Description
“Let us therefore live with the myriad cameras and tracers on our lives in such a way that even the monitors can see that we have been with Jesus.” The sentence sits near the close of John Lennox’s expanded 2084, several hundred pages after he has explained what cameras of that kind are for in Xinjiang, where by the figures he cites between 800,000 and two million Uyghurs have been detained in camps the Chinese state calls vocational centres. Lennox is not being glib. He means the counsel pastorally, and for a believer already living inside such a system it may be the only counsel available. But the distance between the scale of the harm he documents and the scale of the response he recommends is the most interesting thing in this book, and the one thing he never turns round to look at.
The design is four parts. Lennox, an Oxford mathematician who sat in Maurice Wilkes’s Cambridge lectures in 1962, gives three of them to the technology and its discontents: Turing, neural networks, the GPT models, automation and job loss, autonomous weapons, surveillance capitalism and what he names surveillance communism, virtual reality, transhumanism, and a sustained case that simulated intelligence is not intelligence at all. The fourth turns to Genesis, the Gospels, Daniel and Revelation to ask what a human being is worth. That the book ends in eschatology is no ambush; the preface says so plainly and the title telegraphs the plan.
What is less obvious is what the eschatology does to the reporting that precedes it.
By chapter 16 Lennox is reading Revelation 13 as a forecast with hardware in it. The second beast animates an image of the first, an image that speaks and kills those who will not bow. Rather than take this as symbol, he proposes it may describe something close to an AI-powered humanoid robot, then draws the connection tight: “This image is nothing less than an artificial intelligence elevated to be an artificial god, for which the acronym AGI – G for God – would fit very well.” The pun is doing real work. It is also, on the book’s own terms, a peculiar thing to say. An entire chapter earlier, Lennox has gone through Searle, Penrose, McGilchrist and Egnor to establish that machines cannot think, that the brain is not a computer, that materialism cannot account for mind. So the world’s final tyrant turns out to be a machine doing what the book insists machines cannot do. Lennox has an exit: the image is given breath, permitted, backed from outside. The exit works. Notice its cost. If the terminal AGI is not a technological achievement at all, the technical apparatus of the first eleven chapters becomes scenery rather than cause.
That cost compounds. Lennox states without hedging that the kingdom of God in any outward sense arrives with the return of Christ, and not through Christian teaching gradually reshaping governments and their structures. The trajectory, then, is fixed. World government, the Monster, the mark. If that is settled, regulation of facial recognition and treaties on autonomous weapons are not merely difficult; they are pressing against a direction of travel already underwritten by prophecy. The practical counsel of the final chapter follows suit. Talk about AI with your friends at church, in the workplace, in clubs. Parents, build relationships strong enough that your children will tell you what they meet online. Ministers, preach the second coming more than has lately been the custom. Prioritise people over gadgets. Sound advice, every word of it, and a set of personal and congregational adjustments offered in answer to a diagnosis that has been structural, geopolitical and economic for most of the book.
He anticipates the charge and refuses it. “Fear of AGI should not prevent believers from contributing to the positive aspects of narrow AI to the benefit of all.” His model is Daniel, who did not retreat to the desert but administered Babylon and Medo-Persia with skill. He urges young scientists into AI research precisely so that believers are qualified to sit at the ethics table, and holds up Rosalind Picard’s affective computing at MIT as the pattern. None of that is quietism, and I sat with it a while before working out what still snagged, which is this: serving Babylon competently is a posture available to a person, and it is not a politics. The Christian manifesto Lennox reproduces affirms AI’s legitimate use in policing, intelligence and surveillance — four chapters after the Xinjiang material. Nobody is asked to work out how those two passages sit together.
The chapters on China remain the strongest pages here, and the reason may be that the argument in them does not need Revelation to land. A social credit system that scores citizens for ideological compliance reads as a violation on secular and biblical grounds alike; the reporting carries itself. Elsewhere the survey thins. Dan Brown’s Origin gets a whole chapter as the stand-in for scientific atheism, an odd deputy when the shelves hold philosophers who make the case properly. Harari is quoted so often he stops being an interlocutor and becomes a foil.
Late in the first chapter Lennox mentions that in 1962 he asked his mathematics tutor about pursuing computing and was told there was no future in it. He took the advice, and by his own account missed the start of a revolution. Sixty years on he writes about 2084 with considerable assurance about where the technology and the world are going. The two moments never meet on the page.
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