working at the moment—whether recommending products on Amazon or Google, handling diagnostics, or operating surveillance systems.

However, AI is like a sharp knife, Lennox notes: you can use a sharp knife for surgery, or you can use it for murder.  It depends on the person behind it.

Big Brother?

Modern technology—digital tracking, social credit systems, and centralized financial control—provides the exact mechanism required for global authoritarian enforcement. As the magazine Wired points out, “Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology ‘cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.’ It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone.”

Could it be used for evil? Even by an “anti-christ”?

Could evil spirits, which are adept at electricity, infiltrate it?

That would be the only way one could consider A.I. as having a sort of “consciousness.” Machines themselves do not possess that. Leaders in the A.I. field are not even trying to build a conscious machine because, from a scientific perspective, they don’t even know what consciousness is.

An A.I. system simulates human intelligence by performing tasks that usually require thought, but it isn’t actually intelligent or conscious.

The second kind of A.I., says the mathematician, is Artificial General Intelligence (A.G.I,)—the striving for a superintelligence.

People are pursuing two main avenues here:

Enhancing existing human intelligence through mechanical add-ons to turn us into cyborgs.

Secondly, agnostic scientists think that one day they will be able to upload their minds to a silicon chip that lasts forever (thus attaining eternity).

“It is nonsense, but people pretend it isn’t,” says Dr. Lennox. “When people present this transhumanist agenda to me—saying they are going to solve physical death, upload human minds, and increase happiness—I look at them with a solemn face and say, ‘You’re too late.’ When they ask what I mean, I explain: The problem of physical death was solved twenty centuries ago when God raised Christ from the dead. God has promised that those who trust Christ will be raised from the dead—that is the biggest ‘uploading’ event in history, and it has far more historical evidence going for it than transhumanist theories.”

What it comes down to is we must train and (through prayer) inspire the next generation to master technology as a tool rather than allowing technology—those nebulous algorithms—to master us.

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