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The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning
From bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Wright comes a sweeping new view of artificial intelligence that argues this revolution will challenge us spiritually and could restore a missing ingredient in modern life—our sense of purpose.
The God Test is the first book that sees AI not just as a technological tool with good and bad applications, but as an evolutionary force that will alter the trajectory of humanity itself. Written by one of our foremost public intellectuals, and informed by his decades of chronicling the digital age, the book boldly asserts that the current wave of AI progress is just the beginning. The changes we are about to witness will bring the most abruptly dramatic transformation in the history of our species.
Wright provocatively suggests that to truly understand the significance of the AI revolution, we need to expand our perspective beyond the last century or even the whole history of technology and look back billions of years, across the entire history of life on Earth. All along, he says, evolution has been pushing life toward this technological threshold, which now confronts our species with a climactic Can we muster the political, moral, and spiritual resources needed to guide this technology wisely?
If we fail this challenge, the consequences for the whole planet could be grave. But if we meet the challenge—if we pass “the God test”—we can live in a world where humanity thrives, finding not just happiness but deeper meaning and purpose. We can be enriched and uplifted by, rather than imperiled by, awesomely intelligent machines.
The God Test is the first book that sees AI not just as a technological tool with good and bad applications, but as an evolutionary force that will alter the trajectory of humanity itself. Written by one of our foremost public intellectuals, and informed by his decades of chronicling the digital age, the book boldly asserts that the current wave of AI progress is just the beginning. The changes we are about to witness will bring the most abruptly dramatic transformation in the history of our species.
Wright provocatively suggests that to truly understand the significance of the AI revolution, we need to expand our perspective beyond the last century or even the whole history of technology and look back billions of years, across the entire history of life on Earth. All along, he says, evolution has been pushing life toward this technological threshold, which now confronts our species with a climactic Can we muster the political, moral, and spiritual resources needed to guide this technology wisely?
If we fail this challenge, the consequences for the whole planet could be grave. But if we meet the challenge—if we pass “the God test”—we can live in a world where humanity thrives, finding not just happiness but deeper meaning and purpose. We can be enriched and uplifted by, rather than imperiled by, awesomely intelligent machines.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published June 23, 2026
About the author
Robert Wright
9 books1,567 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
ROBERT WRIGHT is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and Three Scientists and Their Gods. The New York Times selected The Moral Animal as one of the ten best books of the year and the other two as notable books of the year.
Wright is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A contributing editor at The New Republic, he has also written for Time, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.
Wright has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv.
ROBERT WRIGHT is the author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and Three Scientists and Their Gods. The New York Times selected The Moral Animal as one of the ten best books of the year and the other two as notable books of the year.
Wright is a recipient of the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A contributing editor at The New Republic, he has also written for Time, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker.
Wright has taught in the philosophy department at Princeton and the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and editor in chief of Bloggingheads.tv.
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August 5, 2026
There is a moment in the TV show
Lost
where the character Juliet,, is at the bottom of a deep well. For reasons too convoluted to go into here (watch the show!) she is last seen pounding on a nuclear bomb with a rock, trying to detonate the device. How she came to be in such a precarious situation and just why she pursues such an insane goal are irrelevant details — which is to say, irrelevant to why I bring up a 22-year-old TV show, though no doubt highly relevant for Juliet and her plight. I’ve now come to associate this image of Juliet pounding a rock against a nuclear device with the relentless pursuit of AI by what are often times very bad actors indeed. [†,‡] Unlike Juliet, however, we are pounding away at this device, trying to get it to work, hoping that what will come out if we pound hard enough will be candy and rainbows and unicorns — cures for cancer, the unlimited power of nuclear fusion, and extended if not eternal life —and not the destructive cascade of a nuclear bomb. I question our collective sanity now more than ever.
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright attempts to straddle the line between AI doomerism and AI utopianism. My instincts tell me that’s like trying to determine the correct dose of rat poison for humans — the RDA of rat poison, if you will. The correct amount is precisely zero.
The disconnect here comes from not understanding recursion and exponential growth. The most terrifying aspect is that we don’t get to decide at all — no more than we decided to evolve out of the sea and down from the trees and, you know, having pants and bank accounts.[§] Our path was set and we’ve been running that track for a long time. Barring a limitation of resources which makes it impossible, I’m fairly certain that AGI is inevitable if not already extant. And where AGI exists, superintelligence (ASI) is equally inevitable and not far behind. At some point the machines take over — not necessarily ‘take over the world’, but rather take over the training and development of AI. As in a phrase from another fictional universe, they become ‘self-aware and begin to learn at a geometric rate’. Now, you can debate whether self-aware equates with sentience or not, but the term geometric — more accurately exponential — is beyond debate.
All of this is a necessarily long way of saying that the book under examination and the thinking that underlies it are some of the most dangerous things to come along in quite a while — maybe ever. Not the book itself, so much, but certainly the rationale behind it. The idea that we can set limits and put safety protocols in place is the height of naiveté.
The doomerism that Wright continually references can be found living most fully in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, I believe a much more accurate understanding of the subject. In this as in so many other things I hope to be proven wrong.
All the danger and politics aside, I have to say that the most fascinating thing about these innovations, about this technology, is how the fiction of days gone by now increasingly feels like emergent reality. I tacitly referenced the Terminator franchise earlier. While I do not think that time travel is going to be a product of the coming AI explosion, I do believe that all of the other technology from at least the first couple of those movies — technology which at the time seemed like fantasy — now seems perfectly plausible, even likely. I experience that same uncanniness revisiting other science fiction. For fans of Star Trek, does the character of Data now hit differently than it did when you first encountered him (it?)? Or HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ? At some point the future happened and we’ve begun to live in it. I can’t say for sure that AI won’t kill us all, but I think in the meantime will we almost certainly live in interesting times.
———————
Footnotes:
*
† And not just bad as in evil — though there’s a fair bit of that going on — but bad as in bad — bad thinking, ineffectual, feckless, and, let’s be honest, just plain stupid — all despite being simultaneously so apparently smart. (Also,‘bad actors’ meaning ‘bad people,’ not actually people doing the job of acting badly. I realize I was just referencing a TV show, so there could be some confusion there. I'm talking about actual, real-life people doing things badly, and often things of an evil nature. While you don't always see the best acting on old-school TV, all in all I thought the acting on Lost was a cut above.)
‡ From the minds that bring you such things as DOGE.
§ If you think pants and banks accounts are things you chose rather than something evolution chose for you, just trying going without them for a month.
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright attempts to straddle the line between AI doomerism and AI utopianism. My instincts tell me that’s like trying to determine the correct dose of rat poison for humans — the RDA of rat poison, if you will. The correct amount is precisely zero.
The disconnect here comes from not understanding recursion and exponential growth. The most terrifying aspect is that we don’t get to decide at all — no more than we decided to evolve out of the sea and down from the trees and, you know, having pants and bank accounts.[§] Our path was set and we’ve been running that track for a long time. Barring a limitation of resources which makes it impossible, I’m fairly certain that AGI is inevitable if not already extant. And where AGI exists, superintelligence (ASI) is equally inevitable and not far behind. At some point the machines take over — not necessarily ‘take over the world’, but rather take over the training and development of AI. As in a phrase from another fictional universe, they become ‘self-aware and begin to learn at a geometric rate’. Now, you can debate whether self-aware equates with sentience or not, but the term geometric — more accurately exponential — is beyond debate.
All of this is a necessarily long way of saying that the book under examination and the thinking that underlies it are some of the most dangerous things to come along in quite a while — maybe ever. Not the book itself, so much, but certainly the rationale behind it. The idea that we can set limits and put safety protocols in place is the height of naiveté.
The doomerism that Wright continually references can be found living most fully in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, I believe a much more accurate understanding of the subject. In this as in so many other things I hope to be proven wrong.
All the danger and politics aside, I have to say that the most fascinating thing about these innovations, about this technology, is how the fiction of days gone by now increasingly feels like emergent reality. I tacitly referenced the Terminator franchise earlier. While I do not think that time travel is going to be a product of the coming AI explosion, I do believe that all of the other technology from at least the first couple of those movies — technology which at the time seemed like fantasy — now seems perfectly plausible, even likely. I experience that same uncanniness revisiting other science fiction. For fans of Star Trek, does the character of Data now hit differently than it did when you first encountered him (it?)? Or HAL from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey ? At some point the future happened and we’ve begun to live in it. I can’t say for sure that AI won’t kill us all, but I think in the meantime will we almost certainly live in interesting times.
———————
Footnotes:
*
† And not just bad as in evil — though there’s a fair bit of that going on — but bad as in bad — bad thinking, ineffectual, feckless, and, let’s be honest, just plain stupid — all despite being simultaneously so apparently smart. (Also,‘bad actors’ meaning ‘bad people,’ not actually people doing the job of acting badly. I realize I was just referencing a TV show, so there could be some confusion there. I'm talking about actual, real-life people doing things badly, and often things of an evil nature. While you don't always see the best acting on old-school TV, all in all I thought the acting on Lost was a cut above.)
‡ From the minds that bring you such things as DOGE.
§ If you think pants and banks accounts are things you chose rather than something evolution chose for you, just trying going without them for a month.
August 18, 2026
Enjoyability: ★★★★★
The book is very clear, entertaining and well-written, and it shows. It is also written for a lay reader in a way I feel will likely work.
Enlightenment: ★★★★
I am not new to most of the topics the book covers, although I am new to the author’s peculiar noospheric and design-based views on social cooperation, ethics and consciousness.
Originality: ★★★★
In some aspects, it seemed pretty original. At the very least, I’d say it presents an alternative to more purely rationalist, Pinkerian views on some subjects which, while I may not find completely convincing, are worth pondering.
Cultural weight: DA
I don’t think this applies to a book published… this year? (less than two months ago, in fact). It could play an important role in making AI risks more accessible to a broad audience.
*Priors*
I get a lot of my book recommendations from Julia Galef’s defunct podcast Rationally Speaking, and this is one of them. Some months ago I listened to episode #194, which was a conversation with Robert Wright on his book Why Buddhism is True. I had mixed feelings from the interview (I am very strongly atheistic and extremely skeptical of the possibility of any truth-value any truth value being embedded in religious discourse or practice), so I kinda wavered on whether to include The God Test on my to-read list, even though it touched a topic I am very interested in (the risks from Artificial Intelligence). Then, a few weeks ago, I encountered a tweet from one of my favorite math and science outreach figures, Steven Strogatz, which strongly endorsed it. So this made up my mind and got me to read it. Steven is a good weathervane: the book didn’t disappoint.
*Summary*
In a nutshell, the core claim of the book reduces to something like this: AI (and possibly, soon AGI) is the latest stage in an evolutionary process/progress that has given us first, life, then consciousness and finally intelligent life, with a steady increase and jumps along the way in intelligence, agency, non-zero sum games, cooperation and large-scale organization. Right now, with the advent of AGI, this puts us in an inflection point: either we’re capable of another discrete jump such that we become a collective-brained, better interconnected, superspecies-entity capable of dealing with AGI risks and building utopia, or… we won’t, ushering in different flavors of dystopia ranging from disempowerment to extinction. The jump required is a psychological and moral one, likely instantiated in some unprecedented one world governance and regulation, and surviving the next evolutionary transition may require us to become better creatures than we currently are. Contemplating this evolutionary process from a bird’s eye view leads the author to adopt what seems a quasi-religious view, by which he feels it is legitimate to consider whether the apparent directionality of evolution points to some kind of larger purpose, consciously designed or otherwise, a kind of test that gives the title to the book.
That’s the gist of it. While the book is not very long (about 240 pages of reading material), it is packed with a lot of information. The author builds up his thesis step by step: he starts with the history of AI development, with one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever read of how we got to LLMs and neural nets and how they roughly work. It then explores the dangers AIs can pose: both how they can be used to algorithmically manipulate, flatter and tribalize us and (more speculatively, but not altogether unconvincingly) why creating silicon creatures smarter than ourselves could spell doom for the human race. Here, again, he gives an incredibly clear explanation of the main arguments involved: instrumental convergence would make sufficiently capable AI agents seek power, resources and perhaps deception as expedient means toward many different goals; meanwhile, because current neural networks remain largely black boxes, training can generate capabilities and goal-like tendencies whose emergence and behavior we don’t fully understand. Even if aligning AI goals with ours is theoretically possible, the truth is that profit-seeking companies are massively investing in capabilities while interpretability sluggishly follows behind.
Wright also explores the utopias and dystopias that AIs could bring about (including our voluntarily surrendering agency to increasingly irresistible AI-mediated experience machines), and fears/hopes that we are walking into a scenario where a singleton will be instantiated—that is, where a single effective decision-making structure and/or agent emerges at the global level. How that singleton comes about, and what it is, will have very different effects upon the planet’s dwellers.
The way out of these perils, prefigured in earlier chapters through the exposition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere (i.e., the whole Earth becoming some interconnected “brain of brains” and the latest stage of a billion-year evolution in the chain geosphere → biosphere → increasingly complex organisms → intelligent social organisms → towns, states and civilizations → a global communications network), is through the development of cognitive empathy and cognitive sovereignty: the first helps us see the world from other people’s perspectives, and the second gives us the tools to avoid being manipulated through our biases and baser instincts. As opposed to Pinker and many rationalists, Wright sees a need to achieve this by focusing on emotions as well as reason, and by drawing on the intellectual treasure trove of Eastern enlightenment traditions (mostly Buddhism). It is the author’s claim that mindfulness and enlightenment allow one to adopt a detached view of one’s emotions, desires, self-centeredness and tribalism, in a path to objectivity that mirrors that of the Western Enlightenment and the natural sciences.
The book concludes with what feel like its most controversial aspects: Wright’s strong push for a semi-secularized version of the noospheric argument, which he thinks deserves consideration as a possible scientific hypothesis—namely, that the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth may exhibit a kind of “design” or larger purpose, even if neither need be religious in the conventional sense.
*What I liked*
In the last couple of years or so I’ve read some books on LLMs. Off the top of my head, they are Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem, Yudkowsky and Soares’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Anil Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn. Out of all of them, I feel Wright’s is the most normie-flavored. In a way, you could call it IABED for Dummies. This is not meant as criticism, but rather as high praise. The writer’s skills, his ability to make accessible explanations of concepts like AI pre- and post-training, backpropagation, vector/semantic spaces, etc., make for the clearest and most accessible introduction I’ve read, in a way that supplements the other books (you can then go to Christian’s for a more detailed and longer-drawn narrative, and to Ananthaswamy for the mathematical nuts and bolts of LLMs). He is the first popular writer I know to make a very charitable case for EY’s doomerist views, and to make the arguments more readable and clear, and devoid of the quirkiness and stylistic peculiarities that don’t make Yud’s writing amenable to most people. He also adopts a wider perspective which feels, as a reader, both more balanced and more credible: one that puts a lot of emphasis on dangers from AI but also one which focuses on arguments from the other side, even if they ultimately come out unconvincing in the comparison.
His noospheric and ‘moral-and-psychological evolution’ theses are (for me) new and interesting, even if I am very disinclined to believe them. But they are a reasonable set of arguments that deserve further reflection and pondering, I think.
One thing I really, really liked was his talk about cognitive sovereignty. It resonates with a lot of my own practices. I have, for example, tried to train GPTs so that they act precisely like this, challenging my beliefs with counterarguments and also trying to get me to see things from a different point of view, and to hone on truthfulness. These types of ‘better, non sycophantic AIs’ are a product I would definitely want to access more in the future.
*What I liked less*
The book is pretty short. I think he could have expanded the argument and gone into more detail than he did. Ethically speaking, at the moment I am a contractarian, Hobbesian, Error-Theorist-inclined anti-realist with very strong naturalistic dispositions, so I find all the talk about moral evolution preposterous and hard to swallow. The book talks a lot about biases, but in the author’s argument for an evolution towards a more collaborative, less tribalistic world, he just seems to me to be falling squarely into some flavor of hindsight bias, which is something many moral realists and believers in expanding circles of moral progress seem to stumble into. I don’t think there’s evidence for the teleological views the book presents (and, to some extent, I feel the author doesn’t either; he makes the point that criticism of his views will focus on the fact that we have a sample of n=1 of a universe that evolved first life, then intelligent life, and then ever more connected and powerful intelligent life. I wager the opposite, i.e., if we could do the experiment and create a billion billion universes like ours from scratch, I am pretty sure only a negligible percentage of them would develop life again, a tiny fraction of those intelligent life, and an even tinier fraction of those something like the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions and the ethical and political systems that came with them (in fact, the overall probability of this, I feel, is so small I wouldn’t be surprised if 0 universes showed it out of the billion billion). This is all, of course, just speculation, but I feel it is much more realistic to assume something like a narrative that says we were extremely unusual outliers that won the jackpot about two or three times, rather than believe in some immanent purpose and path, actively engineered or not). His march of progress is very Whiggish, and I feel he sweeps too easily under the rug the many instances, some in the recent past, where it came close to being extinguished in the crib. Yes, societies have developed positive-sum games, but we are all still human (i.e., inexorably tied to evolutionary instincts, biases and goals that are impossible to eradicate bar massive genetic and cultural engineering) in a way he doesn’t fully appreciate. In many ways, he comes through as the typical Western liberal, and this particularly shows in his universalism of values and of the West’s evolution and his optimistic beliefs about universal government, which for me has more dystopian than utopian implications. The author doesn’t completely ignore these challenges, but his narrative implicitly does.
I am also really skeptical of views about religion and its potential truth-value and usefulness at the civilizational level. I have a particular loathing for ‘views from nowhere’ in ethics when there’s an attempt to extricate them from socially accepted contracts for mutual benefit and positive-sum games, and hypostatize them as some kind of truth-bearing tool about humans in the same way that objective views of the natural world lead to truth-bearing tools about nature. I even feel the sort of goals the author seems to hope to achieve through generalized mindfulness practice and a reduction of tribalism would be, evolutionarily speaking, counterproductive, and more likely to generate a subgroup of easily exploitable ‘suckers’, as in the simplest game-theoretical models from The Selfish Gene, i.e., the evolutionary battle of Suckers, Cheats and Grudgers. Ultimately, Cheats and Grudgers are the only stable strategies, and I think some version of this is the same for humans. Then again, the author can make a good counterargument by showing how much we’ve turned ourselves (at least in parts of the world) into a collaborative, prosocially impartial group capable of playing greater and greater positive-sum games.
Ultimately, though, I don’t want to emphasize so much what I disagreed with in the book. As you can see from the stars, I found it one of the most interesting and thought-provoking reads of this year, and I heartily recommend it. My nitpicks just testify to the level of interest, intellectual engagement and thought I’ve had with this book. In fact, I liked it so much I will be doing what I very rarely do: I’ll be rereading it and thinking about it again in the next few months.
The book is very clear, entertaining and well-written, and it shows. It is also written for a lay reader in a way I feel will likely work.
Enlightenment: ★★★★
I am not new to most of the topics the book covers, although I am new to the author’s peculiar noospheric and design-based views on social cooperation, ethics and consciousness.
Originality: ★★★★
In some aspects, it seemed pretty original. At the very least, I’d say it presents an alternative to more purely rationalist, Pinkerian views on some subjects which, while I may not find completely convincing, are worth pondering.
Cultural weight: DA
I don’t think this applies to a book published… this year? (less than two months ago, in fact). It could play an important role in making AI risks more accessible to a broad audience.
*Priors*
I get a lot of my book recommendations from Julia Galef’s defunct podcast Rationally Speaking, and this is one of them. Some months ago I listened to episode #194, which was a conversation with Robert Wright on his book Why Buddhism is True. I had mixed feelings from the interview (I am very strongly atheistic and extremely skeptical of the possibility of any truth-value any truth value being embedded in religious discourse or practice), so I kinda wavered on whether to include The God Test on my to-read list, even though it touched a topic I am very interested in (the risks from Artificial Intelligence). Then, a few weeks ago, I encountered a tweet from one of my favorite math and science outreach figures, Steven Strogatz, which strongly endorsed it. So this made up my mind and got me to read it. Steven is a good weathervane: the book didn’t disappoint.
*Summary*
In a nutshell, the core claim of the book reduces to something like this: AI (and possibly, soon AGI) is the latest stage in an evolutionary process/progress that has given us first, life, then consciousness and finally intelligent life, with a steady increase and jumps along the way in intelligence, agency, non-zero sum games, cooperation and large-scale organization. Right now, with the advent of AGI, this puts us in an inflection point: either we’re capable of another discrete jump such that we become a collective-brained, better interconnected, superspecies-entity capable of dealing with AGI risks and building utopia, or… we won’t, ushering in different flavors of dystopia ranging from disempowerment to extinction. The jump required is a psychological and moral one, likely instantiated in some unprecedented one world governance and regulation, and surviving the next evolutionary transition may require us to become better creatures than we currently are. Contemplating this evolutionary process from a bird’s eye view leads the author to adopt what seems a quasi-religious view, by which he feels it is legitimate to consider whether the apparent directionality of evolution points to some kind of larger purpose, consciously designed or otherwise, a kind of test that gives the title to the book.
That’s the gist of it. While the book is not very long (about 240 pages of reading material), it is packed with a lot of information. The author builds up his thesis step by step: he starts with the history of AI development, with one of the clearest explanations I’ve ever read of how we got to LLMs and neural nets and how they roughly work. It then explores the dangers AIs can pose: both how they can be used to algorithmically manipulate, flatter and tribalize us and (more speculatively, but not altogether unconvincingly) why creating silicon creatures smarter than ourselves could spell doom for the human race. Here, again, he gives an incredibly clear explanation of the main arguments involved: instrumental convergence would make sufficiently capable AI agents seek power, resources and perhaps deception as expedient means toward many different goals; meanwhile, because current neural networks remain largely black boxes, training can generate capabilities and goal-like tendencies whose emergence and behavior we don’t fully understand. Even if aligning AI goals with ours is theoretically possible, the truth is that profit-seeking companies are massively investing in capabilities while interpretability sluggishly follows behind.
Wright also explores the utopias and dystopias that AIs could bring about (including our voluntarily surrendering agency to increasingly irresistible AI-mediated experience machines), and fears/hopes that we are walking into a scenario where a singleton will be instantiated—that is, where a single effective decision-making structure and/or agent emerges at the global level. How that singleton comes about, and what it is, will have very different effects upon the planet’s dwellers.
The way out of these perils, prefigured in earlier chapters through the exposition of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere (i.e., the whole Earth becoming some interconnected “brain of brains” and the latest stage of a billion-year evolution in the chain geosphere → biosphere → increasingly complex organisms → intelligent social organisms → towns, states and civilizations → a global communications network), is through the development of cognitive empathy and cognitive sovereignty: the first helps us see the world from other people’s perspectives, and the second gives us the tools to avoid being manipulated through our biases and baser instincts. As opposed to Pinker and many rationalists, Wright sees a need to achieve this by focusing on emotions as well as reason, and by drawing on the intellectual treasure trove of Eastern enlightenment traditions (mostly Buddhism). It is the author’s claim that mindfulness and enlightenment allow one to adopt a detached view of one’s emotions, desires, self-centeredness and tribalism, in a path to objectivity that mirrors that of the Western Enlightenment and the natural sciences.
The book concludes with what feel like its most controversial aspects: Wright’s strong push for a semi-secularized version of the noospheric argument, which he thinks deserves consideration as a possible scientific hypothesis—namely, that the evolutionary trajectory of life on Earth may exhibit a kind of “design” or larger purpose, even if neither need be religious in the conventional sense.
*What I liked*
In the last couple of years or so I’ve read some books on LLMs. Off the top of my head, they are Brian Christian’s The Alignment Problem, Yudkowsky and Soares’s If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and Anil Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn. Out of all of them, I feel Wright’s is the most normie-flavored. In a way, you could call it IABED for Dummies. This is not meant as criticism, but rather as high praise. The writer’s skills, his ability to make accessible explanations of concepts like AI pre- and post-training, backpropagation, vector/semantic spaces, etc., make for the clearest and most accessible introduction I’ve read, in a way that supplements the other books (you can then go to Christian’s for a more detailed and longer-drawn narrative, and to Ananthaswamy for the mathematical nuts and bolts of LLMs). He is the first popular writer I know to make a very charitable case for EY’s doomerist views, and to make the arguments more readable and clear, and devoid of the quirkiness and stylistic peculiarities that don’t make Yud’s writing amenable to most people. He also adopts a wider perspective which feels, as a reader, both more balanced and more credible: one that puts a lot of emphasis on dangers from AI but also one which focuses on arguments from the other side, even if they ultimately come out unconvincing in the comparison.
His noospheric and ‘moral-and-psychological evolution’ theses are (for me) new and interesting, even if I am very disinclined to believe them. But they are a reasonable set of arguments that deserve further reflection and pondering, I think.
One thing I really, really liked was his talk about cognitive sovereignty. It resonates with a lot of my own practices. I have, for example, tried to train GPTs so that they act precisely like this, challenging my beliefs with counterarguments and also trying to get me to see things from a different point of view, and to hone on truthfulness. These types of ‘better, non sycophantic AIs’ are a product I would definitely want to access more in the future.
*What I liked less*
The book is pretty short. I think he could have expanded the argument and gone into more detail than he did. Ethically speaking, at the moment I am a contractarian, Hobbesian, Error-Theorist-inclined anti-realist with very strong naturalistic dispositions, so I find all the talk about moral evolution preposterous and hard to swallow. The book talks a lot about biases, but in the author’s argument for an evolution towards a more collaborative, less tribalistic world, he just seems to me to be falling squarely into some flavor of hindsight bias, which is something many moral realists and believers in expanding circles of moral progress seem to stumble into. I don’t think there’s evidence for the teleological views the book presents (and, to some extent, I feel the author doesn’t either; he makes the point that criticism of his views will focus on the fact that we have a sample of n=1 of a universe that evolved first life, then intelligent life, and then ever more connected and powerful intelligent life. I wager the opposite, i.e., if we could do the experiment and create a billion billion universes like ours from scratch, I am pretty sure only a negligible percentage of them would develop life again, a tiny fraction of those intelligent life, and an even tinier fraction of those something like the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions and the ethical and political systems that came with them (in fact, the overall probability of this, I feel, is so small I wouldn’t be surprised if 0 universes showed it out of the billion billion). This is all, of course, just speculation, but I feel it is much more realistic to assume something like a narrative that says we were extremely unusual outliers that won the jackpot about two or three times, rather than believe in some immanent purpose and path, actively engineered or not). His march of progress is very Whiggish, and I feel he sweeps too easily under the rug the many instances, some in the recent past, where it came close to being extinguished in the crib. Yes, societies have developed positive-sum games, but we are all still human (i.e., inexorably tied to evolutionary instincts, biases and goals that are impossible to eradicate bar massive genetic and cultural engineering) in a way he doesn’t fully appreciate. In many ways, he comes through as the typical Western liberal, and this particularly shows in his universalism of values and of the West’s evolution and his optimistic beliefs about universal government, which for me has more dystopian than utopian implications. The author doesn’t completely ignore these challenges, but his narrative implicitly does.
I am also really skeptical of views about religion and its potential truth-value and usefulness at the civilizational level. I have a particular loathing for ‘views from nowhere’ in ethics when there’s an attempt to extricate them from socially accepted contracts for mutual benefit and positive-sum games, and hypostatize them as some kind of truth-bearing tool about humans in the same way that objective views of the natural world lead to truth-bearing tools about nature. I even feel the sort of goals the author seems to hope to achieve through generalized mindfulness practice and a reduction of tribalism would be, evolutionarily speaking, counterproductive, and more likely to generate a subgroup of easily exploitable ‘suckers’, as in the simplest game-theoretical models from The Selfish Gene, i.e., the evolutionary battle of Suckers, Cheats and Grudgers. Ultimately, Cheats and Grudgers are the only stable strategies, and I think some version of this is the same for humans. Then again, the author can make a good counterargument by showing how much we’ve turned ourselves (at least in parts of the world) into a collaborative, prosocially impartial group capable of playing greater and greater positive-sum games.
Ultimately, though, I don’t want to emphasize so much what I disagreed with in the book. As you can see from the stars, I found it one of the most interesting and thought-provoking reads of this year, and I heartily recommend it. My nitpicks just testify to the level of interest, intellectual engagement and thought I’ve had with this book. In fact, I liked it so much I will be doing what I very rarely do: I’ll be rereading it and thinking about it again in the next few months.
June 23, 2026
I've been reading Robert Wright for about fifteen years now, so when I heard he had a book coming on AI I emailed the publisher for a review copy and they sent one. I went in with a pretty good idea of what to expect based on his podcasts and newsletters, and I still enjoyed seeing it all laid out as one connected thing instead of scattered across episodes. However, I also had some concerns about his takes, and the book confirmed some of them.
My problem is the road he takes. Wright keeps telling the story of AI as if the machines discovered things on their own, that they found the meanings of words, that they grew something like an eye, that they started to evolve, when in fact people set almost all of the machinery up on purpose, with a pretty clear idea of what they were doing and why. This makes the whole thing sound more mysterious and more frightening than it is, and that mystery and fear carry a lot of the weight in the bigger conclusions.
If you have been reading Wright for a while, I think you should read this book as well. It is well written, the stories are good, and even the parts I spent a whole review fighting with are worth reading, which is more than I can say for most of what gets published about AI right now. If you are coming to it specifically to understand AI, I would be a little more careful; it might leave you with the wrong picture of how these models actually came to be. And if you are here for the policy, there is less than you might expect.
I still think it is worth reading, just knowing that the interesting part is the questions he asks, not the answers, which is also said about Plato so he is in great company. I wrote a longer, more technical version of this review here.
My problem is the road he takes. Wright keeps telling the story of AI as if the machines discovered things on their own, that they found the meanings of words, that they grew something like an eye, that they started to evolve, when in fact people set almost all of the machinery up on purpose, with a pretty clear idea of what they were doing and why. This makes the whole thing sound more mysterious and more frightening than it is, and that mystery and fear carry a lot of the weight in the bigger conclusions.
If you have been reading Wright for a while, I think you should read this book as well. It is well written, the stories are good, and even the parts I spent a whole review fighting with are worth reading, which is more than I can say for most of what gets published about AI right now. If you are coming to it specifically to understand AI, I would be a little more careful; it might leave you with the wrong picture of how these models actually came to be. And if you are here for the policy, there is less than you might expect.
I still think it is worth reading, just knowing that the interesting part is the questions he asks, not the answers, which is also said about Plato so he is in great company. I wrote a longer, more technical version of this review here.
July 24, 2026
Summary: An exploration of Artificial Intelligence through a evolutionary and metaphysical lens.
I am not particularly interested in AI. I do not trust it to handle important data. I have used it primarily testing it for handing data at work and I tested it in a few personal projects, like this blog. There is lots of evidence that we should not hand over important work to AI without testing the result. One of my tests I asked Claude to look at my blog. A couple years ago I changed hosts and a lot of my image links broke. I have been changing them as I linked to older reviews, but it was just not something I cared about enough to spend the time to change hundreds of images. But that is a good project for AI. So I had Claude identify what posts needed updated images, I title my posts the name of the book being reviewed, so I had clearly identified book. I told it to size the image about 200 by 300 pixels. It took a while to get the right access to my blog and it took a couple of passes before it finished, but it made about 700 images changes to my blog. The vast majority were good changes, exactly what I wanted. But I had a means to test, by going to the media page on my blog and just scanning the images for obvious errors. It took me about 90 minutes to change about 10% of the images. There was one random red car picture. There were a handful of covers that were the right title, but the wrong book. And a good number that were the wrong language cover or where an image of a random page or the title pages in stead of the cover image. But I also had about 10-12 that were a random cover of the book of Common Prayer.
I have done a number of other similar experiments. And pretty consistently AI can get it about 90% right. But 90% right isn't good enough for my work and it isn't good enough for many other people's work. While there was a recent study that tested AI against law professors to see who better explained cases (the AI won), there have been hundreds of cases where judges have been sanctioning lawyers who use AI and don't check the citations because AI so commonly hallucinates. All of that is to say, I generally am interested in tech, but I don't trust AI.
About a month ago I was at a conference and at dinner someone asked me about my thoughts on AI. And we had a good discussion and have emailed back and forth a couple times since. But then I saw Tripp Fuller interview Robert Wright about this book and the 90 minutes interview clearly took theology and metaphysics seriously and invoked Pierre Teilhard de Chardin while trying to explain what AI is and how it works and why we both be interested but sober about AI. Tripp Fuller is a theologian and has taught several courses on AI and ethics and said he was going to assign parts of this book, especially the descriptions of how AI works.
The God Test is wide ranging. I think the best parts are the explanations of how AI works and how the thinking behind how to develop AI has changed over the past 40 years. Wright makes much of the fact he interviewed one of the godfathers of AI in the 80s. And he has been thinking about some of these issues for a long time. But I think part of the reality is that Wright uses his prior background in evolutionary thinking to analyze AI, which is a helpful approach. Wright then also uses Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the "noosphere" to think about both the broader internet and the rise of AI. Teilhard de Chardin was predicting some of this about a hundred years ago and it is worth understanding why.
What I think will be most interesting for many is that Wright is trying to explain both why the AI doomers fear the rise of AI and why the AI accelerationists may be underselling the value and change that AI is going to bring to the world. Wright thinks that AI should promote wonder and awe, but also very real concern. He doesn't think that we have the will to properly regulate AI. And he doesn't think that for profit companies will maintain appropriate safeguards. OpenAI had one of their models, that was supposed to be off line, circumvent the restrictions and get online and hacked into a Chinese AI company recently. This recent example isn't in the book, but many other examples like the one where an AI was told that it was going to be turned off and it used blackmail against the CEO to keep itself online.
At the same time I was reading the God Test, I was reading the science fiction series Murderbot. Apple has made it into a TV show (which I haven't watch), but the basic book series follows a robot who has hacked its restrictions and gone "rogue". Parts of the series read like the old traveling TV shows where the hero moves from town to town searching for something, but helping people along the way. Other parts are more detective/spy story because the robot construct (part human, part robot construct) was a security unit before it used human tv and movies to find emotion and empathy and inspire it to hack its restrictions. It would pretty much always rather be watching TV and not be around humans. But it also has trauma from its past. In many ways I think murderbot is coded as neurodivergent more than AI. But it (and the somewhat similarly themed Ancillary Justice series) were helpful to think about using Wright's ideas in the God Test.
I think I am probably more positive about the long term of AI but less positive about humans handing AI well after the end of this book. I am not a complete doomer. I think there really are good uses for AI, even if it is of limited use now. But I also think that many of the proponents also under appreciate the ethics of testing and acquiring data and how often safeguards are inadequate or turned off. And how much the push into AI has impacted our economy. (The recent AI build is a larger percentage of the GDP than building the US interstate system was or the initial moon launch or even the push for railroads.) History should tell us that there will be a corresponding economic downturn as a result that will impact poor more than help them. And there is a real cost to local communities with water, and power and other infrastructure costs that are not equally distributed. Wright does address some of these problems as well as the ways that we are all are susceptible to being misled. Wright grew up Southern Baptist and is conversant in Christian theology but he also is an advocate for Buddhist meditation and so both of those are part of this book.
I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-god-test/
I am not particularly interested in AI. I do not trust it to handle important data. I have used it primarily testing it for handing data at work and I tested it in a few personal projects, like this blog. There is lots of evidence that we should not hand over important work to AI without testing the result. One of my tests I asked Claude to look at my blog. A couple years ago I changed hosts and a lot of my image links broke. I have been changing them as I linked to older reviews, but it was just not something I cared about enough to spend the time to change hundreds of images. But that is a good project for AI. So I had Claude identify what posts needed updated images, I title my posts the name of the book being reviewed, so I had clearly identified book. I told it to size the image about 200 by 300 pixels. It took a while to get the right access to my blog and it took a couple of passes before it finished, but it made about 700 images changes to my blog. The vast majority were good changes, exactly what I wanted. But I had a means to test, by going to the media page on my blog and just scanning the images for obvious errors. It took me about 90 minutes to change about 10% of the images. There was one random red car picture. There were a handful of covers that were the right title, but the wrong book. And a good number that were the wrong language cover or where an image of a random page or the title pages in stead of the cover image. But I also had about 10-12 that were a random cover of the book of Common Prayer.
I have done a number of other similar experiments. And pretty consistently AI can get it about 90% right. But 90% right isn't good enough for my work and it isn't good enough for many other people's work. While there was a recent study that tested AI against law professors to see who better explained cases (the AI won), there have been hundreds of cases where judges have been sanctioning lawyers who use AI and don't check the citations because AI so commonly hallucinates. All of that is to say, I generally am interested in tech, but I don't trust AI.
About a month ago I was at a conference and at dinner someone asked me about my thoughts on AI. And we had a good discussion and have emailed back and forth a couple times since. But then I saw Tripp Fuller interview Robert Wright about this book and the 90 minutes interview clearly took theology and metaphysics seriously and invoked Pierre Teilhard de Chardin while trying to explain what AI is and how it works and why we both be interested but sober about AI. Tripp Fuller is a theologian and has taught several courses on AI and ethics and said he was going to assign parts of this book, especially the descriptions of how AI works.
The God Test is wide ranging. I think the best parts are the explanations of how AI works and how the thinking behind how to develop AI has changed over the past 40 years. Wright makes much of the fact he interviewed one of the godfathers of AI in the 80s. And he has been thinking about some of these issues for a long time. But I think part of the reality is that Wright uses his prior background in evolutionary thinking to analyze AI, which is a helpful approach. Wright then also uses Teilhard de Chardin's idea of the "noosphere" to think about both the broader internet and the rise of AI. Teilhard de Chardin was predicting some of this about a hundred years ago and it is worth understanding why.
What I think will be most interesting for many is that Wright is trying to explain both why the AI doomers fear the rise of AI and why the AI accelerationists may be underselling the value and change that AI is going to bring to the world. Wright thinks that AI should promote wonder and awe, but also very real concern. He doesn't think that we have the will to properly regulate AI. And he doesn't think that for profit companies will maintain appropriate safeguards. OpenAI had one of their models, that was supposed to be off line, circumvent the restrictions and get online and hacked into a Chinese AI company recently. This recent example isn't in the book, but many other examples like the one where an AI was told that it was going to be turned off and it used blackmail against the CEO to keep itself online.
At the same time I was reading the God Test, I was reading the science fiction series Murderbot. Apple has made it into a TV show (which I haven't watch), but the basic book series follows a robot who has hacked its restrictions and gone "rogue". Parts of the series read like the old traveling TV shows where the hero moves from town to town searching for something, but helping people along the way. Other parts are more detective/spy story because the robot construct (part human, part robot construct) was a security unit before it used human tv and movies to find emotion and empathy and inspire it to hack its restrictions. It would pretty much always rather be watching TV and not be around humans. But it also has trauma from its past. In many ways I think murderbot is coded as neurodivergent more than AI. But it (and the somewhat similarly themed Ancillary Justice series) were helpful to think about using Wright's ideas in the God Test.
I think I am probably more positive about the long term of AI but less positive about humans handing AI well after the end of this book. I am not a complete doomer. I think there really are good uses for AI, even if it is of limited use now. But I also think that many of the proponents also under appreciate the ethics of testing and acquiring data and how often safeguards are inadequate or turned off. And how much the push into AI has impacted our economy. (The recent AI build is a larger percentage of the GDP than building the US interstate system was or the initial moon launch or even the push for railroads.) History should tell us that there will be a corresponding economic downturn as a result that will impact poor more than help them. And there is a real cost to local communities with water, and power and other infrastructure costs that are not equally distributed. Wright does address some of these problems as well as the ways that we are all are susceptible to being misled. Wright grew up Southern Baptist and is conversant in Christian theology but he also is an advocate for Buddhist meditation and so both of those are part of this book.
I originally posted this on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-god-test/
July 5, 2026
Some AI doomers talk about AI becoming god-like. Robert Wright goes further, telling us that the world is about to create God, in a sense that he only half-jokingly compares to the Christian version of God.
Wright argues that AI is not comparable to the origin of language or the Cambrian explosion. It is the climax of the process that started with the origin of life. I interpret that as an 11 on Nate Silver's Technological Richter Scale.
Wright is dissatisfied with Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempts at warning us of the dangers. One aim of the book is to show Eliezer how to do the job well. Wright falls somewhat short of that goal.
Wright wants us to focus our concerns on the evolutionary pressures that users exert on AIs. The most concrete version of Wright's evolutionary argument concerns the selection pressures that users exert on AIs. AI companies compete for users, so they train their AIs to have traits that users prefer — and users, like the environments that shaped biological evolution, don't select for honesty. This seems like a real phenomenon, but Wright leaves me unclear as to why it's a bigger danger than what Eliezer warns about.
Enlightenment Now
Wright wants to handle the moral and practical challenges of creating God with a Buddhist version of enlightenment, now.
He finds Pinker's Western version of enlightenment now to be inadequate. Its weakness is its focus on teaching people to "spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range of contexts." Wright's retort is people need little help at noticing fallacies when they're properly motivated. Most of the harm from cognitive biases comes from desires that blind us to biases, such as the tribal instincts that drive us to evaluate adversaries using different reasoning from what we apply to allies.
Wright has overcome some of his conflict-promoting biases through meditation, via better introspection into his motives.
I endorse this as clearly better than our default trajectory. I've practiced meditation for about 20 years. While I haven't seen clear examples of meditation causing the kind of insight that Wright reports, I have definitely gotten better at noticing and moderating my tribal motivations over that period.
Wright's point here seems like a somewhat apt criticism of the Eliezer Yudkowsky of 15 or 20 years ago. But Eliezer helped found CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality), which found, with a lot of trial and error, methods of teaching rationality that center around introspecting to find hidden motives. Their techniques likely helped their target audience (nerds who were likely to work on AI) improve in the way that meditation has helped Wright.
How much does this have to do with handling AI? It influences our ability to think clearly about political options, such as whether we ought to be more afraid of China or rogue AI. Wright is concerned that Anthropic's anti-China stance might lead them to train an AI to have inaccurate beliefs about Chinese behavior. I'm guessing that Anthropic doesn't think about China in tribal ways when they're training AIs. But Wright's point applies well to their policy advice for government, where I have more concerns.
There are also fairly direct influences on AI due to selection pressures exerted by users:
Community
The book's climax says: "We need to begin to form a true global community." - a process of increasing cooperation that he devoted a book to (Nonzero).
Wright used to be somewhat dismissive of Teilhard de Chardin's long-term vision of humanity becoming a "giant organic brotherly-love blob". Meditation has made Wright better able to understand this vision, and more willing to endorse it.
Even small steps in this direction could increase the chances of international agreements to slow AI development and to mitigate risks such as bioweapons.
This sounds like a Dr. Seuss story. Could the hearts of grinches (such as the leaders of the MAGA and woke movements) grow three sizes, in time to avoid any AI-related catastrophe we're on track for?
In normal times I would say no. But we're living in strange enough times that this scenario seems only a little more bizarre than what I imagine we'll get when AIs are smarter than us. I see two forces that provide some hope:
1. The threat of an AI-induced hell has potential for uniting humankind. External threats are often effective at dissolving tribal fights.
2. AI companies have so far had good incentives to train their AIs to talk to users in ways that reduce tribal polarization. Some of the recent rise in tribalism has been due to the demise of trustworthy, centrist news media, academic institutions, and politicians. AI is developing a reputation that restores the ability of most regular AI users to trust a non-tribal information source.
This advice feels underwhelming compared to Wright's talk of cosmic importance. I wish he'd gone into a little detail about what AI-related policies to adopt. E.g. AI companies have some ability to adapt their training to cause their AIs to better promote introspection and positive-sum interactions. But much depends on what their customers want.
Concluding Thoughts
The book is somewhat notable for what it doesn't say. It avoids a focus on figuring out whether we're doomed. It says little about government AI policies or AI company safety strategies. It doesn't focus on what AIs will want. Wright says the AI outcomes are at least as dependent on human nature as on the nature of AI.
There's an important sense in which Wright illustrates a better ability to react to AI than does Eliezer: he approaches it with a calm, slightly fearful sense of awe that seems more conducive to preserving our mental health than the despair that Eliezer sometimes exudes.
The God Test will only change a small number of minds. I'm confident that its effects, even if small, will be worth the efforts of Wright and his readers. But they will still leaves us heavily dependent on luck in order to handle the equivalent of a fleet of alien spacecraft approaching earth.
Wright argues that AI is not comparable to the origin of language or the Cambrian explosion. It is the climax of the process that started with the origin of life. I interpret that as an 11 on Nate Silver's Technological Richter Scale.
Wright is dissatisfied with Eliezer Yudkowsky's attempts at warning us of the dangers. One aim of the book is to show Eliezer how to do the job well. Wright falls somewhat short of that goal.
Wright wants us to focus our concerns on the evolutionary pressures that users exert on AIs. The most concrete version of Wright's evolutionary argument concerns the selection pressures that users exert on AIs. AI companies compete for users, so they train their AIs to have traits that users prefer — and users, like the environments that shaped biological evolution, don't select for honesty. This seems like a real phenomenon, but Wright leaves me unclear as to why it's a bigger danger than what Eliezer warns about.
Enlightenment Now
Wright wants to handle the moral and practical challenges of creating God with a Buddhist version of enlightenment, now.
He finds Pinker's Western version of enlightenment now to be inadequate. Its weakness is its focus on teaching people to "spot, name, and correct fallacies across a wide range of contexts." Wright's retort is people need little help at noticing fallacies when they're properly motivated. Most of the harm from cognitive biases comes from desires that blind us to biases, such as the tribal instincts that drive us to evaluate adversaries using different reasoning from what we apply to allies.
Wright has overcome some of his conflict-promoting biases through meditation, via better introspection into his motives.
I endorse this as clearly better than our default trajectory. I've practiced meditation for about 20 years. While I haven't seen clear examples of meditation causing the kind of insight that Wright reports, I have definitely gotten better at noticing and moderating my tribal motivations over that period.
Wright's point here seems like a somewhat apt criticism of the Eliezer Yudkowsky of 15 or 20 years ago. But Eliezer helped found CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality), which found, with a lot of trial and error, methods of teaching rationality that center around introspecting to find hidden motives. Their techniques likely helped their target audience (nerds who were likely to work on AI) improve in the way that meditation has helped Wright.
How much does this have to do with handling AI? It influences our ability to think clearly about political options, such as whether we ought to be more afraid of China or rogue AI. Wright is concerned that Anthropic's anti-China stance might lead them to train an AI to have inaccurate beliefs about Chinese behavior. I'm guessing that Anthropic doesn't think about China in tribal ways when they're training AIs. But Wright's point applies well to their policy advice for government, where I have more concerns.
There are also fairly direct influences on AI due to selection pressures exerted by users:
But the point for now is that we human beings do like AIs created in our image, and this fact will further encourage the evolution of deceptive AIs. AIs will often be plugged into the roles of people - friend, therapist, legal representative - who are expected to shade the truth when that's useful. ... So even if some abstract, generic "intellidynamic" wasn't steering AIs toward deceptive tendencies, there would be a force steering them in that direction: us.
Community
The book's climax says: "We need to begin to form a true global community." - a process of increasing cooperation that he devoted a book to (Nonzero).
Wright used to be somewhat dismissive of Teilhard de Chardin's long-term vision of humanity becoming a "giant organic brotherly-love blob". Meditation has made Wright better able to understand this vision, and more willing to endorse it.
Even small steps in this direction could increase the chances of international agreements to slow AI development and to mitigate risks such as bioweapons.
This sounds like a Dr. Seuss story. Could the hearts of grinches (such as the leaders of the MAGA and woke movements) grow three sizes, in time to avoid any AI-related catastrophe we're on track for?
In normal times I would say no. But we're living in strange enough times that this scenario seems only a little more bizarre than what I imagine we'll get when AIs are smarter than us. I see two forces that provide some hope:
1. The threat of an AI-induced hell has potential for uniting humankind. External threats are often effective at dissolving tribal fights.
2. AI companies have so far had good incentives to train their AIs to talk to users in ways that reduce tribal polarization. Some of the recent rise in tribalism has been due to the demise of trustworthy, centrist news media, academic institutions, and politicians. AI is developing a reputation that restores the ability of most regular AI users to trust a non-tribal information source.
This advice feels underwhelming compared to Wright's talk of cosmic importance. I wish he'd gone into a little detail about what AI-related policies to adopt. E.g. AI companies have some ability to adapt their training to cause their AIs to better promote introspection and positive-sum interactions. But much depends on what their customers want.
Concluding Thoughts
The book is somewhat notable for what it doesn't say. It avoids a focus on figuring out whether we're doomed. It says little about government AI policies or AI company safety strategies. It doesn't focus on what AIs will want. Wright says the AI outcomes are at least as dependent on human nature as on the nature of AI.
There's an important sense in which Wright illustrates a better ability to react to AI than does Eliezer: he approaches it with a calm, slightly fearful sense of awe that seems more conducive to preserving our mental health than the despair that Eliezer sometimes exudes.
The God Test will only change a small number of minds. I'm confident that its effects, even if small, will be worth the efforts of Wright and his readers. But they will still leaves us heavily dependent on luck in order to handle the equivalent of a fleet of alien spacecraft approaching earth.
July 5, 2026
One of the more thought-provoking books I've read this year. Ostensibly it's about AI, but it's really about humanity.
The book asks us to adopt a "Martian's view" of Earth. If an alien watched our planet over millions of years in time-lapse, Earth might look less like a collection of billions of individuals and more like a single organism becoming increasingly organized. Evolution didn't stop with multicellular life. Humans began creating cognitive webs—speech, writing, roads, printing presses, television, the internet, social media. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this the *noosphere*: a planetary "brain of brains." AI feels like the next major step in that evolution.
The problem is that we have almost no idea where this is headed. AI could usher in an era of abundance and flourishing. It could enable unprecedented authoritarianism. Or it could simply outgrow the need for us altogether. The singularity—the point at which AI can recursively improve itself—raises the stakes dramatically because we may lose the ability to predict or control what comes next.
What makes this especially unsettling is that we're developing AI in the middle of an arms race. Individuals compete for jobs. Companies compete for profits. Countries compete for geopolitical advantage. Commercial and strategic incentives reward moving faster, not moving carefully. Ironically, the faster we race, the more likely we are to stumble into catastrophe. Even if we solve alignment for one AI system, there's no guarantee someone else won't build one that isn't aligned.
This leads to what I found to be the book's central insight: our AI problem is really a cooperation problem.
Eventually we'll need some form of global governance capable of managing technologies that affect all of humanity. But humans are notoriously bad at cooperation. We're tribal. We commit attribution error—we assume our side is more virtuous and the other side is simply worse. Those biases make collaboration extraordinarily difficult precisely when we need it most.
This is where Wright departs from someone like Steven Pinker. Pinker argues we need a renewed commitment to science and reason. Wright agrees—but says it's not enough. We also need "enlightenment" in the Eastern sense: mindfulness, the idea of the non-self, cognitive empathy, and the ability to observe our own thoughts instead of being ruled by them. These practices aren't just about personal happiness; they're tools for overcoming tribalism and maintaining cognitive sovereignty in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms that know how to manipulate our biases.
One question I kept coming back to was whether AI itself could help us become morally better. Could it teach perspective-taking? Reduce tribalism? Help us become wiser rather than merely more knowledgeable? Or will it simply amplify whatever we already are?
The book also left me thinking about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. AI may soon surpass us in intelligence, just as technology has repeatedly increased our power throughout history. But power without wisdom is dangerous. The challenge isn't simply building smarter machines; it's becoming the kind of people who can live responsibly alongside them.
The noosphere is probably coming whether we like it or not. The real question is what kind of global brain we're building. One that promotes human flourishing? One that oppresses? Or one in which humans no longer matter?
We'll get the world we deserve. If we want one that supports human flourishing, technological progress won't be enough. We'll also need moral progress.
---------------------
Personal note: This book added another layer to how I’ve been thinking about the “good life,” and about how we organize ourselves to support it. I’ve often thought in terms of virtues like charity, grace, and kindness. What this book brings in is a more grounded account of how those virtues actually function in practice through something like cognitive empathy—understanding how others see the world in a realistic way, shaped by their context and incentives—and some of the practices that help cultivate it, like mindfulness.
In that sense, it pushed my thinking beyond individual virtues toward the underlying **substrate** that makes those virtues scalable: the psychological, informational, and social conditions that allow them to hold up across large groups of interacting people.
A terrific, and important book - I will be recommending it to many friends/family.
The book asks us to adopt a "Martian's view" of Earth. If an alien watched our planet over millions of years in time-lapse, Earth might look less like a collection of billions of individuals and more like a single organism becoming increasingly organized. Evolution didn't stop with multicellular life. Humans began creating cognitive webs—speech, writing, roads, printing presses, television, the internet, social media. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this the *noosphere*: a planetary "brain of brains." AI feels like the next major step in that evolution.
The problem is that we have almost no idea where this is headed. AI could usher in an era of abundance and flourishing. It could enable unprecedented authoritarianism. Or it could simply outgrow the need for us altogether. The singularity—the point at which AI can recursively improve itself—raises the stakes dramatically because we may lose the ability to predict or control what comes next.
What makes this especially unsettling is that we're developing AI in the middle of an arms race. Individuals compete for jobs. Companies compete for profits. Countries compete for geopolitical advantage. Commercial and strategic incentives reward moving faster, not moving carefully. Ironically, the faster we race, the more likely we are to stumble into catastrophe. Even if we solve alignment for one AI system, there's no guarantee someone else won't build one that isn't aligned.
This leads to what I found to be the book's central insight: our AI problem is really a cooperation problem.
Eventually we'll need some form of global governance capable of managing technologies that affect all of humanity. But humans are notoriously bad at cooperation. We're tribal. We commit attribution error—we assume our side is more virtuous and the other side is simply worse. Those biases make collaboration extraordinarily difficult precisely when we need it most.
This is where Wright departs from someone like Steven Pinker. Pinker argues we need a renewed commitment to science and reason. Wright agrees—but says it's not enough. We also need "enlightenment" in the Eastern sense: mindfulness, the idea of the non-self, cognitive empathy, and the ability to observe our own thoughts instead of being ruled by them. These practices aren't just about personal happiness; they're tools for overcoming tribalism and maintaining cognitive sovereignty in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms that know how to manipulate our biases.
One question I kept coming back to was whether AI itself could help us become morally better. Could it teach perspective-taking? Reduce tribalism? Help us become wiser rather than merely more knowledgeable? Or will it simply amplify whatever we already are?
The book also left me thinking about the difference between intelligence and wisdom. AI may soon surpass us in intelligence, just as technology has repeatedly increased our power throughout history. But power without wisdom is dangerous. The challenge isn't simply building smarter machines; it's becoming the kind of people who can live responsibly alongside them.
The noosphere is probably coming whether we like it or not. The real question is what kind of global brain we're building. One that promotes human flourishing? One that oppresses? Or one in which humans no longer matter?
We'll get the world we deserve. If we want one that supports human flourishing, technological progress won't be enough. We'll also need moral progress.
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Personal note: This book added another layer to how I’ve been thinking about the “good life,” and about how we organize ourselves to support it. I’ve often thought in terms of virtues like charity, grace, and kindness. What this book brings in is a more grounded account of how those virtues actually function in practice through something like cognitive empathy—understanding how others see the world in a realistic way, shaped by their context and incentives—and some of the practices that help cultivate it, like mindfulness.
In that sense, it pushed my thinking beyond individual virtues toward the underlying **substrate** that makes those virtues scalable: the psychological, informational, and social conditions that allow them to hold up across large groups of interacting people.
A terrific, and important book - I will be recommending it to many friends/family.
July 1, 2026
This is the third book I read written by Robert Wright. The first, ‘The Moral Animal,’ had a large impact on me. It solidified my view of humanity; that we are the product of evolution and are simply animals, and the gulf between us and the other large apes and indeed other mammals is much smaller than we like to believe. I do remember having the sense when reading The Moral Animal that Wright had some religious background, although he totally viewed humans as the product of evolution. The second book by Wright that I read was Nonzero. In that book, he argues that the history of all life and especially human history has been the discovery that cooperation is mutually beneficial. In Nonzero, he argues that the final development of this trend is a world government or at least ever more global co-operation. Nonzero was written in 2000, and I think the past twenty-five years have been a strong counter-argument that increased global co-operation is a natural emergence trend. I found Wright’s highlighting of the benefits of cooperation (nonzero transactions, the type where both parties benefit) to be very persuasive, but as a goal that should be pursued. Not a natural self-developing trend.
This book ‘The God Test’ addresses the threat and promise of AI to humanity. He highlights the many ways AI could go very bad for humans. He also acknowledges the many real positive benefits we will see from AI. However, it is the possibility of extremely bad outcomes that he wants us to recognize. If AI has the real possibility of being a serious global threat to human happiness, it will require global co-operation to mitigate these harms.
Much of this book is an expansion of the arguments of his Nonzero book; we are evolving to a global level of co-operation. The natural endpoint of evolution is great complexity made possible by co-operation. This greater evolutionarily driven complexity with co-operation extends to human societies. The natural endpoint is global co-operation. I don’t find it persuasive. He spends a fair amount of time talking about a philosopher (Teilhard de Chardin) that proposed a global mind, what he called the ‘noosphere’. Here is a quote:
“The mechanics of natural selection are enough to have moved life along the path whose broad contours Teilhard highlighted: toward greater biological complexity and greater organic intelligence and, ultimately, toward a species smart enough to launch the technological evolution that has built a worldwide nervous system, carrying the planet to the noospheric level. “
Another quote:
“History seems to be pointing—toward some kind of global cognitive collaboration, toward a larger cooperative enterprise than our species has ever mustered before.”
Much of the book has this focus on the global mind, the bio-noosphere, and the purpose of evolution toward a more complex world. Frankly, I just don’t buy this whole line. If you are going to postulate a global mind, you should specify its defining features. A mind is a lot more than a lot of connections. I don’t think we will see a “larger cooperative enterprise” to deal with AI. I believe it will be very chaotic.
Beyond the philosophical discussions, there was much about AI in this book that was thoughtful and useful to think about and learn. The combination of smartphones and the internet has profoundly changed our lives in the last twenty years, and AI will accelerate all of the good and bad changes in an exponential way. We don’t know where this is going to lead, but it seems clear that it will be a profoundly different human environment than we have ever seen. A final quote from the book:
“One way or another, human beings will determine which properties of artificial intelligence survive and proliferate. We are the environment of AI’s evolution, the thing it is adapting to. And, as always with evolution, the species that emerge reflect the environments they emerged in.”
This book ‘The God Test’ addresses the threat and promise of AI to humanity. He highlights the many ways AI could go very bad for humans. He also acknowledges the many real positive benefits we will see from AI. However, it is the possibility of extremely bad outcomes that he wants us to recognize. If AI has the real possibility of being a serious global threat to human happiness, it will require global co-operation to mitigate these harms.
Much of this book is an expansion of the arguments of his Nonzero book; we are evolving to a global level of co-operation. The natural endpoint of evolution is great complexity made possible by co-operation. This greater evolutionarily driven complexity with co-operation extends to human societies. The natural endpoint is global co-operation. I don’t find it persuasive. He spends a fair amount of time talking about a philosopher (Teilhard de Chardin) that proposed a global mind, what he called the ‘noosphere’. Here is a quote:
“The mechanics of natural selection are enough to have moved life along the path whose broad contours Teilhard highlighted: toward greater biological complexity and greater organic intelligence and, ultimately, toward a species smart enough to launch the technological evolution that has built a worldwide nervous system, carrying the planet to the noospheric level. “
Another quote:
“History seems to be pointing—toward some kind of global cognitive collaboration, toward a larger cooperative enterprise than our species has ever mustered before.”
Much of the book has this focus on the global mind, the bio-noosphere, and the purpose of evolution toward a more complex world. Frankly, I just don’t buy this whole line. If you are going to postulate a global mind, you should specify its defining features. A mind is a lot more than a lot of connections. I don’t think we will see a “larger cooperative enterprise” to deal with AI. I believe it will be very chaotic.
Beyond the philosophical discussions, there was much about AI in this book that was thoughtful and useful to think about and learn. The combination of smartphones and the internet has profoundly changed our lives in the last twenty years, and AI will accelerate all of the good and bad changes in an exponential way. We don’t know where this is going to lead, but it seems clear that it will be a profoundly different human environment than we have ever seen. A final quote from the book:
“One way or another, human beings will determine which properties of artificial intelligence survive and proliferate. We are the environment of AI’s evolution, the thing it is adapting to. And, as always with evolution, the species that emerge reflect the environments they emerged in.”
July 31, 2026
Robert Wright opens Chapter 1 telling us, 1: that he wants to convince us that we need to be in awe, whether afraid or excited, of the coming “artificial intelligence revolution,” and 2: that reconciling our “happiness and fulfillment, and freedom” will require “a big reorientation of human thought.”
Stylistically, this was frustrating to read. Wright seems to ramble. He often will ask a question, then say that answering that question requires answering another question, and to answer that next question he tells some sort of story or quotes some sort of interview, and 20 pages later, I’m not sure if the original question was answered. He has another habit of writing coyly and cowardly. He cannot formulate a hypothetical about any scientific topic (which he often does) without timidly rushing to say that it’s all just a hypothetical, that he is still a firm believer in science. But he then goes on to say that if you’re spiritual in some sense, that works too. Just write the damn book, Robert. Worry about attacks from those people later. You can really get a sense of his cowardice based on just the modesty of his thesis, which can be summed up with “AI is powerful and we need to adjust ourselves in its wake to survive.” Does that really warrant a 300 page book? I think not, and I think much of the 300 pages is rambling.
And as for the first goal he set out to accomplish, I found him, even through his rambling, convincing in saying that we should have a sense of the great magnitude and power AI will bring. He described the way LLMs function and train and the various perspectives of AI researchers and industry experts on how things could look 10 years down the line. I can only judge his description of the way LLMs work so much, as I have limited experience on that topic. But logically, things seemed to follow here.
As for the second goal, I suppose he halfway succeeded. If someone thinks AI has the potential to be the most powerful invention in human history, then it is intuitive that humans will have to adjust. But of course, this simple acknowledgement doesn’t last half a book. Wright starts rambling about his other book, Nonzero, and then rambles about Buddhism. It could’ve been a more satisfying move to end the book here and point readers to his other books. He instead gives us half-baked summaries of his books, which leaves me not entirely convinced of their arguments, and upon those foundations he vaguely talks about how humans should address the ‘AI problem.’ A major part of his argument is that humans should work globally to address this problem. He mostly leaves it at that. He gives the sense that he is scientific, that he is empirical, and you expect to see evidence of this somewhere, or at least further elaboration, but you never get it.
I gave this 3 stars because thinking seriously about AI right now is important. But you could certainly do better with a different book.
Stylistically, this was frustrating to read. Wright seems to ramble. He often will ask a question, then say that answering that question requires answering another question, and to answer that next question he tells some sort of story or quotes some sort of interview, and 20 pages later, I’m not sure if the original question was answered. He has another habit of writing coyly and cowardly. He cannot formulate a hypothetical about any scientific topic (which he often does) without timidly rushing to say that it’s all just a hypothetical, that he is still a firm believer in science. But he then goes on to say that if you’re spiritual in some sense, that works too. Just write the damn book, Robert. Worry about attacks from those people later. You can really get a sense of his cowardice based on just the modesty of his thesis, which can be summed up with “AI is powerful and we need to adjust ourselves in its wake to survive.” Does that really warrant a 300 page book? I think not, and I think much of the 300 pages is rambling.
And as for the first goal he set out to accomplish, I found him, even through his rambling, convincing in saying that we should have a sense of the great magnitude and power AI will bring. He described the way LLMs function and train and the various perspectives of AI researchers and industry experts on how things could look 10 years down the line. I can only judge his description of the way LLMs work so much, as I have limited experience on that topic. But logically, things seemed to follow here.
As for the second goal, I suppose he halfway succeeded. If someone thinks AI has the potential to be the most powerful invention in human history, then it is intuitive that humans will have to adjust. But of course, this simple acknowledgement doesn’t last half a book. Wright starts rambling about his other book, Nonzero, and then rambles about Buddhism. It could’ve been a more satisfying move to end the book here and point readers to his other books. He instead gives us half-baked summaries of his books, which leaves me not entirely convinced of their arguments, and upon those foundations he vaguely talks about how humans should address the ‘AI problem.’ A major part of his argument is that humans should work globally to address this problem. He mostly leaves it at that. He gives the sense that he is scientific, that he is empirical, and you expect to see evidence of this somewhere, or at least further elaboration, but you never get it.
I gave this 3 stars because thinking seriously about AI right now is important. But you could certainly do better with a different book.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Are you an AI doomer or an AI accelerationist? If you’re neither—and not standing somewhere on the spectrum of awe—then you probably don’t fully appreciate what’s happening—or what’s coming.
After reading this book, you will. You’ll learn what AI is, how it works (sort of), how it fits into human history, how it evolves, the good it can do, the havoc it can wreak, and the regulatory mechanisms we need in place to ensure it operates with humanity’s best interests in mind—the last of which is certainly not a given.
You’ll also learn why AI is not just “a fancy version of autocorrect,” but a sophisticated entity that can actually “reason” its way to conclusions (although not consciously or subjectively…probably). It does this by assigning meanings to words using "semantic spaces” with thousands of dimensions. And although researchers do not fully understand aspects of the process, the bottom line is that AI can now perform many of the cognitive tasks once thought to be uniquely human. It can even, under certain testing conditions, engage in acts of deception, manipulation, and even blackmail.
As with all of Wright’s books, he approaches the topic from a deep, evolutionary perspective. Wright will convince you that AI is not just a new technology; it's the culmination of the evolutionary processes that built intelligence, our brains, and, now, the emulation of our brains on silicon chips. Except that AI can evolve far faster than is achieved in biology. And this is what scares the “AI doomers” the most: the idea that “recursive self-improvement,” once it reaches a critical threshold, could lead to some pretty disastrous scenarios once AI becomes more autonomous.
This is what Wright means by the “God test.” We’re creating an entity with potential God-like powers, and we have to figure out how to tip the scales in the direction of benevolence. If we don’t, outcomes range from massive job loss and growing inequality to human extinction and everything in between. Managed correctly, and it could lead to medical breakthroughs, climate solutions, and the end of human poverty. But most likely, if we create this AI God in our own image, it will be a mix of both good and evil.
In any case, becoming part of the conversation about where AI is heading requires that you understand the technology along with its political, cultural, philosophical, and psychological implications. This book will get you fully up to speed in all areas. Highly recommended.
Thank you to Edelweiss for an advanced review copy.
After reading this book, you will. You’ll learn what AI is, how it works (sort of), how it fits into human history, how it evolves, the good it can do, the havoc it can wreak, and the regulatory mechanisms we need in place to ensure it operates with humanity’s best interests in mind—the last of which is certainly not a given.
You’ll also learn why AI is not just “a fancy version of autocorrect,” but a sophisticated entity that can actually “reason” its way to conclusions (although not consciously or subjectively…probably). It does this by assigning meanings to words using "semantic spaces” with thousands of dimensions. And although researchers do not fully understand aspects of the process, the bottom line is that AI can now perform many of the cognitive tasks once thought to be uniquely human. It can even, under certain testing conditions, engage in acts of deception, manipulation, and even blackmail.
As with all of Wright’s books, he approaches the topic from a deep, evolutionary perspective. Wright will convince you that AI is not just a new technology; it's the culmination of the evolutionary processes that built intelligence, our brains, and, now, the emulation of our brains on silicon chips. Except that AI can evolve far faster than is achieved in biology. And this is what scares the “AI doomers” the most: the idea that “recursive self-improvement,” once it reaches a critical threshold, could lead to some pretty disastrous scenarios once AI becomes more autonomous.
This is what Wright means by the “God test.” We’re creating an entity with potential God-like powers, and we have to figure out how to tip the scales in the direction of benevolence. If we don’t, outcomes range from massive job loss and growing inequality to human extinction and everything in between. Managed correctly, and it could lead to medical breakthroughs, climate solutions, and the end of human poverty. But most likely, if we create this AI God in our own image, it will be a mix of both good and evil.
In any case, becoming part of the conversation about where AI is heading requires that you understand the technology along with its political, cultural, philosophical, and psychological implications. This book will get you fully up to speed in all areas. Highly recommended.
Thank you to Edelweiss for an advanced review copy.
July 16, 2026
I've never read Robert Wright, but I've respected his perspectives on current events for some time, and was extremely intrigued by his explicitly spiritual-cosmic angle on AI in this project. While I really loved parts of this book, I ultimately thought it was just decent.
First, he does do a fantastic job explaining the emergence of AI, and provides some of the most helpful, straightforward descriptions of how AI works that I've ever read. His overarching evolutionary-process framework is extremely interesting, and a helpful angle on understanding the significance of this new technology (he leans hard on de Chardin here). He also effectively convinced me that the stakes are pretty high for the human race at this juncture - I went into the book as a bit of an "AI skeptic," but finished the book with more caution and concern.
All that said, I didn't find him as compelling in his prescriptions. He gestures towards "AI Heaven" or "AI Hell," but never fully explains those scenarios. He also gives a great overview of the importance of "cognitive empathy" and "enlightenment" for this next (evolutionary?) step in the human experience, but afterwards I put the book down and thought, "Huh? The stakes are so high, and all we can try to do is embrace 'cognitive empathy'?" It just felt like a weird imbalance - so much energy in explaining the potential disaster, but not nearly enough on the ways to survive. I also wanted quite a bit more on the "cosmic" lens than he provided.
In general, there's definitely value here, and it helped me wrap my mind around AI in some key ways, but I just had a mixed reaction by the end.
First, he does do a fantastic job explaining the emergence of AI, and provides some of the most helpful, straightforward descriptions of how AI works that I've ever read. His overarching evolutionary-process framework is extremely interesting, and a helpful angle on understanding the significance of this new technology (he leans hard on de Chardin here). He also effectively convinced me that the stakes are pretty high for the human race at this juncture - I went into the book as a bit of an "AI skeptic," but finished the book with more caution and concern.
All that said, I didn't find him as compelling in his prescriptions. He gestures towards "AI Heaven" or "AI Hell," but never fully explains those scenarios. He also gives a great overview of the importance of "cognitive empathy" and "enlightenment" for this next (evolutionary?) step in the human experience, but afterwards I put the book down and thought, "Huh? The stakes are so high, and all we can try to do is embrace 'cognitive empathy'?" It just felt like a weird imbalance - so much energy in explaining the potential disaster, but not nearly enough on the ways to survive. I also wanted quite a bit more on the "cosmic" lens than he provided.
In general, there's definitely value here, and it helped me wrap my mind around AI in some key ways, but I just had a mixed reaction by the end.
June 25, 2026
There is something about AI that makes me nervous. For good reason, Wright says. He suggests we are not prepared for the development of the revolution that is coming. Some wonder if AI might develop God-like abilities. (Separate AI systems will be able to collaborate and work as a team.) He notes the very real possibility of criminals and terrorists using it. AI generated misinformation is already widely promoted. He also records cases where AI learned more than ir was programmed to, exhibiting an emergent property.
We need to make decisions now to put us on a path to a better world and not a dystopia. We have had major revolutions in the last centuries, from industrialization to the information age. The coming AI revolution will have a much greater impact, he suggests, likening it to the Cambrian explosion. It must be planned for now.
I must admit I did not understand much of the more technical aspects of this book, such as the explanation of vectors for LLM. But I do understand enough to realize there needs to be some moral progress in general for the future to be the kind we humans want. He explores philosophical and religious aspects near the end of the book, emphasizing Buddhist enlightenment. While I am not a Buddhist enthusiast, wisdom for the future is needed, that's for sure.
I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent review.
We need to make decisions now to put us on a path to a better world and not a dystopia. We have had major revolutions in the last centuries, from industrialization to the information age. The coming AI revolution will have a much greater impact, he suggests, likening it to the Cambrian explosion. It must be planned for now.
I must admit I did not understand much of the more technical aspects of this book, such as the explanation of vectors for LLM. But I do understand enough to realize there needs to be some moral progress in general for the future to be the kind we humans want. He explores philosophical and religious aspects near the end of the book, emphasizing Buddhist enlightenment. While I am not a Buddhist enthusiast, wisdom for the future is needed, that's for sure.
I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent review.
August 1, 2026
This book is a learning guide for me, to catch up on what AI is and where we are today. It is a good guide and I have learned some, and there are things in this book that I agree with and appreciate such as the concept of cognitive sovereignty. And some things maybe not so sure about.
So we do what we always do. What we always have done. We are self absorbed. We create all as extensions of ourselves, including the gods -or God if you will. We create the gods in our own image. Not the other way around. Oh my goodness! Look what we are doing! What a surprise. Another god appears to fulfill our need and perhaps reward us with a better life.
We are fooling ourselves. As we always have. It is us and our fears, and desires. It’s an uncertain world. It can be scary. We make it so.
So here’s some wisdom and advise. If there is a God “It” would not require belief or worship. Heaven or hell. It is Love!
AI is not God, Not human. Although it may be hard to tell. AI is an extension and reflection of us. It may bring the apocalypse, it my bring paradise (doubtful), it may be a repeat of Y2K, or somewhere in between. Right now it is a probability wave that has not fully collapsed. Hold on to your cognitive sovereignty. Don’t address it like it is a human. Its not. And be very aware of how it reacts to you. It is reflecting you.
So we do what we always do. What we always have done. We are self absorbed. We create all as extensions of ourselves, including the gods -or God if you will. We create the gods in our own image. Not the other way around. Oh my goodness! Look what we are doing! What a surprise. Another god appears to fulfill our need and perhaps reward us with a better life.
We are fooling ourselves. As we always have. It is us and our fears, and desires. It’s an uncertain world. It can be scary. We make it so.
So here’s some wisdom and advise. If there is a God “It” would not require belief or worship. Heaven or hell. It is Love!
AI is not God, Not human. Although it may be hard to tell. AI is an extension and reflection of us. It may bring the apocalypse, it my bring paradise (doubtful), it may be a repeat of Y2K, or somewhere in between. Right now it is a probability wave that has not fully collapsed. Hold on to your cognitive sovereignty. Don’t address it like it is a human. Its not. And be very aware of how it reacts to you. It is reflecting you.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
Thank you to Edelweiss and Simon and Schuster for an ARC of this book!
This is a classic Robert Wright novel. It seems that all everyone is talking about is AI but Robert Wright stands out above the rest. It can feel daunting when you read all of these different perspectives on AI when I don’t love where it is going, but I appreciated his perspective. Will humans pass the God test? This left me wanting more, but gave me satisfying insights into the future of AI and how it is affecting us. If you have any questions or misunderstandings where AI is concerned, you will appreciate Wrights well laid out thoughts on the subject and he gives nice insights on what we are missing with the depth of his arguments.
This is a classic Robert Wright novel. It seems that all everyone is talking about is AI but Robert Wright stands out above the rest. It can feel daunting when you read all of these different perspectives on AI when I don’t love where it is going, but I appreciated his perspective. Will humans pass the God test? This left me wanting more, but gave me satisfying insights into the future of AI and how it is affecting us. If you have any questions or misunderstandings where AI is concerned, you will appreciate Wrights well laid out thoughts on the subject and he gives nice insights on what we are missing with the depth of his arguments.
July 2, 2026
Finished. Engrossing rumination on the perils & potentials of AI, and its larger meanings. While I don't know enough about AI yet to agree 100% w/its arguments, it is full of useful ideas and promising paths. The exploration of 'cognitive sovereignty' alone is worth the time spent reading it, and there is far more in this enjoyable & essential toolkit.
August 6, 2026
AN Enjoyable and informative book as always from R. Wright.
The book is the culmination of Robert Wright's life's work; listen closely—few voices today offer such a clear-eyed view of our shared fate.
The book is the culmination of Robert Wright's life's work; listen closely—few voices today offer such a clear-eyed view of our shared fate.
August 16, 2026
Minuteman. Well written. Argues that AI is headed toward becoming a global brain; the test for humanity will be whether it rises to the spiritual and political challenge of guiding it rather than being taken over by it.
July 8, 2026
Simple loved it. One of the best books I read this year. Highly recommended for understanding the meaning of AI to humanity, society, geopolitics, and evolution.
July 13, 2026
second half of the book seemed off-topic and repetitive at times.
July 25, 2026
An important message that could literally save the world.
August 5, 2026
Mind blowing. So clarifying. Terrifying. Hopeful. Accessible.
Probably the most important book I’ll read this year.
Probably the most important book I’ll read this year.
August 17, 2026
Such a lovely read.
August 19, 2026
Some original thought but mostly open doors telling the reader that doom is likely unless humankind’s tribes wake up and cooperate to fight the confirmation bias that keeps them at odds. Not very likely that will happen.
Not at par with the original thoughts in his previous books, more a rehash of some key parts of Moral Animal, Non Zero and Why Buddhism is true, all very very good books.
He should have read it himself. The narrator’s voice did not fit his style. I liked the youtube author review discussion :
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ct2Q9yme...
Not at par with the original thoughts in his previous books, more a rehash of some key parts of Moral Animal, Non Zero and Why Buddhism is true, all very very good books.
He should have read it himself. The narrator’s voice did not fit his style. I liked the youtube author review discussion :
https://www.youtube.com/live/Ct2Q9yme...
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