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DIVINE DELUSION<br>Adopt AI or Die?<br>In his new book The God Test, Robert Wright proposes that humanity is facing both a singular opportunity and an epochal threat.
Of Pascal’s famous wager on the existence of God, Denis Diderot dryly remarked, nearly a century later, “Pascal says: If your religion is false, you risk nothing in believing it true; if it’s true, you risk everything by believing it false. An imam could say just the same.”
It was a clever eighteenth-century comeback to a pious seventeenth-century Catholic. When Blaise Pascal advised that it was a better bet to believe in God, or at least to conduct oneself in a godly manner, just in case he existed, he had a very particular god in mind. But why not Allah, or the god of the Jews, or the gods of the Hindus or the ancient Greeks? What if, in betting on belief over nonbelief, one backs the wrong heavenly father?
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<br>by Robert Wright<br>Buy on Bookshop<br>Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $30.00<br>It was all a little unfair to poor Pascal. A scientist and philosopher as much as a Christian, his wager, excavated from the semi-fragmentary and only posthumously published Pensées, was probably not meant—as it was later taken—as some logical proof of God’s existence but rather as a considerably subtler and more complicated argument for faith when the existence of a truly transcendent God isn’t provable by reason alone.<br>Like so many catchy ideas, though, Pascal’s wager has made itself into what we would now probably call—I regret to say—a meme, a little bit of shorthand for a simple idea: better to bet on the divine than against, considering the consequences.<br>It’s generated philosophical debate over the centuries, including in the 2010s, when, on an online message board called LessWrong, a poster going by the pseudonym Roko posed a thought experiment now referred to as “Roko’s basilisk”: At some point in the future, an artificial intelligence comes into being. It is generally benevolent, except that it decides to torture for all eternity those humans who failed to work to bring it into existence. In other words: invent AI or be cast into hell.
This would be fantastically silly stuff if it were not so near to our contemporary reality, in which a growing number of people, including many of the richest and most powerful among us, seem convinced that some kind of supremely powerful intelligence is about to emerge from our increasingly powerful thinking machines. (As if to prove a point about the fuzzy edges between technology and superstition, Roko’s basilisk has already spawned a Manson family–like murder cult, the Zizians, who were linked to the deaths of six people between 2022 and 2025.) Whether one considers AI models nascent machine gods or just shockingly sophisticated mechanical Turks, the diffusion of impressively capable Large Language Models, or LLMs, which are able to ape if not exactly replicate feats of reasoning, logic, and language, has brought many once science-fictional ideas to the forefront of politics, policy, and philosophy. The founders and CEOs of multibillion-dollar AI companies vacillate between describing their products as a semidivine technology that will usher in an age of “amazing abundance,” in the words of Elon Musk, and describing them as apocalyptic agents of the literal end of the world, requiring careful government oversight and national or international regulation.<br>What is it, this seeming machine intelligence? God, devil, successor species, industrial technology, or just a clever trick? Robert Wright—journalist, author, foreign policy realist, evolutionary biology enthusiast, and podcaster—wants you to wager on the likelihood of possibilities one through three. After 300,000 years, give or take, of the anatomically modern human species, and three and a half billion or so of prior evolution, we’re facing both a singular opportunity and an epochal threat.
In his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, Wright suggests that emergent AI—especially so-called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—represents not just a technological breakthrough, but an actual evolutionary outcome, possibly even a terminal one: a great, superseding mind, the next great leap forward for, or from, humanity. Wright is a great fan of the Roman Catholic philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, sought to reconcile evolution, paleontology, and geology with Catholic theology, ultimately proposing a sweeping teleology in which the whole universe is drawn toward an ultimate state of unification and complexity. (Not for nothing, these ideas bear striking resemblance to the later science-fictional idea of a “technological singularity.”) Teilhard’s ideas about the “noosphere,” a kind of globally interconnected mind or consciousness, and the “Omega...