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 Two

The Great Inversion

In August of 1955, four academics—three mathematicians and a computer scientist—produced what is widely regarded as the founding document for the field of artificial intelligence. It was a proposal for a two-month workshop, to be held at Dartmouth College the following summer, that would investigate “the artificial intelligence problem.” The proposal defined that then-obscure phrase like this: “For the present purpose the artificial intelligence problem is taken to be that of making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.”

As for how the problem would be approached: “The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

More than half a century later, we don’t know whether that conjecture is true. But we do know that, as a guide to subsequent progress in artificial intelligence, it has proved misleading. And, in the case of large language models—which power chatbots like ChatGPT and have figured centrally in the generative AI revolution—it has proved dramatically misleading. Misleading, in a sense, by 180 degrees.

Creating large language models—LLMs—wasn’t a matter of “precisely describing” the dynamics of human cognition and then replicating those dynamics in machines. The dynamics inside the machines—the inner workings of ChatGPT and all other LLM-powered AIs—turned out to be something of a mystery, even to the people who built the models.

This doesn’t mean those inner workings don’t mirror the dynamics of human cognition. In fact, findings from the field known as “interpretability”—the field devoted to figuring out what exactly is going on inside these machines—suggest that what’s going on inside them does resemble, in some basic respects, what goes on inside the human mind. But most of those resemblances weren’t by design. At least, they weren’t by the design of human beings.

What happened, basically, is this:

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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.