"But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning

This week on Sinica I'm joined by Robert Wright, author of The Moral Animal, Nonzero, and The Evolution of God, for a conversation that runs a little outside our usual beat, though China sits closer to its center than you'd expect.

The occasion is his new book The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, which reads the AI revolution as the latest turn in a story going back billions of years. We get into the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin's "noosphere," Bob's argument that we evolved large language models rather than engineered them, the cognitive empathy we've both long preached, and the two-word talking point — "But China!" — that Bob thinks is most likely to lead us astray.

6:56 – Teilhard de Chardin, the noosphere, and why a planetary "global brain" has become necessary

14:49 – Directionality without the mysticism: complexification, teleology, and the "cell's-eye view" worry

21:57 – The God Test: is moral progress really the price of governing AI, and is that hopeless on a short clock?

28:33 – Why Bob says we evolved large language models rather than built them, and the sycophancy problem that follows

35:19 – Open weights and open source: a real safety argument, or competitiveness in safety's clothing?

40:03 – Cognitive empathy as the master key, and the same capacity as an engine of deception

48:06 – Arms-race fatalism and its limits: cheetahs, gazelles, and the rival who can pick up the phone

53:40 – "But China": fear of Beijing, Anthropic and Amodei, Jeff Ding, and the chip-control backfire

1:10:48 – Nonzero: game theory, common threats, and the takeoff scenarios that worry Bob most

1:23:22 – Attribution error and projection, Ed Fredkin's old warning, and the actual first move

Paying It Forward: Garrison Lovely, author of the forthcoming Obsolete (Nation Books) and the Substack of the same name on the AI race.

Recommendations:

Bob: Pantheon, the animated series on uploaded minds and emergent superintelligence; and the Crowded House song "Don't Dream It's Over."

Kaiser: Kyle Chan's High Capacity podcast, especially his episode with Carnegie's Matt Sheehan, "Is China Getting Worried About AI?"; and Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels.

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