"But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning
About this episode
Kaiser Kuo interviews Robert Wright about the implications of AI and its historical context, as discussed in Wright's new book.
This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal , Nonzero , and The Evolution of God , for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer to its center than you'd expect. The occasion is his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning , which reads the AI revolution as the latest turn in a story going back billions of years. We get into the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere," Bob's argument that we evolved large language models rather than engineered them, the cognitive empathy we've both long preached, and the two-word talking point — "But China!" — that Bob thinks is most likely to lead us astray. 6:56 – Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere, and why a planetary "global brain" has become necessary 14:49 – Directionality without the mysticism: complexification, teleology, and the "cell's-eye view" worry 21:57 – The God Test: is moral progress really the price of governing AI, and is that hopeless on a short clock? 28:33 – Why Bob says we evolved large language models rather than built them, and the sycophancy problem that follows 35:19 – Open…
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