On Friday, June 16, I had two guests, each with a new book. The first was Harvey Mansfield, who came on to discuss his latest, Where Harvard Went Wrong: Fifty Years of Commentary that Fell on Deaf Ears. The second was Robert Wright, who got me started in the podcast business almost twenty years ago. His new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, argues that we should take AI seriously as an epochal technological development. As Bob sees it, AI doomers, while sometimes hyperbolic, shouldn’t be ignored. There are real risks to this technology if its growth is not managed carefully. But if we do manage to turn AI toward the common good of humanity, it could change the way humans relate to each other and to the universe, bringing about more peace and advancements that will benefit all.
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Following the path to AI prosperity rather than stumbling into dystopia will require coordination on a global scale, including an agreement among the nations with leading AI companies to slow development. That sounds like a dealbreaker, but Bob points out that we recently came very close to an analogous global agreement on minimum corporate taxes, until the U.S. scuttled it at the last minute. If AI will one day be capable of recursive self-improvement—gaining speed and functionality with no human intervention required—we’ll find ourselves in a situation where the future will become harder to predict. Better to get governments, AI companies, and researchers on the same page now, so that we can understand what it is we’re creating and what it is capable of, rather than roll the dice and let LLMs (and those who would use them maliciously) take the lead.
Given how quickly we’ve integrated AI into seemingly every aspect of our lives, it can pay to step back and consider how quickly it’s happened. Scenarios once confined to science fiction novels—like the development of artificial consciousness—are now actual dilemmas we have to confront. With wars and regional conflicts flaring up around the planet, the prospect of coordination seems highly improbably anytime soon. But perhaps it is another one of those science fiction scenarios: purely hypothetical, until it’s upon us.
