[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] A computer scientist, an exoplanetary physicist, and a theologian.
Walk into the Sheldonian Theatre one evening.
No, this is not the opening line of a joke, but it is the premise of this evening's event on the topic of life.
So a very warm welcome to this, our second Sheldonian series event, following on from the launch last term.
It's wonderful to have students, staff, and alumni all blended here together in a lovely melting pot of the Sheldonian Theatre,
including quite a few of you who are returners from last term.
This series, as you know, is a new addition to our calendar.
It reflects our commitment to putting inclusive and respectful inquiry,
as well as diversity of thought through free speech at the heart of our life here in the Collegiate University.
And each term, we are tackling one topic, seeking to show the different ways that we can approach the big issues and questions of the day.
The fact that so many of you are here again reflects that there is a thirst for such an event, and so thank you for your company.
Learning at its best happens when you approach your topic with humility and open mind and heart, and with a spirit of exploration and examination.
That is what we strive to deliver here at Oxford and what we wish to showcase through our Sheldonian series.
Last term, we explored the topic of democracy with a panel discussion with experts drawn from the fields of political science and journalism.
This term, we're exploring life in all its many forms.
How on earth or in space for that matter, can we even begin to contemplate such a topic?
Well, one of the many strengths we have at Oxford is our breadth and how we work across disciplines and boundaries.
It is something that comes naturally to us in our colleges.
Students from the humanities and social sciences come together with students from the natural sciences and medicine.
And in our research, too, so much that is distinctive about what we bring carries the mark of the interdisciplinary.
So whether it's challenges such as climate change or pandemic prevention, or opportunities such as artificial intelligence,
we know that solutions will emerge from the connections that we make between ideas, findings and approaches.
So it is then that we present to you tonight a number of perspectives on life.
You will hear from three exceptional scholars from our community, each bringing different disciplines and different disciplinary expertise,
exploring questions including the origins of cosmic life, the future of artificial life and intelligence, and what it means to live well.
Here's how the evening is going to proceed. First up is Professor Jayne Birky.
Professor Birkby received her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge,
and has previously held a postdoctoral scholarship at Leiden University and NASA's Sagan Fellowship at Harvard University,
and an Assistant Professorship at the University of Amsterdam.
She is an ERC starting Grant Laureate, was awarded the 2021 Philip Leverhulme Prize in Physics
and was a finalist in the 2024 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists in the UK.
Professor Birkby uses the world's largest telescopes and highest resolution
instruments to study the atmospheres of other worlds outside our solar system.
She has a keen interest in connecting these exoplanet studies with chemistry, geology and biology, and the pursuit of the answer to are we alone?
She will then be followed by Reverend Canon Professor Luke Breherton,
who is the newly minted Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford and director of the MacDonald centre for theology,
Ethics and Public Life. Prior to that, he was the Robert E Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology at Duke University,
and before joining Duke in 2012, he taught at King's College London.
His most recent book is A Primer in Christian Ethics Christ and the Struggle to Live Well.
Alongside his scholarly work, he writes in the media on topics related to religion and politics,
and is actively involved in forms of grassroots democratic politics, both in the UK and the US.
And then we will conclude with Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt.
Nigel is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of web science.
He is principal of Jesus College and professor of Computing Science here at the University of Oxford.
He is chairman of the Open Data Institute, which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
He was knighted in 2013 for services to science and engineering.
He is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.
Jaye, Luke and Nigel will all speak one after the other, each for about ten minutes at the conclusion of Nigel's presentation.
We will then begin the Q&A session and open to questions from the room and to those that were pre-submitted at registration.
So now it's over to our speakers, and I invite Jayne to come up and deliver her presentation.
Thank you.
Are we alone? Is us and its life unique?
This is a simple question, but it has a profound answer.
If life began on earth, how and where did it happen?
What was the environment and the conditions that allowed it to evolve into the complex,
advanced lifeforms that we are today and can it exist on other planets?
As an astronomer, my job is to look for signs of life on other planets.
Today, I want to tell you about where we might look for signs of life, how we might do it, and how close we are to being able to do that.
We know of one planet that has life. The Earth.
That's home. That's us. And so far, it's the only home that we have known.
We are perfectly adapted to live and survive in the conditions of modern day Earth.
But the Earth was not always like it is today.
Its entire surface and atmosphere have evolved over time.
So when did life begin, in our fossil records
We can look back to about 3.5 billion years ago.
Tere is evidence, 3.5 billion years ago, of microbial mats in the fossil record found in Western Australia.
There is even some evidence that life may have begun.
4 billion years ago on Earth. And the Earth itself, we think, formed at the same time as the sun.
4.5 billion years ago. So life on Earth, in some form or another has been around for a long time.
So what does it need? We think life to begin starts with chemistry.
It needs an energy source.
It needs an environment with the right temperature and pressure that can allow it to drive the chemical reactions that are prebiotic chemistry.
Then take inanimate objects, inanimate atoms,
through a complex series of reactions that eventually become so complex that they become what we recognise as life.
If we think life started around the same time as the Earth formed, and we know the kind of place that it needs to form,
the question then comes, do we have the material that we need to make life?
Life uses things like carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, phosphorus and sulphur.
But these atoms need to develop into more complex molecules.
Now, it may be that the sites for life to do that exist on Earth.
However, we know that the leftover debris from planet formation.
Such as asteroids and comets may have delivered that material to us.
We think that some of the water on Earth came from comets.
The recent OSIRIS-REx mission actually went to an asteroid, the asteroid Bennu, and grabbed a sample, a pristine sample of asteroid material in it.
Not only did they find 14 of the 20 amino acids that we use in life,
all life on Earth uses these amino acids, and they also found all five bases of the DNA structure.
So in DNA, the rungs of the ladder that are in the helix, that material, all five of those bases have been found on this asteroid.
So it's possible that material was delivered to us and didn't necessarily have to start those reactions on the Earth.
The other striking thing about the Earth that does make it unique in our solar system
is that it was the only rocky planet with a liquid water ocean on its surface.
We know of some icy moons where there are liquid water oceans below, but this is the only one where we have it on the surface.
We think water is necessary for Earth like life, because it is the solvent that allows those chemical reactions to proceed.
Fortunately, it also turns out that water is one of the most common molecules in the universe.
So we have an idea of when life formed. Where is might have formed the conditions and the material that it needed.
So where can we look for life elsewhere? We can look within our own solar system.
We have two other rocky planets very nearby.
We have Venus and we have Mars. We see evidence on Mars in its past that it had surface water.
There are regions that we can see now that look like they've been carved out by flowing rivers.
So the potential for life potentially to have existed on Mars in the past and perhaps even today, it might be buried under the surface.
So we have we are sending rovers to Mars.
They are digging, uh, they are even picking up samples and leaving them for us to go and collect later for the Mars sample return mission,
to actually analyse what we dig down into the surface.
We're sending missions to parachute through Venus,
and we're sending other missions to fly through the geysers that are spouted out from the icy moons around Jupiter and Saturn.
But if we want to look for Earth twins, then we need to look at planets around other stars.
We need to understand how common are other Earths.
In the process of doing this, we have found that every star has at least one planet, and for Earth like planets,
that their temperature is such that they are able to have a liquid water ocean on the surface.
So this depends on how far they are from their star.
And for some, like stars, it's about 1 in 4.
For smaller stars of about a 10th of the size of the sun, about 1% of its luminosity.
Um, it's more like 50%. So if there are billions of stars in our galaxy and there are billions of galaxies in the observable universe, the odds,
the numbers seem to be in our favour, that we would at least find us like twins the same mass, size, and temperature as our own Earth.
But the process for life existing on Earth went through many different events that it's difficult to know whether that is common.
One of these, for example, is the collision in our early formation that formed the moon.
This collision would have stripped the early Earth of any of its atmosphere, any of its surface activity, and reset the planet.
It would have sterilised the entire planet after that impact.
Where we formed the moon. We don't yet know how common moons are around other planets.
This is still something that we need to find out. But in looking at exoplanets, we found an extraordinary array of systems.
We found star systems with multiple suns. If you like Star Wars, you may have imagined these yourselves.
We found planets that are very icy, and even planets that are so close to their host star, they're so hot that their entire surface is molten lava.
And they have a permanent dayside and a permanent nightside. They don't get the diurnal, diurnal rhythms that we have here on Earth.
This is an artist's impression of a system called Trappist one, and it has seven Earth sized planets.
It is a space laboratory to go and study what happens if you take the Earth and you slowly move it away from a heat source,
and you can see what happens. These are all born around the same time.
You can see how they evolved and the different scenarios that have appeared, um, on those planets.
At the same time, our very nearest exoplanet neighbour, the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri,
the planet Proxima Centauri b, orbits in what we call the habitable zone.
So in this nice region where we can have liquid water on the surface where the temperature is just right.
This is where we will be looking for life on exoplanets, planets around other stars.
But these stars are very small and they're very active.
They have lots of flares. Now, Earth protects itself from flares using its magnetic field.
If you've ever seen the northern lights, that's our magnetic field.
Protecting us from all the harmful radiation and particles from the sun when it flares these small stars.
We don't know if the planets around them have magnetic fields. So it might be that life on those planets have to evolve away to protect itself.
We know that Earth like life, can survive very extreme conditions.
This is a tardigrade that really, really tiny.
And they're everywhere. But these guys have survived the vacuum of space, and they can survive temperatures up to 150 degrees.
They're extremely robust, and it's because they can put themself into stasis so they can survive extreme conditions.
But we also have other, uh, lifeforms on Earth called extremophiles, and they actually thrive in extreme conditions.
They can survive in extremely acidic or alkaline conditions.
Um, they can exist down in the deep vents, uh, deep in the ocean,
with a sort of thermal heat coming out, which potentially is one of the sites for life.
Um, so when we go to look for life on other planets, we have to be very open minded about what that might look like.
But an exoplanet, the only thing we can see is its outer skin, its atmosphere.
Now life changes. Atmospheres on Earth.
Oxygen in our atmosphere is here because of photosynthesis and respiration from, uh, animals like us.
Um, if we were to all disappear, if all life disappears, then the oxygen in a few tens of thousand years combines with methane, and it disappears.
So that oxygen is a signature of disequilibrium.
It's a sign that something is constantly replenishing it.
And it's on Earth. It is not a geological process that can do this.
It has to be life.
So if we can find those signatures, oxygen, methane, biosignatures on other planets, then perhaps this is a strong indication of life.
Same for technological signatures. CFCs in old refrigerators.
They are gases that hang around in our atmosphere. If we can see their signature, then we can say that there's potentially advanced civilisation.
How do we do this? We do this using spectroscopy. We take the light from the planet, and we split it into all the colours of the rainbow.
And we look for the missing colours. These missing colours tell us very precisely what molecules are in that atmosphere.
Oxygen has a very specific pattern of lines that no other molecule in the universe can replicate.
So if we see that specific pattern has to be oxygen, potentially that is a signature of life.
So to do this we are building the Extremely Large Telescope.
Its mirror is 39m across. That is twice the size of this building.
It is enormous. It's being built in Chile, in the Atacama Desert, and it will be ready in 2029.
This enormous light bucket will enable us to actually look at the light from these planets.
And so if life is common and nearby, then by the end of this decade, it is quite possible that we will have found it.
Thank you. Okay.
So I arrived in Oxford less than a month ago.
I'm still slightly bewildered and unpacking boxes,
and I'm in that slightly strange fugal state where you feel you've walked through the back
of a wardrobe and entered a weird land where you have to ask yourself questions like,
why should I wear a gown? Or should I wear a gown to this meeting?
And why is a working knowledge of the liturgical calendar and Latin necessary to know when anything is actually happening or going on?
Um, but I would say, given my job, I was very, very pleased when I went for my induction at my department and saw this question,
uh, emblazoned on the hoarding outside the new Schwarzman Building.
And I was even happier when I saw the arrow pointed directly to the entrance of the theology and Religion department, which I took to be a sign.
Um, but joking aside, this question of what does it mean to be human?
I think it's the most important and fundamental question any of us could ask about life in this life.
And this question is central to all ancient and philosophical traditions around the world.
And they try to answer this question through wrestling with a further question, namely, what is what does it mean to live human life?
Well, what does a flourishing life consist of?
And I don't think we can begin to fathom any answers to these questions without asking further questions about the meaning,
purpose, and character of what it means to be human.
Now, any account of what it means to be human must address and ask inevitably about the material conditions of human flourishing.
And today this takes addressing questions about biology, physics, natural sciences, and the kind of things Jayne addresses.
Some philosophical traditions contend that all one needs to know,
in order to answer the question of what it means to be human, is what science tells us.
They tend to reduce living well and the meaning and purpose of human life to its material basis.
One example, famously, is Karl Marx, who quipped that humans are what they eat,
by which he meant that human life and consciousness is wholly determined by its material conditions.
By contrast, other philosophical and religious traditions hold that there's more to life than what we can touch, see, taste, and smell.
Or, to use the words of Jesus. Humans are more cannot live by bread alone.
And it's this insight that I think sets the stage for why religion, philosophy, and the humanities are so important.
They seek answers, or at least they should seek answers to the meaning and purpose of life and the
question of what should be the quality and character of relations between humans.
If life is to be lived well at this point,
I think it's helpful to introduce a distinction made by the early 20th century French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel,
and he distinguishes between a mystery and a problem.
A problem is something you can stand over and solve, such as how to make a computer or solve a complex equation.
Whereas a mystery is something we as humans are situated within that is greater than us, that we can never solve or come to the end of.
The origins of the universe, the meaning of life, uh, how to live a good life are just such mysteries.
Now that doesn't make a mystery. Spooky or irrational.
We can have ever deeper, ever deeper understanding of mysteries and more and more insightful things to say about such questions.
But we never resolve or solve mysteries.
The quest for answers is always before us.
So science is vital for understanding the material conditions of life,
but I don't think it can address questions about the meaning and purpose of life, or how to live well with others.
These are mysteries that require us to grow in wisdom.
If we fail, though, to put questions about the meaning of life and its purposes at the heart of every human institution and practice,
I think we quickly become driven by materialistic goals, seeking power over other others to obtain material things.
I think this is true of science and technology as it is of business and academia.
It's as if science and technological endeavours are not situated within a broader account of moral purposes and the ends of a human life,
then science and technology are easily corrupted.
They collapse into manipulating and instrumentalising human lives and life itself, for the sake of the power and enrichment of the few.
As an aside, I would go as far as to say that the enterprise of science, at least in the university, needs relocating within the.
Mystery side of things if it is not to be wholly instrumentalized or commodified when so relocated.
Science can recover itself as a mode of contemplation, discovery and form of deep play undertaken for its own sake.
This is perhaps points to the true meaning and purpose of science, but that is a debate for another day, perhaps in other Sheldonian lectures.
Now growing in wisdom about how to address the questions about the meaning and purpose of life is a struggle.
Again, this is a key insight of all ancient philosophical and religious traditions around the world.
We are easily distracted or corrupted, and it is hard work to try and address these questions wisely.
Part of the struggle is personal, whether through meditation, therapy, ritual processes, prayer, diligent study, physical training.
We must grow in wisdom and self-awareness if we are to know how to relate well to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us.
But it is also a collective struggle. Humans are what anthropologists call ultra social animals.
Are not individual atoms bouncing against each other. We are mutually vulnerable, interdependent creatures.
We cannot survive without others. And to thrive depends on being embedded in some kind of shared or common life.
Our individual flourishing, then, is symbiotic with the flourishing of a wider ecology of human and non-human relations.
Each of us comes to be as a human through the quality and character of our relations with others, including non-human others.
So our shared life is the condition for the possibility of each individual to have a good life.
If there is no decent and affordable housing, if there are no well-paying jobs,
if there is no safe place for the kids to play, then each individual life is diminished.
No human is an island and all flourishing is mutual.
I came across the old Labour Party slogan from the early 20th century which summarises this wonderfully.
Fellowship is life, or, as the Bible puts it. Love your neighbour as yourself.
But as many of you know first hand and to state the obvious, people don't love their enemies.
Societies are not just and generous. They are mostly structured to so as to benefit the few or those with the most money.
So there must be a collective struggle to ensure a decent quality of life can be had by all.
Central to our collective struggle and to any account of living well, is asking difficult questions about what needs to change.
If everyone is to have a decent quality of life.
Asking hard questions about what needs to change is based on the realisation that my life or the life of others is not all that it could be.
To have a just and generous form of common life in which all can thrive, means we have to face, head on the need for change.
So through collective struggle and asking difficult questions about our way of life,
we come to self-awareness and can begin to overcome the ways material and social conditions are set up
to alienate or exploit us or those around us through personal and shared struggle for a better life.
We ourselves become better able to live this life well with others.
Part of our personal and collective struggle is to discern and grow in wisdom about which claims concerning the human condition are true.
We must do this in a world where there are radically different visions of the meaning and purpose of life.
Whether it is Hinduism, Islam, stoicism, Marxism, liberalism, Christianity, whatever.
Each gives different answers to the question of what it means to live well.
Learning how to navigate and negotiate this kind of plurality is itself part of learning how to live a good life.
But at this very point, we meet a severe and present danger.
There are four options of what to do when meeting someone who I disagree with,
or whose way of life I find threatening or strange eventualities that are inevitable in any form of society beyond the immediate family.
When we meet a stranger, we can do one of four things I can kill them.
I can create a system to dominate them so I don't have to listen to them or talk to them.
I can make life so difficult that I caused them to flee, or I can do politics.
That is to say, I can form norm and sustain and create some kind of common life amid asymmetries of power.
Competing visions about what life really means or what it's for,
and my own feelings of fear and aversion to others without killing, coercing, or causing others to flee.
Human history and the contemporary context are full of examples of the first three options.
Politics. Is the other option. Indeed, politics is essential to live, let alone live.
Well, as I said already, humans cannot survive, let alone thrive, without others, and some kind of common life must be cultivated.
If human life is to go on, politics is the name for generating this common life.
In Aristotle's succinct formulation. To be human is to be a political animal.
The quality and character of political relationships, as well as the goods pursued through politics, determine whether or not humans live well.
And so politics is not a failure of the good or moral life.
It's constitutive of living life well.
The failure to do politics leads to killing, coercing, coercing, coercing, and causing others to flee.
And that is not just immoral, it is evil.
A university should be a place where you can learn to discern between conflicting claims to truth and how to navigate conflict politically.
That is to say, through peaceful means.
That is debate and argument rather than force and violence to work out right from wrong, good from evil, truth from lies.
And that is what I take the point of this series of talks instituted by the Vice Chancellor to be tragically, too often,
universities such as this August institution are so focussed on the means of life they never ask about the meaning of life,
let alone teach students how to pursue this question well.
And that is a dereliction of duty, particularly as we live in a moment when basic questions are being asked about what it means to be human.
As we will hear in a moment. Technological advances in areas like genetic engineering and human machine integration.
And AI raise a profound questions about the identity and purpose of human life.
Similarly, as we have heard, growing ecological awareness,
reflection on the origins of life and life on other planets are reshaping the view about the interconnectedness of all of life.
Some foresee a future of enhanced or even post human beings, while others view humanity as merely a thread within a larger web of life.
It is vital we are able to address these questions well and seek moral, not simply technical, answers.
Even as we recognise the contested and contingent nature of our answers.
Politics is the means through which to do this,
the means through which we move from the world as it is a world in which many people are not able to live well,
where science and technology are often instrumentalized for immoral or evil purposes,
and where injustice and discrimination prevail to a world as it should be, one in which we and others can live well.
My challenge to you tonight is to pursue knowledge about life, which is a good and beautiful thing to do for its own sake,
but also to pursue wisdom in how to live well through forms of personal and collective struggle for a more just and generous common life.
Your life and the life of others depends on it. Thank you.
Uh, so, uh, following on from Jayne and Luke, I'd like to share some thoughts on life from a perspective of having researched AI for over four decades.
In thinking about my own contribution,
I was reminded of Darwin's concluding paragraph at the end of one of the most important books ever written, Origin of Species.
He wrote, there's a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one,
and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.
It is an arresting, powerful, beautifully crafted piece of prose.
I used it, um, as part of a title for a paper I wrote in the spring of 2022 from So Simple a beginning species of artificial intelligence.
The paper reviewed the history emergence. And evolution of different AI methods and techniques.
It included the large language models, or LLMs, at the heart of much current excitement around AI.
The paper describes an ecosystem of different types of AI, each occupying a niche to which it is particularly suited.
Developments in modern AI are often presented as evolutionary trees.
This one starts with a method called word to vec, although it too had earlier ancestors going back to the 1980s.
There are many other trees that lead to other types of AI,
but word to vec is an important ancestor because in 2013, Micallef and his colleagues turned words into vectors.
This is a profound representation of the world in this approach.
Words aren't dictionary entries in a lexicon. Each word is represented as a series of ones and zeros in what is a high dimensional space.
This is achieved by training the program on large amounts of language.
The meaning of a word is determined by the words that surround it.
Words that are similar in meaning are close together in this high dimensional space called an embedding space.
Similar words share similar vectors. Many species of AI system proliferated using embeddings.
We can see in our tree the earliest GPT models we can see.
Models from Google. We can see models from Meta Lamas models.
Uh. Uh. Open source. Which means that you can test, adapt, change and modify it.
In fact, the Lama models gave rise to a whole proliferation of different models, many of them in Chinese.
Interestingly, because the open weights were available to be adapted and changed,
and I hadn't even mentioned Deep Seek in this little tree of life, the company founded in 2023, which is sending reverberations through the world of AI
Most language models are possible because of vast data and prodigious compute.
It's difficult to imagine the amount of data these systems have been trained on. Most of the available internet.
Public internet has been used and not always respecting the moral rights of authors who produced it.
From Shakespeare to song lyrics, from Mumsnet to Wikipedia, social media to the New York Times,
from computer programs to scientific articles, content in a multitude of languages.
The data is processed and turned into patterns of embeddings or vectors,
and wider representations of context that express at global scale the likelihood of one token preceding another,
one token following another, but hundreds thousands of words of context.
Our current generation of AI's, when given a prompt or asked a question,
can generate coherent conversations much else besides all of which demands huge compute power.
This visualisation is one way to understand the increase in compute power.
It shows the number of transistors on a computer chip by the year of introduction.
This straight line. Represents a true exponential change in our world.
A doubling and re doubling of compute power every two years.
In 50 years, a 50 million fold increase in the computer power of chips.
This is Moore's law. Our AI models become more capable.
As more compute and more data are made available. One benchmark is their continued improvement.
And the exams they can pass with flying colours from law to maths, chemistry to English literature, improving on a whole range of other benchmarks to.
To get even better, they're being encouraged to explain their reasoning and set out the steps they use and learned from that.
And they now call up other AI methods to help. These rates of improvement are touted as harbingers of artificial general intelligence.
AGI Polymathic superintelligence.
What is life in this age of powerful AI systems?
There's a lot of doom mongering in discussions about AI.
It's claimed they're going to take our jobs and render us obsolete, make many of our accomplishments appear trivial.
Consider the images in this slide. Garry Kasparov, the world's greatest chess player, beaten by machine in 1996.
Lee Sedol, one of the world's greatest go players, beaten by a machine in 2016.
Each of these events touted as pivotal moments.
But we haven't stopped playing chess or go.
We're not diminished by machines that can routinely beat us.
Indeed, these games have been enriched by the presence of AI, the analysis of games, the formation of hybrid teams.
More people play chess today than ever. We've been augmented by the presence of chess super intelligence.
And remember, these systems do not derive the slightest scintilla of pleasure when they defeat us, nor any pride in a game well played.
AI systems have nothing that corresponds to the sense of our lived humanity.
When we we we respond to this photograph.
In the 1980s, I was a postgraduate student visiting in MITs AI lab.
Pat Winston, its director. An early pioneer in machine vision.
When talking about progress in AI used to say, there are lots of ways of being smart that aren't smart like us.
And this led me to think about the ways in which smart systems might vary.
One dimension is varying levels of intelligence. The American Psychological Association defines intelligence as the ability to derive information,
learn from experience, adapt to the environment, understand and correctly utilise reason.
Many examples of adaptive behaviour and learning in the animal kingdom from the desert,
ant that can reliably find its way home to the octopus that can navigate mazes.
Our latest AI systems display quite a lot of this operational sense of intelligence.
If learning and adaption are key characteristics of intelligence, all machines have it to some degree.
The substrate in which these systems are realised is another dimension along which smart systems might vary.
With a carbon based biology or silicon based computers.
But the dimension that intrigues us so much is the virtue and value we attach to sentience,
our self-aware presence of living in the world, of being alive.
This is the famously hard problem.
Our conscious awareness being in the world as we place ourselves of the species or a AIS, and perhaps one day, extraterrestrials.
In the broad landscape of smart systems, we will doubtless wish to explore other attributes too.
And as we consider our own evolution, our sense of life, remember that we just didn't make our technologies.
Our technology is made and changed us. The tools we built, made and changed us from the hand axe to writing.
Both changed our neurology and we are changing our neurology even now as we use computers.
Developments in machine brain interfaces suggest we may integrate our technologies directly into ourselves.
Humans in the future will see, sense, explore, understand and live in the world via technologies that further augment us.
All of this demands an understanding of what matters, what we value.
It is about what it is to be a moral agent.
It will be about ethics. It will be about our sense of being human in an age of AI.
And let's return to where Jayne began this evening's discussion on a final question about life.
If life arises elsewhere in the universe, as the numbers suggest, it might or indeed should,
one in another civilisation with its hold this thought own E.T. equivalent of Elon Musk,
committed to their species becoming space faring, exploiting AI wouldn't they have built self-replicating machines?
Machines that don't have to be sentient, just smart in other ways.
Mining the resources of other solar systems, replicating and spreading outwards.
To explore brave new worlds and report back. These machines have been imagined.
They even have a name. Von Neumann probes after one of the founders of computer science, John von Neumann.
On some reasonable assumptions, the galaxy should be full of them.
E.T. AI's. So finally, a paradox.
The Fermi paradox. Enrico Fermi, the great physicist,
pointed out in 1950 the contradiction between the high likelihood of extraterrestrial life and the lack of evidence for it.
If life can develop and evolve whatever the substrate, where is it?
Thank you.
Thank you Nigel. Thank you so much Luke. Thank you Jayne. Absolutely wonderful presentations.
We're just going to bring some chairs along and we'll sit down. So that gives you a moment to think about what questions you'd like to ask for.
If I could invite the speakers to come and take a seat. And we'll start, uh, the discussion period.
We've got roving microphones. So, um, please do wait for that so that everybody's able to hear you.
Uh, and your question. But why don't we come? I'm going to take a seat at the end so I can sort of, uh, see you all.
That's it. That's great stuff when I go there. Brilliant.
Thank you so much. Right, Jayne Come on. Come on over. And.
Luke. Terrific.
Jayne I'm. I'm going to take, uh, moderator's privilege and ask the first question if that's okay.
Uh, and it's it links a little bit to, um, a question that we've had in the pre-submitted as well,
which will overlap, uh, with some of the points that you made, uh, Luke two.
Are you constrained in looking for life that just looks like the version of life as we see biologically.
Here on Earth, I was interested to know that you're very dependent on the oxygen signature and
limiting to the concept of amino acids and other building blocks that we've got.
So what's the chance that we're missing other variations and forms of life and outside
And how how are you addressing that particular question? Yeah, exactly.
So a lot of what I showed is based on looking for Earth like life.
I'm I think we don't yet know if. The beginnings of life and the development of life happens in similar ways that if it does happen elsewhere,
that it sort of has to happen the same way.
So this sort of stems from the idea that if planets are the debris of star formation, that life, if it occurs on a planet,
is just a natural consequence of all the physics and chemistry that happened, uh, informing the star.
And so perhaps that. Suggest that the pathways for evolution and life might be the same.
And so what we're looking for might be the same.
But I would say as astronomers, what we are looking for, to try and be as agnostic as possible as what we think life is.
And what to look for is just any signature of disequilibrium.
So any signature in the atmosphere that geology on its own wouldn't produce in a steady state.
So I thought for an on Earth that something like oxygen, life creates oxygen in our atmosphere, but we can be very open about what we might see.
And then from that, you sort of I would then go to my chemist and biologist and science, uh,
colleagues and ask them, okay, well, we found this, but can any think that that might be life create this?
Luke you very much spoke from the context of human life.
Um, and to a certain extent, Nigel, the same for this sort of AI, uh, challenges, even with the use of, you know, intelligence in the expression.
What would you say about the sort of more basic version of biology as presented by Jayne you know,
in the tiny little mites or other, uh, animal systems that that aren't in the human form.
I mean, if you follow your logic, you would say that for them to thrive and live well, which they have a right to, would require a political system.
Otherwise, it's a very Darwinian process of just survival of the fittest.
So how do you think about having listened to Jayne the opportunity for living and thriving
Well, with a completely different version of life that's not human. Yeah it's a wonderful question.
I think two quick things. One is that I think that the sense of life.
That is kind of the forms of symbiosis.
It's the forms of symbiosis in which there are multiple forms.
Um, is, uh, central to all of life and the conditions of life.
And so that's what it means to flourish, human and non-human.
And how we navigate that and, you know, contentious issues like predation and this kind of stuff,
how that figures within an understanding of, of living.
Well, I think is kind of a key question.
Um, and there's obviously lots of different religious, philosophical traditions kind of have things to say about that.
I think building on what Jayne was saying, I think there's a broader question of how we recognise and name life and obviously religions
Christianity particular, uh, has lots of speculation about non embodied forms of life and forms of consciousness which aren't materially based.
Uh, angels being one example. And now we can think of this is kind of magical language, but it's a I think it's an interesting point of reflection.
There's been lots of philosophical, uh,
rich philosophical and moral thought about the nature of life that isn't dependent on chemistry, biology and other things.
And I think that's, uh, could be an interesting point of dialogue between science and religion.
And it doesn't tend to factor in because the conditions you laid out were tended to be.
You know, we're looking for biological and chemical signatures,
or we have the imaginative possibilities of other modalities of life not dependent on material conditions.
And related to that is this very, very big question of, Jayne and I were talking about this earlier, this question of could we even communicate,
let alone record, could we even recognise, let alone communicate with non, um, material based or non-human forms of life or what would that mean?
And how would that stretch us? Because I think we tend to think holy in kind of analogical terms, from human life to some other form.
What would it mean to think from some other form to us? Um, yeah.
Yeah. No, that's very interesting. And, and that the sort of ability to bring the two together, actually, you're quite right.
There is a strong tradition in religion of other versions of it. And in fact, uh, Piero crania student has asked a question which speaks to this.
Can you be religious and still be okay with that?
There's other forms of life out there in the galaxy, and, you know, Luke would say yes.
So there's a very rich tradition of, yes, there's a great, um, early modern theological Nicholas of Cusa.
Yes. It's a long treatise thinking about speculating on life in other plants.
There was a brief moment in the Reformation. Melanchthon was very against the idea that God would make a life on other planets,
but basically as a very rich tradition of kind of the idea that if the universe is if God creates a habitable universe,
then that we should expect a life on other planets, uh, and that, that and the other thing about that, that will be very different to human life.
That's again, a very, very rich tradition of kind of theological and philosophical speculation.
And I think, um, there's no there's no conflict there I don't think.
would you agree, Jayne?
I mean, I approach it from sort of the physics and the chemistry.
So if Earth is habitable, it suggests that that is that is a process that can happen.
Um, so yes, I think that life forms.
So we have a pre-submitted question from a post-grad Luis Moya, this is for you, Nigel,
is does a drive to build artificial life on Earth conflict with our quest to find organic life out there in the cosmos?
Or do you see, I'll be interested in what you both think about land. Well, that's.
I think I think that the point I made is a really interesting, uh, reflection on that,
which is that, uh, you might use one to serve the other because, again, space is very big.
Take a very long time. So perhaps your best hope is, uh, intelligent self.
Yeah. Maintaining systems.
Uh, you know, imagine Voyager plus plus plus, which is kind of out there and able to build copies of it and, and perhaps send the information back.
So, so no, I think that's what's really interesting about how we might use the one to address the other.
And I think, I think I mean, what I do want to kind of.
Make clear is that there was a lot of. Nonsense around the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence, as if that will be a new kind of, um.
Um, challenging agency. Um, we have to be thoughtful about how those built and evolved.
I mean, what the. But this is an echo of ourselves coming back to us.
Extremely capable, these generative AI systems.
But they succeed because they've internalised in a completely different way and represented to us coherent.
And indeed, we'll find patterns in systems that we can't find ourselves.
And we've given them all the tasks at this point.
We've seen them all their goals. It will lead to a very interesting world in which a kind of a new kind of animism will emerge,
which is the systems won't necessarily possess that sentience, that thick texture, I believe, for a long time.
But they will they there will be the voices of our ancestors, literally.
I mean, the posthumous AIS that will represented whatever we think about that, um,
will be suffused with systems that talk to us, that maintain a representation of of past experiences.
So I can see, um, this, this very interesting blurring of distinctions as our AI technology,
without any sense of it being sentient at all, is never the less able to represent sets of possibilities to us that.
Bring the world to us in quite different ways. We're very much reflects your point, Luke, about other versions of life in different ways.
Well, let's open it up now to the audience. So as I said, we've got roving mics.
Please just put your hand up nice. N ice and clearly, if you have a question that you wish to ask to our panellists.
Please this gentleman here in the front. Thank you
This question about the meaning of life, which is a kind of bugbear of our lives.
Put it into a context of the idea that I was brought up with.
Many people here brought up this quite false idea that evolution is a kind of R&D program to produce us.
Which clearly isn't. I've been, I think, five great extinctions.
One thing we know from this record of extinctions is that evolution doesn't repeat.
There are no repeats the trilobites are gone.
The ammonites are gone. The dinosaurs are all but a few.
A few relics have gone. And yet here we are, 65 million years since the last extinction, and possibly only a few centuries from the next.
Well, possibly only a few decades from the next. Talking about the meaning of life.
180 million years of dinosaurs. Never uttered a word that had no vocal chords.
They probably had no ideas. And they certainly never asked what is the meaning of being a dinosaur?
What is the meaning? Being a trilobite.
None of these creatures ever asked this question. Here we arrive without curious arrogance, thinking that we must have a meaning.
Why do we believe that we have a meaning?
Wonderful question. Right.
The quest for the meaning and the thrive. I'm going to give that right to you, Luke.
But I would like to, uh, again have all the panellists reflect on that question.
No, it's a it's a wonderful it's a wonderful point. I mean, I think, um.
The sense that in a sense you can kind of flip it and the sense of, why shouldn't we ask that question?
The fact that we can ask that question is significant. It's not trivial.
It's not irrelevant. So, um, I think I'd also say who knows what dinosaurs speculation was like.
We we can't. It's famous. Thomas Nagel has his famous essay about.
Could we understand a dog or a bird or, you know, have the forms of consciousness in other ways of being alive are beyond us.
In a sense, we struggle to comprehend them, but that doesn't make them of no value or of no worth.
Uh, and so I think our capacity to engage with life in particular human ways,
which involves the capacity to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of life and to come up with ethical frames
of reference and think beyond simply being determined by our material and social conditions which make life possible,
and act I both against that. And with that I think is a distinct way of being alive which needs to be engaged with.
So I don't think one needs to say, uh, kind of put it in context and say, well, it's trivial.
The fact that we can ask these questions, I think is incredibly profound and a remarkable gift,
that we are the kind of animal that can ask these questions and that needs to be embraced
and engaged with how then that leads us to make sense of and value the life of dinosaurs.
I think part of the gift of being human is that dinosaurs suddenly can be a memory,
can be retrieved, can be engaged with and delighted and wondered at.
And I think that capacity for wonder, that capacity for contemplation,
that capacity for questioning is this is this remarkable gift that that relates to being the human.
That joy would be to find other forms of life, uh,
that are able to have that capacity for wonder and question asking or to somehow create a form of system which could equally participate in that.
I think it would do that in very different ways. Uh, and then the challenge for us is, can we receive that gift from others?
But I certainly want to maintain and hold out the need, the necessity, the vitality of our embrace,
of our capacity to ask those questions is central and constitutive of who we are as this kind of animal.
Of course, there is an interesting there's an interesting, uh, line on the, uh, the joy of finding others who might ask those questions, which is,
um, perhaps one reason we haven't heard from anybody yet is they're all keeping very quiet because only a fool makes a noise in the jungle.
Um, and that genuinely is we're having this debate earlier on this kind of serious exchange between people thinking,
should we be sending messages out there, um, which isn't perhaps very elevating about the kind of, uh, propensities of sufficiently advanced systems,
uh, to think about, uh, maintaining their own interests.
But, uh, no, I and the other thing is, you make a good point is that we have this tendency to think there is some ascendancy in all of this,
some inevitable, um, progression to something, um, better.
And. Well, we're probably responsible, um, for, um, large extinction events ourselves, you know, with the megafauna and possibly close cousins.
So it's interesting to, uh, to reflect on where we might be going.
It'll take a very physics approach to this, um, which is it's not necessarily my own thoughts.
Purpose of life, I think is is very personal to each individual.
Um, but, um, this idea that life is a natural consequence of the physical and chemical processes of the universe and the universe,
you know, we think started as a big bang, and it's trying to dispel its energy into the sort of lowest state that it can.
And it turns out life is very good at using energy, converting energy into higher from higher.
forms into sort of heat in the lowest state. And so if involving, uh, an organism that can ask this question, why do I exist?
What's the purpose if that keeps us going and keeps us surviving?
Life has evolved to keep going. Um, it keeps using energy, and the universe likes that.
Um, so maybe that's another way to think about it.
But the reductionist physics. Yeah, if I may say.
I would say that for me, it's a very personal question as to what we individually take as the purpose and meaning for life.
Well, maybe, uh, Jessica has submitted, uh, maybe a, uh, a comment which might address your point, which is what is the purpose of life?
Is it that we have no choice but to keep ourselves in this quest for the rest of our lives?
That gives it purpose. Um. Maybe that's. That's this.
Let me open it again up to the audience for, uh, additional questions, please.
The gentleman there. Thank you. And we'd love it from students.
So don't be shy. No question is unacceptable. So thank you to all the speakers.
It's been a fascinating evening. Um, despite humanity's intelligence and growing intelligence,
one might argue there is undoubtedly a history of using that intelligence for battle and destroy and destruction,
whether that's fellow man or the planet.
So, given Moore's Law and the, um, doubling of computing power, you sort of think of Terminator Judgement Day scenario,
where artificial intelligence gets so clever that it decides that humans are a threat, unnecessary, etc.
Is that is that pure make believe or is that a genuine?
Risk, do you think? Well, how worried should we be? Nigel,
How many years have we got? I mean, this was certainly a, um, a particular concern of the first AI, uh,
summit in Bletchley Park, just over, you know, back in, uh, over a year, year ago.
Now, um, um, you'll notice that the UK has not signed up to a more modest version of what it's signed up to,
uh, to a year and a half, which is odd, but there you go.
Um, at today's Paris, uh, event, um, I think it is important that we take those, uh, issues of of guardrails of, uh, of safety.
Um, the system doesn't have to be, um, super sentient to nevertheless be a threat.
Uh, if we put them into ascendancy of of, uh, over tasks that are critical, um, whether or not,
and you can have all sorts of scenarios that imagine how they could become,
uh, in some sense, following a set of objectives which they don't have to be aware of,
but nevertheless determine their behaviour, which could lead to bad outcomes for us.
So guardrails, regulations, some notion of where we don't want to proliferate this dual use technology,
like every other general technology and science, we use it for good and ill.
We use it. And, um,
we've got to think quite hard about how we establish limits on how we will put this technology to use and possibly how we will align those systems,
not to determine that they would rather do something that we'd rather they didn't.
So I think that's absolutely. Um, but you're very much answering from the context of us living alongside artificial intelligence.
If we take some of Luke's comments in the context of how does life live
Well, how would I, independent of the human race, live
Well, we need, uh, does I need to generate its own political system?
Well, I think that's a that is an interesting question. I mean, some have thought, uh, seriously about the notion.
At what point is the Bicentennial man kind of notion, at what point do these systems become to have rights and or,
or a sense that, there's a framework of, of behaviour?
Uh, why shouldn't we just treat them as automated slaves in some sense?
I mean, this has a long philosophical tradition, um,
where Aristotle tried to convince himself that sense of humans who were slaves somehow didn't have souls,
and so he didn't have to worry about that in the same way.
Um, I think looking I mean, again, uh, in some sense out to your you're assuming that there will be a richness and a textures in them and,
and a sense of presence that would motivate a mobilised the kind of questions that we've had here.
And that may be an in principle, I don't rule it out at all in principle, but it's a very long way from where we are now.
I don't think we have to worry about giving them rights for quite some time yet.
Um, what we should, though, is, is not imagine we can just use these systems in any way we might may wish.
Because in the act of doing that, whether that's a sex robot, for example,
would you give it to a recidivist to kind of cure them of their compulsions?
You Corson or own interaction?
You you in some sense, it's a act of contagion.
We should treat them as if human, even in the context in which we understand they are AI systems.
I mean, I would yeah, I would say we already have a political relationship with these systems.
Think about the impact of, um, uh, kind of bots on Twitter to elections in this kind of stuff that so the,
the issue, I think the point that Nigel raised about human consciousness and the human body is always adaptive.
And so, uh, a good example is cooking We wouldn't evolve.
Is that in my understanding? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we wouldn't evolve the kind of brains we had if we didn't cook,
depend on technologies in a sense, to become the kinds of creatures we are.
And so there's always this adaptive mutuality going on with our tools.
Uh, and that is, I think, intensified with AI.
We're all it's not the kind of Terminator scenario that concerns me.
It's the ways in which humans consistently invent tools.
Money is a tool. What do we do? And again, religious traditions have a lot to say on this.
We always end up worshipping our tools and tools are made to make life better.
And again and again and again. It's a human kind of move to end up serving our tools, not are tools serving us.
A state is a human tool. It's supposed to organise life better and make it better.
That's all it is. We end up, we fight wars over states.
So I think that's much more my concern.
We're already in that process where we are creating tools which we then imagine ourselves in relationship to good examples to computer.
Human life and consciousness is not machine like.
Again and again, I still meet people who think, oh, it's like a machine.
I they develop whole scientific models as if the human brain is like a machine.
It's nothing like a machine. Um, part of the breakthrough to AI was to stop thinking like that.
And so thinking in neural networks.
So the sense in which we end up through a classic human process of mazes, mimicking our tools and then serving our tools, we're already in that game.
And so I think that's the deeper challenge is how do we break that cycle, particularly with the intensities of this technology,
uh, and thereby remake ourselves in its image rather than using it genuinely to engineer better forms of life
It's very interesting. I mean, it was the point you made about the sort of augmented aspect.
So how we think about augmented or augmenting our life through technology, but also, you know, the evolution, you know, from the medical area,
you know, that I work in or did work in, um, you know, the sort of evolution for prosthetics and cyborgs are making tools.
You becoming a cyborg in effect. And how do you assimilate that as part of you?
And how do you have that thing that's a tool. But now is embedded in your body, a sense of belonging.
And we're going to go we're going there. And that challenges.
What do we mean by the human aspect of life because we're we're evolving it to actually embed the technology as opposed to using it as a tool.
Jayne just to add to that, that, you know, if that's that's the direction that we're going, that if we do encounter other lifeforms on other planets,
um, that we will be taking that AI with us or possibly sending it out ahead of us, the first contact we already do that with our technology
on Mars, we send robots.
We have to think about how we would want our AI to be treated, or how we would treat one if it came to us.
And I think if you consider it in that form, it adds answer to the question.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm determined to get a question from a student.
One. I've got one here. That's the microphone, please.
Can you hear me?
Yes. Yes, yes. Yeah. So I've been noticing that there's kind of a contrast between the questions that we are asked about life in other planets,
which is with, with, like, a sense of wonder and excitement.
And then when we look at life here and we talk about it with a sense of like, fear or concern,
and I was wondering when you ask the question about whether we can imagine life in other planets being way far from life from Earth.
Um, I also thought that maybe we are not or I haven't heard enough, uh, thoughts that are more hopeful, uh,
for what I can bring or even, like, how the humans can do politics in a way that will make us feel proud and happy.
And, uh, whether AI can inform that, even the way in which we look for life in other planets rather that than with fear,
look for it with excitement and think, that is going to be, uh, like a good.
Yeah, like a good, uh, approach. Yeah.
So I was wondering if there are like, uh, thoughts or like ideas of futures, uh, informed by AI and by these questions about, uh, the human endeavour.
There are more, uh, hopeful, hopeful and optimistic.
So thank thank you. No, it's a really good point because we tend to sort of go to the worries.
Um, right. Nigel. And then Luke
Jayne you're evidently excited to find life on other planets. I think she's going to be buzzed if we find other life.
But we need to know why and what will that bring to us?
And it's not just about us as humans benefiting, but let's have some of the positives, because there aren't many
Yeah, I mean, again, dystopian tropes are just everywhere.
It's easy to get kind of very, very lots of shroud waving going on.
I mean, the ways in which these systems are, we should look at what technologies have done in the past when we invented writing,
when we learned to read that technology changed our neurology, we developed parts of our brain to do that.
When they go wrong, we get various forms of dyslexia.
You know, we said, we know. We know that we can we can use these technologies to really enable us to help us flourish.
Um, and I think this is so exciting, whether it's in science where these systems will help us discover, find patterns, um,
do huge amounts of rapid assembly of suggestions and ideas that can be pursued,
many of them computationally, not necessarily have to go through laboratory process.
So there's huge opportunities in science. Wonderful royal society
Royal society report on science in the age of AI covers much of this.
But in arts and creative content, people think that it's this the end of the creative?
No. I mean, one reason why is that we already face a challenge with these models,
having consumed all the stuff that's out there that humans have produced, they start to consume their own content.
And there's this wonderful idea called Mad model autophagy disorder.
They consume their own content and they become increasingly, well, deranged.
They start to dis associating some quite interesting ways.
So the human in the creative context is fundamentally important, not least because of course, we are living our own humanity.
We are expressing our sense of hopes and fears in an age where these systems will help us create new works of art, will help us in our science,
in our health, in our leisure, in our pastimes, possibly even in helping come to more effective political settlements with one another.
Jayne Yeah, I think searching for life and finding it elsewhere, it helps us to understand our own origins, um, and how life begins.
It's one of the huge unanswered questions of modern day science.
And I would hope that, you know, centuries from now, we'll look back and we'll be thinking,
oh, can you believe in, like, the two thousands they didn't know, like how life formed like this.
Just the thing that you think you would know.
So I think you know that exploration and finding life in all its possible forms is is deeply fascinating and something I don't know,
I, I do this every day, so I it's the most fun thing I can think to do.
Well, before we take the final question, because sadly we are coming to the end of our time, I just want to ask one more question.
Uh, actually directed at Jayne But please, if the others want to join. And this is from another undergraduate student, Pre-submitted Ben O'Donnell.
And the question is, if the ongoing research into exoplanetary atmospheres uncovered signs of technological life in our galaxy,
what would be your foremost ethical or moral concerns with messaging that life?
How might we learn from prior messaging attempts such as Frank Drake, Carl Sagan
I received a message and the exclusion of violence and religion from both messages,
so I'd like to maybe have Jayne and Luke comment on that question, and then we'll take the final question
So whether or not to message, uh, it's called Meti messaging extraterrestrial intelligence.
And we could already do that. We know that there are planetary systems where, you know, it's very similar to the Eaeth
And so we could just send messages to them.
Um, and I think Nigel already mentioned this about the sort of dark forest idea that you put out the message and the answer comes back.
it's the same approach you would take to engaging with any new civilisation.
Um, so we can actually look back into our own history and try to learn from as, as a nomadic species.
We've gone out, we explored, we've encountered each other. And how did those situations go and what did we learn from that?
And can we then apply that to how we might deal with contacting extraterrestrial intelligence?
Um. It's not an astrophysics question is definitely an ethical question.
Okay. As to how to do that. Yeah, I think I mean, I think as far as I recall, I might be wrong in this, that,
that no kind of humanities people were involved in the creation of those messages, that they tended to have a view of the human.
They tried to have this very neutral, de-particularised, um, claim to be universal view of the human.
And I think that was a mistake. Um, I think the part of being human and what we know about human interaction and the inherently uncultured nature, uh,
and particular nature, is to kind of lean into that and to what would it what would another alien intelligence be looking for?
It would equally be some particular form of life.
So to have a kind of de-particularised form of life you're sending out that would inherently produce this is a weird bunch of people.
What on earth is that?
You know, whereas to actually say, uh, this is there's a kind of multiplicity of cultural forms that the thick with stories and ritual process,
and that is central to what it means to be human.
And I think there's this problem of a kind of decontextualised idea of rationality rather than a deeply relational, embodied notion of rationality,
which will distinguish us from AI and other forms of planet, and the kind of ritual, um,
religious dare I say, other kinds of processes that that are central to the formation of us as humans.
I think the other thing to say, I'm just going back to the last question is the key thing here is what stories we tell.
We are storytelling animals, and that is crucial to the development of science, to all this kind of stuff.
So what stories are we putting out there, and what story of hope and and hope is a virtue and a commitment.
It's not optimism. It's not, um, a kind of built on speculation on, uh,
existing facts or conditions which might be violent and terrible and all sorts of terrible things.
That's it's a commitment to and and the capacity to develop a that commitment over time to a vision of the good,
to a vision of a more moral way of being in the world.
Uh, and that is hard work. Um, and that is a struggle, collective and personal.
And I think that the cultivation of that hope in the face of what is very bad signals, um, is crucial to us going forward.
And I think a hopeful orientation in the face of the challenges we're facing around AI or whatever.
Um, but that depends on what story we tell about ourselves and about the universe.
And as Nigel was saying, there's a lot of both tragic and apocalyptic stories being told.
What is the kind of realistic, hopeful story which we want to tell about this university, about life itself.
And I think that is a profound question for us. Yeah. No. Absolutely no.
Well, I'm a big fan of hope. I did a whole sermon on it just recently. And as a neuroscientist I hope
So, um, I, I know that we're just after time,
but I can't resist offering one more question to if you could be really succinct and then really succinct answers.
And then we'll wrap up, because I know that some students need to get back for their college dinners, but, um.
Yeah. Hello. Uh, Nigel, were you presented sentience as a continuous variable in your plots?
I think that's a really interesting concept. What would it mean, or what would it be for humans to be more sentient?
And can AI theology or astrophysics be used as a tool for us to achieve greater sentience?
That's a great. But I mean, it was bit contentious to have those as continuous, uh, dimensions at all.
You might say that, um, you know, the, the, the biological versus the silicon, they're kind of more categorical, um, types rather than continuous,
but continuous sentiments is something we talked about if you read the books on, on, uh,
on cephalopod, uh, you know, is that is this a system that might have some sense of awareness?
You know, are there other categories of, uh, of being that have people say a dim flicker of all this or that?
Um, what does it mean to have that rich sense of of a presence?
Uh, and it's, it's the classically challenging problem that none of us quite know.
Um, what the what the what the trajectory to have that in our systems is.
But what I suspect is when you open up our current AI system, there is so much that is missing from what has been.
Selected for over billions of years in the history of life on Earth.
That there's a massive amount of.
Material to account for before. I think we get to the point where we seriously.
Entertain the notion that these systems have sentience.
So how far you go to the left or right? Great question. I think I think it's something we want to be debating more.
Brilliant. Well, on that note, uh, this has been just fantastic.
I've certainly learnt an enormous amount. It's been fantastic to to just have this time with you all.
Clearly, there's much for us all to learn still about life and develop and understand.
So thank you all so much.
We'll do a clap at the end just to announce that next term we will have another Sheldonian series and the topic will be truth.
And uh, because this is what we're about, aren't we in this university finding it and then disseminating it.
So let me first of all, thank Tim Soutpommasane and Julias Grower and David Isaac
who've been the architects for this series and all the work they've done, the events team that, of course got us here tonight.
You all for coming. But most of all, can we please have a round of applause for Jayne, Luke and Nigel for a fantastic evening.