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Home » Transcript: The End of the World? John Lennox on AI and the Book of Revelation

Transcript: The End of the World? John Lennox on AI and the Book of Revelation

Read the full transcript of mathematician Dr. John Lennox’s interview on Sean McDowell Show on “The End of the World? AI and the Book of Revelation”, September 19, 2025.

Introduction to AI Concerns

SEAN MCDOWELL: How concerned should we be about the growth of artificial intelligence? What can the Bible, and in particular the book of Revelation contribute regarding our age of intelligent machines? Dr. John Lennox is back to discuss his new fascinating book, “God, AI and the End of History.” Dr. Lennox, thanks for coming back.

DR. JOHN LENNOX: My pleasure.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Let’s jump right in. At the beginning of your book, you talk about a number of concerns people have about artificial intelligence, such as ethical considerations being outpaced by technology, the idea that AI robots will take over the world. What concerns you most about the growth of AI and why?

The Real Dangers of Current AI Technology

DR. JOHN LENNOX: There are several things that concern me about the growth of AI, and they cover quite a wide range. Firstly, we’re talking about the AI that actually is working. As most of the people watching us will know, there are two kinds of AI. There’s the AI systems that do one and only one thing that normally requires human intelligence. So it’s called artificial intelligence. It’s not real intelligence.

And there are thousands, if not millions now of different AI systems, some of them very beneficial, for example, being used to develop drugs and solve complex problems in logistics and so on. But also many of these are dealing with the area of pattern and vision recognition. And so they can be useful to police, to find out criminals in a crowd by facial recognition. But it’s well known that in parts of our world, particularly in Xinjiang and China, the very same systems are being used to repress people.

And that’s one of the big issues. That is the rapidly increasing intrusive surveillance that this very sophisticated technology enables. In a sense, it’s not merely facial recognition anymore. They can recognize you by your gait, in other words, from the back. And you hear stories about factories where if you’re not smiling coming in, the door will not unlock because the thing is trained on your face to see if you are like that. And in some schools, it’s being used to see if children are bored or if they’re recalcitrant or if they’re annoyed or if they’re happy. So we’re entering a new regime of intrusive surveillance that is being used by an increasing number of governments. So that’s one side of it.

Another side of it that’s cropped up recently is AI, particularly ChatGPT. And these bots that become companions of people, and what they often do is simply reflect the inner goings on in the minds of the people who are consulting them. And that’s all very well if you’re just asking for information, but folks are treating these bots almost like interaction with individuals and we’re now hearing about AI induced psychosis because those interactions start messing up with the brain. If everything you say is reinforced by an AI, it will reinforce your delusions. And so it has been recognized by the medical profession that this is a very serious threat to human stability. So that’s another one.

And of course there’s the ever present pornography which is destroying so many people’s lives and so easily accessible and becoming more sophisticated all of the time. And you could go on and on and you’d still only be talking about the stuff that’s actually working. You wouldn’t be talking about the science fiction side of it, as I call it, where we’re talking about robots overtaking the world or becoming super intelligent. We can talk about those if you want, but a lot of that is pie in the sky, really. It’s fictional. It’s not going to happen. It may, we may approach something like that, but we’re not going to get there for very good reasons. So it is from that point of view, scary.

Economic and Social Disruption

The final one I would mention is the one that’s often uppermost on people’s minds. This technology is robbing many people of their jobs. And I heard of one, I think it was a trading floor where they used to have 850 people. Those people have been replaced by artificial intelligence plus two humans. And that’s it. And the problem there is that it’s all very well for folks to say you can reskill and you can become an expert in AI, but that is really only true in the west where we’ve got the educational infrastructure to upskill people into these areas.

In many places like Africa, where I’ve been, they just don’t. And what they fear is a hugely increased gulf between the rich and the poor. So the world is changing fundamentally through AI systems. And of course, perhaps a final thing which is scary is the whole business of fake news and also the ability to take a very brief video and speech of you or me and make us say anything that the controllers want us to say. And that could lead to the greatest deception that the world has ever seen.

Now if you step back from that, one of the things that strikes me, and it’s relevant to your comment on the Bible, the book of Revelation. The thing that Jesus warned about most in the future was deception. And that’s no accident. We’re now capable of bringing deception to billions on a grand scale. That’s very hard to detect. So the Bible’s spot on, that deception is going to be a huge issue.

The Doomsday Clock and AI Threats

SEAN MCDOWELL: You cited something in Introduction to Your book that I hadn’t heard of before that in 1945, scientists such as Einstein and Oppenheimer created a doomsday clock about how some man made catastrophe result in the end of the world.