About this episode

Robert Wright discusses the implications of AI and its evolution in society.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com Bob is a journalist and the author of many books, including The Moral Animal , Nonzero , The Evolution of God , and Why Buddhism Is True . He’s written for countless magazines, including The New Republic, where he co-wrote the TRB column with Mickey Kaus. They also co-founded Bloggingheads TV, and Bob taught in the psych department at Penn and the religion department at Princeton. Today you can find him on Substack at the NonZero Newsletter , and his new book is The God Test : Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning . For two clips of the episode — how AI flatters its users, and the rapidly converging threats from AI — head to our YouTube page . Other topics: Bob’s reporting on AI in the early 1980s; Geoffrey Hinton — “the godfather of AI” — warning us about AI; “doomer-in-chief” Eliezer Yudkowsky; Bob’s own evolution on AI; the Tree of Knowledge; how AI is a more challenging global issue than nukes; the need for international regulation; the noosphere, our “global brain” — and its author, the visionary Christian, Teilhard de Chardin; neural networks; ChatGPT; Musk and…

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