AI: A God We Can’t Trust

Robert Wright is the author of several books that fall somewhere between popular science and original speculation and is the publisher of the consistently interesting Substack Nonzero Newsletter, a lone, sane voice for international cooperation to reduce the dangers of AI apocalypse. The Substack’s title comes from one of Wright’s books, Nonzero (1999), which argues that evolution increases organismic and social complexity, which in turn favors non-zero-sum — that is, cooperative — survival strategies. A similar argument, applied to the present moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence, motivates his latest title, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning.