Computers

On today’s ID the Future, Tom Gilson, a writer and editor for The Stream, shares his experiences in high school biology. Important mysteries (i.e., major problems) with evolutionary theory were hurried past and papered over, and yet his biology teacher could take an entire class period to tell Charles Darwin’s life story, and then repeat the same class, virtually verbatim, five more times that same semester. Tune in to hear how the class put Tom Gilson off of biology, but how he now finds the subject fascinating, thanks to the work of intelligent design researchers and the larger community of life scientists. Gilson’s commentary is taken from, and builds on, a recent essay of his, available at Evolution News.

On this episode of ID the Future from the vault, Rob Crowther continues his conversation with J. Scott Turner, biologist at the State University of New York (SUNY), visiting scholar at Cambridge University, and author of the new book Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. Turner critiques evolutionary biology’s bias toward mechanistic and gene-centric thinking, and contemporary biology’s failure to come to grips with the evidence of purpose and intentionality at many levels of biology. Viewing the brain as a computer, for example, obscures many things about the brain and the mind that exceed computers, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

On this episode of ID the Future, philosopher Jay Richards continues his conversation with host and historian of science Mike Keas about Henry Kissinger’s recent Atlantic article on “The End of the Enlightenment.” In the piece, Kissinger sounds an alarm over artificial intelligence, and raises questions about machine ethics and the possibility that humans may learn we’re not so special after all. Richards, author of the new book The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work In an Age of Smart Machines, pushes back, explaining how we can continue to use artificial intelligence to our advantage, prudently but without fear of the robot apocalypse or of computers becoming conscious and free. No, Richards argues, those qualities cannot be programmed. They are, and will remain, the human advantage.

On this episode of ID the Future, Jay Richards talks with host Mike Keas about a recent Atlantic article from former National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger on “How the Enlightenment Ends” with the rise of artificial intelligence. Richards, whose forthcoming book The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work In an Age of Smart Machines, covers this territory and more, explains that AI is about statistical processing, not budding consciousness; and the ethical concerns it raises are both important yet in some ways not so new.