Robert Wright's *The God Test* - Marginal REVOLUTION

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The subtitle is Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, due out June 23.

In the first chapter, Wright summarizes four of his perspectives, these are my paraphrases of his pp.5-6:

1. When it comes to AI, we should be somewhere on the awe spectrum.

2. We can create a future where the upside of AI far outweights the downside, though that involves steering human understanding toward the better side of the awe spectrum.

3. A major reorientation of human thought is required, and right now few people seem inclined to do that.

4. The worldviews of the current AI acclerationists and also doomers are not cosmic enough.

It is a good time for this book to be published, and I agree with much more of it than I disagree with.  My main difference is that I am more focused on very small things — such as Rainier cherries and the forthcoming three to four hour Apichatpong movie — than on cosmic awe per se.  For better or worse, I was not born with those genes, and unlike Wright I am far from Buddhism.  I do think there will be a transformation of "observed awe," and I am somewhat worried that it will not go well.  Will we be good at building a fairly new world, if not from scratch, on the basis of some new premises about what is possible and what is not?  I will in any case interpret the pending transformation through a Straussian lens, namely thinking that a lot of the observed transformation of awe will be about something other than what people are claiming.  It will be about people arguing over relative status, but under different guises.  Not as tasty as a good Rainier cherry, but interesting to follow as well.

But are we still good at steering and evolving grand visions?  Christianity and the Enlightenment are a hard act to follow.

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