AI and the Battle for the Soul with Iain McGilchrist - Lecture 1: Information is Not Understanding

[00:00:15][music] Good morning everyone. How exciting it  is to be here with all of you today.

[00:00:23]I offer you the warmest welcomes everyone to  this gathering of those old-fashioned creatures, human beings. Welcome. I'm Stephen Blackwood. I'm  the president of this fledgling college, Ralston College. And my colleagues and I are all very  very glad to have you all here from near and far, from across the ocean, from across the country,  from here in beautiful Savannah for what we hope is a special, memorable, and deeply human day. We  hear a lot about the coming AI revolution. Maybe it has already come. Some will say we're told that  massive disruption is coming indeed is already here. And that on top of the enormous changes  that have already taken place fairly recently in human history, that is to say over the past 50  or 100 or 200 years, developments it is not at all clear we human beings have really learned to live  with, to catch up with yet. And yet on top of all that now comes a further machine revolution in the  form of AI. What are we to do? That is really the question we are asking today. We're a humanities  college Ralston. We're not involved in building these technologies but we are involved in thinking  about what the human being is. How we understand the status and character of our lives. So this  day is in fact not about the machines but about us. I think we certainly I have been learning  the hard way. Indeed, it appears there may be no other way to learn about how hard it is to live  in relation to the machines to ever-expanding, ever more convenient, ever more computationally  powerful and ever more seemingly anticipatory machines. I did a very informal and non-scientific  straw poll recently in which I asked a a handful of friends who were sort of all around my age or  old enough in any event uh several of them are here to remember before the iPhone you know some  of you remember those days those halcyon days when humanity was in its early stages um and I just  asked them you know do you think your life is better or worse now than it was before the iPhone  for all the incredible things it makes possible?

[00:03:15]So much ease and getting around and all this  better or worse and everyone said worse. I mean what are we doing and how do we live  in relation to what we are doing. None of that is of course to question the power, the  genius design or the usefulness of machines, but rather simply to point to the very challenges  for human beings of living in relation to them.

[00:03:46]E. M. Forster's stunningly prescient "The  Machine Stops" a a reading recommended by our chancellor gives us a prophetic image of life  lived entirely through the machine underground in artificial light where face-to-face human contact  has all but ceased. But the thing is I don't think I'm the only one who was struck reading that to a  large degree that is the world we already inhabit.

[00:04:17]So in the end, while it's an extremely interesting  question that we will revisit today of what the machines can and cannot do or will or will not  be able to do in the future so far as we think we understand them. It obscures the more  important question for us and that is what must be ours? What what must we do to be fully  human? To live lives of purpose and meaning, to live the one life we have as well as we can.  There are all kinds of things we can depute to machines and indeed to other human beings. But the  one thing by definition that you cannot depute to anything or anyone is your own life. No one else  can find your place in the cosmos for you. No one else can take your acts of cognition, love,  conscience, conviction, forgiveness, creation.

[00:05:26]But how best do we live amidst the siren song of  ever more powerful, ever more seductive machines, at our seeming command, and amidst an already  struggling civilization, out of touch with its grounding myths, traditions, ideals, and with  our own civic life under ever-increasing strain, fragmented all too often by the very algorithms  that seem to have taken on a life of their own.

[00:05:55]So today then is not about the machines but about  us about the irreducibly inalienably human. How do we defend protect understand and realize that  in ourselves and in others? In short, this day is about the battle for the soul. There's perhaps  no one who has a more powerful critique of the grasping, instrumentalizing approach to our world  than the man we are very proud to have as our chancellor, Dr. Iain McGilchrist. But what makes  this doctor so special and beloved by so many of us in this room is not critique. Simply trenchant  though that critique is, but because his diagnosis already contains the remedy, a recollection of  ourselves, a showing of a higher way of seeing and being, of finding ourselves within the  whole. And so it is with Jonathan Pageau too, whose work has done so much to help many find  themselves in the paradigmatic patterns of the real and especially through the myths that  are a way of that finding. We're in I know for some inspiring and illuminating talks by both of  them. We also have the great fortune today to be joined by the renowned mathematical physicist and  computer scientist Stephen Wolfram. We wanted to make sure the day did not even accidentally  straw man technology and Dr. Wolfram is at once a uniquely accomplished technologist and in  an age of reduction a champion of the ultimate irreducibility of reality itself. I'd like to  thank before we kick off the the Hochman Family Fund for their support of this gathering and above  all Ben Delo, a really visionary philanthropist who has sponsored this event, a man of uncommon  clarity about the existential importance of freedom of thought. It's quite a day. I think  we're in for one that only we frail and fragile, but also curious and conscious and resilient  old-fashioned beings [music] can bring into being.

[00:08:58]What exactly is AI?

[00:09:03]Whatever it may be, I know this. It never gave  birth to a new life. Never mourned the loss of a beloved partner. Never knew joy in the world  and yet grieved over its fragility. Never saw a beauty that scarified its heart. Never fell  in love and yet lived to see that love falter, never suffered and had to contemplate its own  death. Never felt intimations of something inexpressibly great and grave that spoke only to  its soul. For it has neither soul nor body. Those two elements which together interpenetrating  one another constitute the entirety of human existence here on earth. As Wittgenstein  said, the human body is the best picture of the human soul. AI can have as much information  as you like. But what could it ever understand?

[00:10:27]What does it mean to know? Really to know. Isaiah  Berlin describing the tenets of enlightenment thinking refers to the three propositions upon  which the whole western tradition rested. Namely, that all genuine questions can be answered. That  if a question cannot be answered, it is not a question. That all these answers are knowable,  that they can be discovered by means which can be learned and taught to other persons, and that all  the answers must be compatible with one another.

[00:11:10]When Berlin refers to the western tradition,  he's speaking of the western philosophical tradition that is that part of western  culture dealing in explicit fashion with the resolution of questions and answers. Although  philosophers in the west since the time of Plato, but importantly absolutely not before have  behaved as though these tenets Berlin's three propositions were true. There was until the time  of the enlightenment enough implicit expression of cultural wisdom through the media of poetry,  drama, painting, and above all religious ritual.

[00:11:56]In all of which it is easily perceived as far  from true that all questions can be answered, that all questions can be answered and their  answers taught to others. And that all the answers are mutually compatible. These  tenets though espoused by philosophy had not come to shape the culture itself but  with the heightened self-awareness of the movement called the enlightenment and which  the great physicist philosopher David Bohm called the endarkenment. These three obviously  false propositions came to dominate not just academic philosophy but the business of life  itself. Or to look at it another way in what became known as the l'âge des philosophes,  we all became philosophes malgré nous.

[00:12:55]AI is an expression of this very unusual way  of thinking in which information aspires to replace meaning to replace by mimicry knowledge  intelligence and understanding. In every language I know other than English, a distinction is  made between two fundamentally different ways of knowing. Knowing the facts of the case, so to  speak, and knowing from experience. In French, for example, savoir is used to denote the first  kind of knowledge and connaître the second. Thus, I know, savoir, that Paris is the capital of  France. But I know, connaître, Paris because I lived there for several years. Similarly with  wissen and kennen in German. The first is a kind of propositional knowledge knowing that as  opposed to having knowledge of. In other words, the first remains in an abstract conceptual  realm which is wholly unlike reality rather a mere and meager representation of reality.  It is like the glaring simplicity of a map contrasted with the almost infinite complexity  of the world that is mapped. Another way of putting this difference is that between knowing  about something from the outside and knowing it intimately from the inside. Going back to  Berlin's summary of enlightenment thinking fairly obviously only knowledge from the outside  is the kind that can be written down and handed to another in such a way that the other receives  the knowledge whole and intact. If you ask me to tell you about a person I love, I can give  you a description mentioning a number of facts about her. But that will get you almost  nowhere in understanding who she is. For that, I'd have to say you really must meet her. She  is a unique embodied being, an embodied soul.

[00:15:20]We are very impressed by AI's apparent knowledge.  But this can only ever be knowledge from the outside. It is effectively just a very rapid file  retrieval system entirely parasitic on the fruits of human experience. Even when it appears to  understand in a more rounded way by anticipating and mimicking a human emotional reaction, it  has merely moved its conceptual knowledge to a new target. Not in any sense knowledge of but  information about human knowledge of. In this process, everything that matters has been elided.  The meaning has been emptied out and it is only in our reception into the lived world of whatever the  machine emits that meaning is restored once more.

[00:16:19]I'd like to make some brief reflections on  the words body and soul since they're not as straightforward as they may seem. First, the body.  This too comes into being for us in more than one way. The right hemisphere of the brain, as one  can tell from the fascinating changes that occur after unilateral brain damage, is responsible  for our sense of the body as something we live, something that is part of who we are,  and which is, if I can put it that way, the phase of intersection between ourselves and  the world at large. With the right hemisphere suppressed or functionally ablated, by contrast,  the body is something from which we are relatively detached, a thing in the world alongside other  things, devitalized, effectively a corpse. As Gabriel Marcel puts it, it is sometimes as if I  am my body, sometimes as if I have a body. Some languages such as German see the body in these  two senses as so distinct that they have different words for them. Leib for the body I am; Körper  for the body I have. Incidentally the German word Körper related to the English corpse came  into the language through medicine and theology, the body there being the element left when the  soul departed. The word Leib, related to leben, to live, referred to the bodies that survived  a battle, those who were not Körper. In fact, even more striking is that the Greek word which  subsequently came to indicate the body considered separately from the person, sōma, is never  used in Homer to refer to the living body, only to a corpse. In my early training as  a doctor, the emphasis was on the body seen as the thing that we have. In my practice  as a doctor, above all as a psychiatrist, I was returned once more to a vivid  awareness of the body as something we live.

[00:18:56]Then what is perception to the detached  intellect? It is a mass of information registered by the senses whatever they are.  But it is nothing less than the seamless flow of something coming into being through a  process in which our emotions and the body which is their home. Our memories,  the whole of our unconscious life, past and present is brought to bear. The lived  and living body is where meaning resides. And that is I hardly need to point out something.  AI doesn't have. And then there is the soul.

[00:19:47]The soul here already plays a part since in this  world body and soul can never be fully separated.

[00:19:57]Soul is an old-fashioned word that threatens  to disappear from our vocabulary and therefore from our vision of human reality. But it cannot be  replaced by any other word whatsoever. Not by the mind, the intellect, the heart, the moral sense.  Though clearly all those aspects of our existence are connected to what we mean by the soul. It  seems to place the person in the widest context, a context outside the confines of immediate time  and space and it involves a sense of destiny.

[00:20:42]So when in that dramatic moment when Othello  realizes that his wife has been as he thinks unfaithful to him and is ready to put out the  light. He says, "It is the cause. It is the cause, my soul. Let me not name it to you, you chaste  stars. It is the cause." Now when he says my soul, he doesn't mean my mind, my heart, my moral  sense. He means my soul. And then there is that mid-Victorian or late-Victorian poem by W.  E. Henley called Invictus which so much inspired Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment. And  it ends, "It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll. I am the  master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul."

[00:21:51]Not my mind, not my heart, not my moral sense, but  my soul. And then in the different register there is as so often a wonderful passage in Wordsworth  from "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" in which he refers to "that blessed mood in  which the burden of the mystery in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible  world is lightened. That serene and blessed mood in which the affections gently lead us on until  the breath of this corporeal frame and even the motion of our human blood almost suspended. We  are laid asleep in body and become a living soul.

[00:22:44]While with an eye made quiet by the power  of harmony and the deep power of joy, we see into the life of things." When I was a teenager,  probably the most significant thing that happened to me in a wonderful education I was offered was  one day when uh one of my teachers sat me down and played to me Tallis's Lamentations. I'll never  forget it. And that music I got to know the music of Palestrina, Victoria, Tallis, Byrd and so on.  Yes, it has its intellectual elements. Of course, it affects your emotions in a way, but that's  an utterly trivial way to describe it. It speaks directly to the soul. And the Franco-Romanian  philosopher Emil Cioran, who said that, "Were it not for the music of Bach, God's whole  creation could be considered a mistake," described Bach's music as "a ladder of tears in which our  longings for God ascend." This is not computation.

[00:24:02]This is not abstraction. This is the very place  at which body and soul meet and take us on our journey up that ladder of tears towards God.  The philosopher Eugene Gendlin said, "We think more than we can say. We feel more than we can  think. We live more than we can feel. And there is much else besides." Perhaps the soul is what  we mean when we reflect on that much else besides.

[00:24:45]What is meant by the soul in all that has gone  before and indeed what is meant by the body is something that only experience of being human can  possibly help you understand. And that brings me to the question of what is meant by understanding  and its near neighbor intelligence. Though they're not quite the same, they have much in common.  Fatally for the Enlightenment Project and fatally for AI, neither of them can be simply  proceduralized so as to be inserted in another person. Indeed, intelligence could be seen as the  opposite of following procedures. Following rules is known as diligence. By contrast, intelligence  is always and only demonstrated in going beyond the rules. It is necessarily embodied, not  purely abstract. It deals with the implicit, the unspoken. What is more, the necessarily  unspoken as much as the explicit. The word intelligence comes from the Latin roots inter and  legere. That is to say, reading between or among.

[00:26:08]This can be understood in more than one sense.  It means reading between the lines, as we say, hearing what is not said, what is merely implied  as much as what is broadly stated. It means taking into account many possibilities at once, including  possibilities that appear to be incompatible without projecting any of them until a fuller  picture has come into being. Reading between and among intelligence is not just seeing connections  but relationships which are much more than mere connections. It sees Gestalten, that is to say,  wholes that cannot be decomposed into their parts without substantial loss. And importantly, it is  characterized by insight, whether in art, science, or mathematics. Insight is a faculty that once  again cannot be operationalized and refuses to be commanded at will. For example, there are  procedures for manipulating symbols. These are the principles of mathematics. And there is the  fabled scientific method which proceeds logically step by step towards an at least in theory  predictable conclusion. But as the stories of all the great discoveries in both mathematics  and science demonstrate, no amount of following laws and procedures produces insight. And it  is only in that moment of insight dependent on the right superior temporal sulcus and gyrus that  intelligence brings us to something entirely new which can then be grasped by the left hemisphere  and added to the heap of what we call information.

[00:28:09]George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most  influential contributors to the reigning modern synthesis in genetics and therefore  by definition as mainstream as they come, observes the scientific method quite ignores the  most difficult, most creative and most important elements of scientific endeavor. How does  one discern a problem or decide what kinds of questions are to be asked? How does one determine  what observations are relevant and especially what kind of hypothetical solutions are acceptable and  where do they come from? Perhaps the most cogent objection of all he says is that important basic  research has seldom really followed the scientific method as it is stated. In other words, you can't  even start on the scientific method without making assumptions using judgment and having insights.  Insights that are not part of the method and do not follow any kind of formal principles and  the method is in any case unlikely to produce important results. Science in practice is often  driven by hunches and initially somewhat vague impressions. For a start, science depends on good  hypothesis. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but it is essential to the nature of science  that it imaginatively selects its assumptions, which it discards only when they don't work.  But science could never get off the ground if untold numbers of fruitless hypotheses had to be  taken equally seriously and subjected to the same procedure so that they could be systematically  eliminated. It therefore requires the exercise of imagination from the outset which alone can supply  interesting and potentially fruitful hypotheses and eliminate intuitively unfruitful ones. While  respecting the data out of which they emerge, good hypotheses always go beyond the immediate  facts as some scientists are constantly harping on. I'm told that my work goes beyond the facts.  I'm rather pleased about that. I I sort of feel it would be rather odd if Galileo had stopped  it going frankly that planet's not in the place I thought it was going to be. Never mind. I  wonder what's for dinner. I'm off home. No, he saw what was implied and saw well beyond the  facts into a reconception of the cosmos. And as the biologist Peter Medawar wrote, "Scientists  should not be ashamed to admit, as many of them apparently are, that hypotheses appear in  their minds along uncharted byways of thought, that they are imaginative and inspirational in  character, that they are indeed adventures of the mind." Intelligence then can never work by rote.  It is creative and requires the judicious exercise of imagination. And then there is understanding  otherwise known as comprehension. Comprehension is not apprehension. It is taking the world  as a whole, not taking hold of the world.

[00:31:45]The idea that as we saw is embedded in the  Latin root interlegere is also appropriate enough embedded in the Germanic roots of our  word understanding. The element under in the word might be at first sight puzzling. But  the word under in Middle English still had the sense among preserved in modern German, where  one can say unter Freunden, to find oneself among friends. It therefore had within it the idea  of being situated among a range of ideas, experiences, memories, intimations, a field of  connections out of which meaning could arise.

[00:32:32]Once again, imagination needs  to guide our choice. There is no predetermined formula for how to  do this. And then there is wisdom.

[00:32:46]What can I say about that mysterious and  worryingly rare entity? Like all that truly matters, it has to be approached apophatically.  That is to say, by our being clear about what it is not. People sometimes say to me, you seem  to think that we as a society are lacking in wisdom. So tell us how can we develop more of it?  I fear they want me to say something like this.

[00:33:16]We should above all define our terms,  delineate our goals, determine achievable criteria that can be measured, perhaps  set up committees that meet once a month, and produce a report every six months on progress  achieved so far. In the light of that report, we then update our criteria and develop an algorithm  that will lead people closer to wisdom. But wisdom is of course the ultimate case of something for  which there are no rules which cannot be written down in a form that can be taken in by another  person or a machine and is beset with paradox as all the great truths are. I don't just say that.  Niels Bohr said that—the greatest of the modern physicists. It is a hard-won side effect of a  long, disciplined, and thoughtful life. No AI has a snowball's chance in hell of achieving it.  Traditions from the east are the most fruitful place to go if one was looking not for worldly  success but for wisdom. But to the western mind, their teachings can be frustrating. They do not  recommend actionable projects such as accumulating more and more information like AI or doing more  and more like busy executives, but cultivating not knowing and not doing. Certainly not setting  up committees governed by procedures and obsessed with statistics that are the proof of success. I  should clarify here that not knowing is not by any means the same as ignorance nor is non-doing the  same as idleness rather the opposite. The great German 20th century thinker Josef Pieper called  busyness the true idleness. He pointed out that having the discipline to make use of freedom so as  to think carefully and with due caution to be both scholarly and creative is what makes a culture  from the perspective of the neuroscience of the hemispheres. The literally less intelligent,  literally less perceptive, frankly delusional, quick and dirty left hemisphere has, for  perfectly good evolutionary reasons, developed so as to think it knows what it does not know  and to be ready to go do something on the basis of its mistaken beliefs. Meanwhile, the right  hemisphere seeing the big picture looking before and after is what the celebrated neuroscientist  V. S. Ramachandran calls the devil's advocate.

[00:36:18]The one that is always seeing the possibility of  something else that the busy hasty left hemisphere has simply overlooked. No, ignorance is what  comes before knowledge. Not knowing is what if we are lucky comes after. Similarly, non-doing is  an important preparation for wise action. You'll not find it as one of the courses of action  recommended by a machine. This is because we imagine that whatever happens in this world  originates from and is initiated by ourselves. And so we've trained machines to conform to this idea.  But we've forgotten that as D. H. Lawrence wrote, "We are transmitters. We are transmitters." And  in this simple phrase has compressed much wisdom.

[00:37:17]We need to get out of the limelight and stop  getting in the way of the wisdom that comes to and through us, not from and out of us. We  can't do anything to prevent death, but we can do much to prevent life by blocking its path or  crowding it out with our clever plans. We don't originate life but have the sacred responsibility  to transmit it and help it flourish. The gardener cannot make a plant. Can't even make it grow.  All he or she can do is tend to the plant and encourage it in a direction of its own making  or fail to do so. We are gardeners not gods.

[00:38:13]And we're gardeners of our souls. We're not  the source, but that which flows from it. I am a Daoist. Uh, by the way, entirely  compatible with being a Christian.

[00:38:28]I'm a Daoist and according to Daoism, it is wise  to discern the direction of the Dao and follow it, not attempt to obstruct it or divert it  where we think best. Our task is to be a vehicle for something beyond us, behind  us, above us, before us. How do we do that?

[00:38:56]Well, non-doing is what I would describe in  an intentional paradox as active passivity, an opening of our being towards what is, in which  we are attentive and ready to lend ourselves to a process not of our making. A relation to what is  ought to be a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.  For this we need receptivity to cultivate what George Steiner called audition.  "The stance or disposition," he wrote, "that we need to adopt according to Heidegger  is one of waiting on something rather than just waiting for it. Man is only a privileged listener  and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not as for Cartesian and positivist  rationalism one of grasping and pragmatic use.

[00:40:04]It is a relation of audition. We are trying to  listen to the voice of being." End of quote.

[00:40:16]This receptivity is vital in the true sense  of the word for without it there is no life.

[00:40:26]All that is is continually coming into being  through a process of calling and answering between what is in us and what is greater than us. Each  calling to the other. A relation of resonance, reverberation, response and responsibility in  which we co-author reality. We don't make it up.

[00:40:54]But neither is it there entirely as though  we didn't exist. Before there are things, there are relations. Relations come before relata.  The things that are related. Nothing is just out there inert and lifeless. It keeps coming into  being for us as it encounters our rapt attention.

[00:41:19]And the quality of that attention matters because  how we attend changes the nature of the world that comes into being. The only world we can know.  Here I would note just two of many distinctions between the cerebral hemispheres. The first is  this. What presence is to the right hemisphere is merely represented to the left. The verb  to presence is a translation of Heidegger's Anwesen and the implication is something not  really being present in some sort of passive sense but positively coming into being, or  a becoming. Representation on the other hand means something being present again when it  is actually no longer present. In other words, it is a lie. Whatever it is is no longer  coming into being for us but fixed, no longer imaginatively alive. It has neither  body nor soul, become nothing more than a concept.

[00:42:33]The relevance of this is that AI is the export  into the world outside ourselves of the modus operandi of the left hemisphere and it has  neither body nor soul but only concepts.

[00:42:52]The second hemisphere distinction I want to draw  attention to concerns the all-important question of value. The overriding value, arguably the  only value of the left hemisphere, the reason it evolved to be what it is, is that of utility,  power to control, manipulate, and utilize the world. In fact, one way of looking at it is as the  embodiment of the drive for power. It therefore conceives, makes, uses, and delights in tools. The  logical extension of this drive is the machine, a tool that can make other tools. And AI is a tool.  At any rate, it started out as one. But it is both a tool and the projection into the external  world of that drive towards limitless power.

[00:43:53]To be clear, when I say the embodiment of a drive,  I am indeed implying the existence of forces, attractors, teloi in the cosmos that  long antidate and transcend ourselves.

[00:44:11]"One definition of evil is that it reduces the  human to a passive machine." So said the great Hannah Arendt. This is where we're going in a new  frighteningly literal sense. Nothing according to the drive behind the machine should be impossible.  As Hannah Arendt put it, "a distinctive feature of radical evil is that it isn't done for humanly  understandable motives such as self-interest, but merely to reinforce totalitarian control and  the idea that everything is possible." This is the Luciferian power, the force that in its origin was  good. Lucifer was indeed chief of all the angels, the light-bearer. But through resentment of  anything superior to himself, he came to desire the destruction of all that is good and true and  beautiful. [snorts] This myth, which is the great theme of Milton's Paradise Lost, speaks to us  now more than ever. I believe there are forces at work that we do not fully comprehend. Some of  them driven by a lust for destruction for its own sake. I think we can see this happening around  us in the last few years more markedly than ever before. In the epistle to the Ephesians, we find  the words, "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,  against the rulers of the darkness of this world."

[00:46:01]I'm not a great fan of St. Paul, but I do think  that he was very wise when he said those words.

[00:46:11]At the beginning of part three of "The Matter  with Things", I recount a myth of creation from the Onondaga people. The Onondaga belong to the  Iroquois nation. It tells of a benign creator God who as the light fades in the universe needs to  bring into being for the sake of the whole cosmos, the earth and all its creatures. But he has  a resentful younger brother of a jealous disposition whose attempts to create produce  only things that are ugly, misshapen, barren.

[00:46:48]This brother is consumed with envy of the  beautiful and fruitful creatures that his brother has made and does his best to destroy  them. Effectively, he will not accept anything that he himself has not made. The whole story  would be worth recounting if there were time.

[00:47:10]It has many levels and is rich in its insights  into the nature and the relation of good and evil.

[00:47:17]The point I must confine myself to drawing  attention to today is the refusal of all that has not been made by ourselves and a sort of rebellion  against all that is natural and good in the human condition. Hannah Arendt wrote, "For some time  now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed towards making life also artificial,  towards cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature." And  that was some 70 years ago. The resentment of nature, the attempt at every turn to bring her  down and destroy her is the consummate evil of our age. The desire to destroy everything we have not  made ourselves. I was going to say with our own hands, but that too sounds now too natural. It's  no longer good enough that we made with our hands, but at last only with our machines. And here's the  thing. When harm comes to us, the destruction is always without exception presented as something  benign, a great step forward, something that is offered to us as a boon. So it is that we welcome  the Trojan horse into our midst. Tyranny is always presented as a power for you, not the power  that will be used over and against you. As the mechanistic systems get more powerful, we become  situated more and more as passive and childlike.

[00:49:11]And we not only allow them to infantilize us,  but we do all we can to encourage them. This is foolish in the extreme. We must push back. We're  not as fragile and impotent as we're made out to be. This is a culture in which vulnerability and  victimhood bring status, but we do people a great disservice when we lead them to believe that  they're endlessly vulnerable. We all have an extraordinary capacity for resourcefulness and  resilience if we allow ourselves to recognize it and embrace it with courage. Yuval Noah  Harari—I felt a shiver go down my spine—who calls us hackable animals and recommends that we  get used to it, recently told the WEF in Davos in a meeting, a summit in January, artificial  intelligence is the new master of words. It will take over language, law, and power. Most of the  world of the mind will originate in a machine. AI has coined a new word for humans, the watchers.  Note that, the watchers. And he concludes AI machines can lie better than humans. You bet.  So of course, what could possibly go wrong?

[00:50:40]What I believe we have created in AI is not  something that has intelligence. Not something that can understand but something that lays  itself open to be used by intelligences that we cannot perhaps understand and whose aim is power.  Power to control but also to destroy all that they themselves have not created. This is a story to be  found deeply enshrined in ancient myths from all around the world because it's not dependent on the  adventitious elaborations of our own technological culture but reflects the deep structure of the  world whether we recognize it or not. You might well think that the fact that the machine cannot  suffer or die is a strength, but it is not. The psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, many  of whose family died in the Nazi death camps and who narrowly escaped from them with his own life,  had deep wisdom. He reflected that suffering is a great teacher and more than that even one of the  ways in which a life is fulfilled. Not something pridefully to be sought out but something to  be accepted at last as a gift. He saw too that resistance overcome brings meaning that could come  by no other conceivable route. In other words, there is a paradox at the heart of the cosmos.  But when did anyone wise imagine that the truth was straightforward, single and simple? Oh yes,  the philosophers of the enlightenment forgot about that. The truth, the truth is bound up with  paradox. Of this I am certain. And no machine can ever begin to understand this. Bounds and bonds  speak of limitation. Bounds and bonds. But it is through our bonds paradoxically that we are made  free. The bonds we hold to one another, the bonds we acknowledge with nature, and the sacred bonds  that assure us of our place in a cosmos that is, strange to say, our home. So matter is not  everything, but let the iron enter into our souls.

[00:53:36][applause] [music]