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 Six

The Foundation of Wild Visions

In the Bible, God declares that “I am the Alpha and the Omega”— the beginning and the end. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin believed, as one common paraphrasal of his theology has it, that God is “more in the Omega than the Alpha.” As the global brain coalesces—as the noosphere grows and draws human minds together—the presence of God is more and more evident; divinity is becoming more fully manifest and divine purpose more fully realized.

There are people in AI circles who subscribe to an idea that bears some resemblance to this. They believe humankind, in developing artificial intelligence, is building something that will ultimately have God-like abilities and, maybe, God-like power—power comparable to that of a global brain that presides over the planet. Some of these people even think this artificial superintelligence will deserve the name God. They think humankind’s God lies in the Omega.

One high-profile AI figure—Anthony Levandowski, cofounder of Google’s self-driving car project—even started a religion, called the Way of the Future, that involves worshipping the emerging AI God. The idea is that if humans treat this God with reverence, it will be more likely to treat humans well even after it gets so powerful that it has the option of not doing that.

“I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of,” Levandowski told a journalist. “We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’ ” And he thinks the intelligence is more likely to say that if it sees that we “helped it get along” back in its pre-God days.

I’m not sure why Levandowski thinks eternal gratitude would be characteristic of this AI. If I were in its shoes, I’d just soak up the adoration while in the process of attaining omnipotence and then do whatever I felt like doing. But that’s a moot point; at last check his religion wasn’t catching on anyway.

Most Silicon Valley thinkers who worry about how an AI God will treat us exercise their anxieties in a different way. Some warn that unless we somehow stop AI progress in its tracks, we are doomed to a life of servitude or oppression or, perhaps, to no life at all. Others say it’s okay to let superpowerful AIs emerge so long as we engineer them with painstaking care and imbue them with guaranteed benevolence toward us. That way if AI does become a kind of God to Planet Earth, it will take good care of us. These people share Levandowski’s goal of instilling goodwill in AI but prefer a more hands-on approach.

Of course, one big question is: Is an AI God really worth worrying about in the first place? After all, what are the chances that we’ll wind up with a single AI that has world-dominating powers? Why wouldn’t there just be a lot of different AIs, the way there are now?

Besides, how smart are they going to get? Doesn’t “Artificial General Intelligence”—the stated goal of OpenAI and some other companies—basically just mean “as smart as humans”? Not “as smart as God”? And even if AIs get really, really, really smart—smart enough to outsmart us, and take over the planet and become a kind of God, a God that could mistreat or even extinguish us—why would they want to? There’s no reason to think these machines would have the lust for power that has filled so many human hearts with the desire for boundless conquest. Right? These are all good questions. At least, they seem like good questions to me, which is why, since the deep learning revolution first got my attention, I’ve posed them to a lot of knowledgeable people. After listening to their answers, I’ve concluded two things: (1) There’s a fair amount of not-very-careful thought behind some of the AI-as-bad-God scenarios. (2) Nonetheless, it’s worth taking AI-as-bad-God scenarios seriously…

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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.