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 Fifteen

Fredkin's Mission

The article that in 1983 brought me into contact with Geoffrey Hinton—the article on artificial intelligence that I wrote for The Wilson Quarterly—came out in early 1984. By that time I was no longer on the staff of the Quarterly. I’d moved from the top of a tower in Washington, DC’s, Smithsonian Castle, where the Quarterly had given me the most exotic office I would ever have, to the second most exotic office I would ever have, in a stately early-twentieth-century mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. That was the location of the New York Academy of Sciences, which put out a magazine called The Sciences.

At The Sciences I wrote a column called “The Information Age.” It explored some of the undercurrents and consequences of the digital technology revolution that, thanks to the advent of the personal computer, were getting more and more attention. The things I wrote about ranged from information theory to virtual reality to the nature of consciousness to the implications of the PC revolution for the Soviet Union.

Among the subscribers to The Sciences was an editor at a New York publishing house who, after reading some of my columns, sent me a letter. (Yes, a physical letter—email wasn’t a thing back then.) This led to my first book, Three Scientists and Their Gods, whose subtitle was Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information.

Though this was long before I heard anyone speculate that we might be living in a simulation, I now realize that, actually, that’s what the first chunk of the book was partly about. That chunk was a profile of Edward Fredkin, a professor at MIT who advocated something he called “digital physics.” What exactly that means is a long story, but one of the things Fredkin took it to mean was crystallized on the cover of the April 1988 issue of The Atlantic magazine, which featured an excerpt from my book. Across the top of the cover were the words, “Did the Universe Just Happen?” Then, in smaller type: “Controversial scientist Edward Fredkin says no—that the universe is a computer and was built for a purpose.”

Fredkin was a fascinating figure—a self-taught computer scientist and a self-made millionaire (back when a million dollars was considered real money in tech circles) who owned an island in the Caribbean. I spent several days on the island interviewing him and members of his family. When it was time to go, Ed and I got into his seaplane so he could fly me to the island of Virgin Gorda, where I would catch a flight to San Juan en route to my apartment in Brooklyn.

That scene constitutes the closing section of my book’s profile of Fredkin, and the final sentences of that section are these:

“I have one more question,” I yell over the engine noise. “What is the meaning of life?” He doesn’t miss a beat. “It has to do with intelligence and information and all that,” he yells back.

“I think our mission is to create artificial intelligence. It’s the next step in evolution.” I write this down on a three-by-five index card, to be filed for future reference.

Well, the future reference has arrived. And the mission, I’d say, has been accomplished. Today’s large language models qualify as artificial intelligence, at least as that term has traditionally been defined.

And Fredkin lived to see it. He died in June of 2023, six months after ChatGPT debuted. This AI fit a prediction Fredkin had made back in 1977, a decade before I visited his island. Interviewed by a New York Times reporter who was covering an AI conference at MIT, Fredkin said, “The first artificial intelligence will be smart about some things and dumb about others, like humans.”

AI would continue to evolve, he believed, and eventually would tower over us like a colossus. But he wasn’t worried about it abusing its stature. Intelligent machines would be no more interested in dominating us than “they would be interested in dominating chimpanzees or taking nuts away from squirrels,” he told the Times.

What did worry Fredkin about artificial intelligence was its deployment by human intelligence…

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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.