Are We Building a God? AI, Superintelligence, and the Coming Singularity

On the question of whether you know computers have consciousness or sentient subjective experience, you know, whether it is quote like anything to be them, as Thomas Nagel put it, um You never know for sure the the distinguishing feature of consciousness is that it's private. You never know for sure that any being other than you is conscious. We didn't just invent machines that think, we invented machines that invent, in a certain sense, machines that think. The training of a large language model is a process by which, I contend, and a lot of people in AI would agree, it is a process through which cognitive functionalities that evolved by natural selection in human beings take shape. The core of the idea behind the singularity is that technological advance speeds up subsequent technological advance, things move faster and faster, suddenly, all bets are off. Who knows what the world's gonna be like in a couple of years. That's kind of the singularity. And they're saying well, the singularity is near, one might say, to to uh quote the title of a best selling book by Ray Kurzweil. But they mean really near.

Hey everybody, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. My guest today is Robert Wright, the legendary writer, one of my favorite authors. He's the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God. Which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize non zero The moral animal And Three Scientists and Their Gods, which was the finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his book, Why Buddhism Is True. He's the co founder and editor in chief of the widely respected Bloggingheads TV dot Bloggingheads dot TV, I've been on several times, and meetingoflife.

He's written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times. Time Magazine Slate, the new republic. If you've read any of those, you've read Robert Wright. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Penn uh Princeton University, where he also created The popular online course Buddhism and Modern Psychology. He's currently visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York, and here's his new book.

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