"The God Test": AI as Cosmic Reckoning, with Robert Wright

About this episode

Alan Rozenshtein, Research Director at Lawfare, spoke with Robert Wright—author of Nonzero, The Moral Animal, The Evolution of God, and Why Buddhism Is True, and the writer behind the NonZero Newsletter and podcast—about his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which argues that AI is an evolutionary threshold on the scale of the entire history of life, that we are collectively failing to grasp its magnitude, and that rising to the challenge will require both new forms of international governance and an expansion of human moral and cognitive perspective.

The conversation covered the multiple meanings of the book's title and what it means to view AI from a "cosmic" perspective; whether the public is finally starting to "feel the AGI" and where skepticism about AI's capabilities now comes from; how large language models are trained and Wright's claim that we have built "machines that create machines that think"; whether these systems genuinely understand, what Searle's Chinese Room and Nagel's "what is it like to be a bat?" have to do with it, and the open question of AI moral patienthood; the two families of AI risk—bad actors empowered by AI versus AI itself going rogue—and why the near-term disruption to jobs, relationships, and security may matter most; the "But China!" argument against AI regulation, China hawkishness, and why Wright thinks racing toward superintelligence is dangerously destabilizing; the case for "global governance" over "world government" and the perils of concentrating AI power at home; and why a book about AI and geopolitics closes with a call for mindfulness, cognitive empathy, and transcending the psychology of tribalism.

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