Why The AI Doomers Might Be Right - Robert Wright - #1122
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I've told you this before, but you wrote probably the most influential book in my life, which was The Moral Animal, and it was the thing that got me started on the trajectory of thinking about evolutionary psychology, of studying human nature more deeply. Why are you now writing about AI, given your heritage? Well, in some ways it's an extension of evolutionary thinking in a couple of senses that I think are so underappreciated. AI is a product of evolution and is still evolving.
But the other connection to the moral animal, I think, is, first of all, well, the moral animal was about the human mind, and uh AI uh does a lot of things that traditionally omen only human minds have done. The other thing I tried to do in the moral animal is highlight kind of what you might call moral biases, kind of self-serving moral biases, the, you know, the way we all think we're right and the other guy's wrong. And I think if we're going to get through the AI revolution in good shape, among the things we're going to have to do is grapple with that, with kind of what you might call the psychology of tribalism, a little more successfully than we have. And so I I pay a certain amount of attention to that in this book as well.
What's the central question that you're wrestling with here? Is it true that this technology, which obviously holds the potential to bring great wonders, is also in some respects terrifying and could go badly awry if we don't approach it wisely? And I think the answer is yes. That that's exactly why this debate's interesting, right? That we have this sort of endlessly unresolved potential future.
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