Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution.
Today, I'm speaking with Robert Wright, publisher of the Nonzero Newsletter, Host of the Nonzero Podcast, and author of many books, including "The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning", which goes on sale TODAY, June 23rd.
Bob's history with AI in some ways rhymes with my own. While he's never been a technologist, he's always been interested in big ideas – and his personal lore includes having interviewed Geoffrey Hinton all the way back in 1983, when the connectionist paradigm was still mostly theoretical, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, around 2010, when notions of AI risk were very often dismissed, if not outright laughed off.
That background primed him to pay attention when AI systems hit major milestones – such as Deep Blue's victory over Garry Kasparov, and of course ChatGPT passing the common sense Turing Test – and his broad intellectual range and constant drive to understand the truth has landed him, when it comes to making sense of AI developments, in the very top tier of American journalists.
We don't spend too much time on it today, simply because I know that Cognitive Revolution listeners are already familiar with the core arguments, but the book contains a really impressive tour and synthesis of AI research results that have lead him to conclude – correctly in my view – that the trends that have thus far delivered us Fable are not likely to stop in the immediate future, that we lack the scientific understanding required to be confident that we'll be able to control increasingly powerful AI systems indefinitely, and that … even in the best case, we should expect AI to cause major disruptions to our economic, political, and international systems.
Now, Bob's not particularly optimistic that humanity will rise to the occasion – he believes that market forces will, by default, select for deceptive AIs; and our history of arms races, both commercial and especially military, suggest that our scientific power might well continue to exceed our wisdom – but the part of the book that we focus on today is his call for, however unlikely it may seem, a species-scale process of enlightenment in which, motivated in part by the growing realization of the tremendous challenges that AI presents, humanity finally gets its act together, recognizes our common interests, and works together – at multiple levels, starting with conscious consumption, and extending all the way to the international level, to invent the mechanisms and build the trust required to establish agreements that can effectively govern AI development.
You may say he's a dreamer, but he's not the only one. This might be a bit bold to say, but I personally feel that grappling with the magnitude of AI's impact has made me, in several ways, a better person. For much of my life I was a classic achievement-oriented striver, always trying to be the best I personally could be. Now, in the AI era, I feel, viscerally, that my fate is tied to the rest of humanity's in such a profound way that I'm much less focused on my own income or status, and more focused on trying to do my very small part to nudge history in a positive direction.
While the book itself is written for a general audience – and would be a great shortcut introduction to the current state of AI for intellectual readers who are just starting to pay attention – I feel that more importantly, even the most AGI-pilled, to the degree that they haven't already experienced such a pro-social transformation, could benefit from reading, and really taking time to meditate on the big ideas in Bob's book.
Scripture says that God made humans in its image, but the situation today is potentially reversed – it's now strikingly plausible that humanity will synthesize a God-like superintelligence from our collective inheritance. And as Bob warns, though we don't know for sure that this will happen, or, if it does, whether it will be a good god or a bad god, it will in some sense be the god we deserve.
And so, I hope you enjoy, and find cause to pause and reflect on your personal contribution to the AI moment, in this conversation about humanity's ultimate test, with author Robert Wright.
Watch now!
Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz