THE GOD TEST (Part 2): Can Humanity Pass the Cosmic Reckoning?

I'm Rufus Griscom and this is the next big idea. Today, Robert Wright on America, China, and the nail-biting race to superintelligence. This is part two of my conversation with Robert Wright about his new book. the God test, artificial intelligence, and our cosmic reckoning. If you haven't heard the first episode, you may want to go back and listen to it now.

We talked about AI as a new stage in the evolution of intelligence, and about the very human traits already showing up in our machines empathy, deception, power seeking, seduction. Today we ask the harder question, what happens when these machines become the object of a geopolitical arms race? Bob is skeptical of the increasingly common argument that America must simply race as fast as possible to beat China to superintelligence. In his view, The dangers posed by AI, bioweapons, cyber war, societal collapse, authoritarian surveillance, even nuclear escalation, cannot be solved by one country alone.

They require something much harder, coordination, restraint, and a larger moral imagination. In the Bible, God tests human beings again and again with knowledge, with power, with temptation, with fear. Artificial intelligence, Bob argues, may now be presenting us with a test of similar magnitude, not because it was sent from the heavens, but because it asks of us the same things religious traditions have long asked. Humility, restraint, awe, and the ability to see beyond ourselves.

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