Emily Whitten: The limits of science and human intelligence

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up: what are the limits of science when it comes to human intelligence?

WORLD’s Emily Whitten says two recent books help Christians think through that question.

AUDIOBOOK: If you memorized all of Wikipedia, would you be more intelligent? It depends on how you define intelligence.

EMILY WHITTEN, REVIEWER: That’s a clip from the audiobook version of Robert J. Marks II new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do that Artificial Intelligence Never Will. Marks has thought a lot about how to define intelligence as an electrical engineer, computer engineer, and Distinguished Professor at Baylor University. He’s also spent his career creating computer programs that mimic human thinking. And while computers can do amazing things–he says they’ll never become human.

AUDIOBOOK: Basically, for computers or artificial intelligence, there’s no other game in town. All computer programs are algorithms. Anything non-algorithmic is non-computable and beyond the reach of AI.

Marks takes readers deep into the science to prove his point, and casual readers may find his reasoning hard to follow at times. But he does aid readers with pop-culture references and a chapter on real world implications—I found the section on killer robots especially intriguing.

Another new book that deals with similar themes in a more exciting way–Blake Crouch’s sci-fi novel, Upgrade. Here’s a FanfiAddict interview with Crouch.

CROUCH: This is about genetic engineering and what that means for humanity. It’s about a guy named Logan Ramsay, it’s set in the near future. He’s with an agency called the Gene Protection Agency….

In the opening pages, Ramsay and his GPA partner track a potential criminal, Henrik Soren, to an airport in Denver.

AUDIOBOOK: ‘My flight’s about to board.’ ‘You aren’t going to Tokyo, not tonight.’ See the woman sitting at the high top behind us? That’s my partner, Agent Netman. Airport police are waiting in the wings. I can drag you out of here or you can walk on your own steam, but you have to decide right now.

The intel Ramsay gets from Soren leads to a secret lab, and there - in a powerful explosion - Ramsay gets exposed to a gene editing virus.

AUDIOBOOK: We know that someone infected me with a package designed to alter my DNA. We assumed, big mistake, it didn’t work. But it was obviously a sleeper package remaining dormant for the first month or so.

Soon, Ramsay becomes stronger and sharper in nearly every way. This genetic “upgrade” opens new doors–but it also isolates him from his family and makes him the enemy of those who want to force their upgrade on the rest of humanity.

Like a Jason Bourne movie, Crouch provides plenty of action–with daring escapes and fights. Unfortunately, his characters use offensive language, and they think and live within an evolutionary framework that leads them to terrible misjudgments.

Still, read carefully, both Non-Computable You by Robert J Marks and Upgrade by Blake Crouch can help us think through important scientific and ethical challenges in our day–and the days to come.

I’m Emily Whitten.

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