The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning — Robert Wright

Chapter Excerpts

  1. 1A Blast from the Future
  2. 2The Great Inversion
  3. 3The Cosmic Context
  4. 4The Evolution of a Large Language Model
  5. 5The Elements of Understanding
  6. 6The Foundation of Wild Visions
  7. 7Intelligence and Power
  8. 8Agency
  9. 9Evolutionary Arms Races
  10. 10AI Heaven and AI Hell
  11. 11Hive Minds and the Loss of Control
  12. 12The Singularity and the Singleton
  13. 13Gemini and Superman
  14. 14Enlightenment Now
  15. 15Fredkin's Mission
  16. Appendix: Evolution, Purpose, and Consciousness

About the Author

Robert Wright is the New York Times best-selling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, Three Scientists and Their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Why Buddhism Is True, and, most recently, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning.

His books have been published in more than 20 languages, and he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Time, Slate, and The New Republic. He won the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism for his column The Information Age in The Sciences magazine.

He has taught in the psychology department at Penn and the religion department at Princeton. He cofounded the pioneering platform Bloggingheads.tv and now hosts the NonZero podcast and publishes the NonZero newsletter.