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

Excerpt from Chapter Twelve

The Singularity and the Singleton

Maybe it would be misleading to call the book Superintelli gence, published in 2014, the Bible of sci-fi AI doomerism.

After all, the book—written by philosopher Nick Bostrom (also author of the aforementioned paper clip thought experiment)—didn’t predict a humankind-crushing AI takeover, or even deem that especially likely. It just talked about some ways in which artificial intelligence that’s much smarter than people could develop, some possible downsides of that development, and some ways to address the downsides. Its subtitle was “Paths, Dangers, Strategies.”

Still, the book’s opening allegory suggested that a hostile silicon colossus might be Bostrom’s motivating concern.

Some sparrows, in Bostrom’s allegory, decide that it would be great to have a big strong bird as their helpmate. So they decide to go find an owl egg and rear an owl. A sparrow named Scronkfinkle protests: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?” But Scronkfinkle is outvoted, and the fable ends amid ominous uncertainty about the sparrows’ future. Bostrom then writes that his book is dedicated to “Scronkfinkle and his followers.”

Bostrom didn’t say whether Scronkfinkle was a stand-in for Eliezer Yudkowsky. However, he did, in his acknowledgments, thank Yudkowsky for “extensive discussions that have helped clarify my thinking.” The two men had for years frequented some of the same intellectual circles, notably including a loose community that came to be called the “rationalists” because of its proudly professed allegiance to logical thinking. Bostrom had sometimes commented in Yudkowsky’s influential rationalist blog LessWrong, where visions of our AI future were debated long before the deep learning revolution made our AI future a mainstream subject. The book Superintelligence crystallized a worldview that had taken inchoate form in the rationalist community.

Bostrom’s acknowledgments extended the same thanks—for “extensive clarifying discussions”—to a list of people that, a decade later, would read like a Who’s Who of AI researchers and entrepreneurs. It included Sam Altman and Elon Musk (who the following year would become cofounders of OpenAI); Dario Amodei (who in 2021 would leave OpenAI to become a cofounder and the CEO of Anthropic); and Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman (cofounders of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google the year the book was published and eventually became a primary engine of its AI operation). Not to mention Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio.

The praise Bostrom’s book got from some of these people, including Altman, and from other notables, including Bill Gates, helped give it canonical status. If Superintelligence isn’t the Bible of sci-fi AI doomerism, it’s the closest thing there is.

One of the book’s achievements was to popularize a vocabulary of the singularity—labels for critical parts of the process by which, as AI progress increases the rate of AI progress, the resulting acceleration reaches a kind of threshold, beyond which lies a whole new world.

The key terms were “onset” and “takeoff.”…

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Excerpted from The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning by Robert Wright. Copyright © 2026 by Robert Wright. Published by Simon & Schuster.