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Robert Wright\u2019s Princeton library has seen many remote visitors. The veteran journalist and author \u2014\u00a0formerly at outlets including The New Republic<\/em>,\u00a0Time<\/em> and\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>, with five books published and a sixth out this June \u2014\u00a0has been holding court in front of his packed bookshelves for decades. <\/p>\n A writer liberated by the blogging revolution, he founded the video-interview platform Bloggingheads.tv years before podcasts became the new daytime television, and he has also gone his own way for decades. This editor was a devoted watcher, decades ago, when a young who\u2019s who of literary types Skyped in to talk with Bob, from Ezra Klein to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Megan McArdle. So it was a touch surreal to see those familiar bookshelves and hear that familiar voice corresponding with Fortune<\/em>. When I told him as much, he responded with his familiar self-deprecation: \u201cWell, your ship has come in.\u201d<\/p>\n For the last five years, Wright has made his home at the widely read NonZero newsletter and podcast, building on a 26-year-old book of the same name that argued human history is shaped largely by non-zero-sum dynamics\u2014by encounters in which one side\u2019s win isn\u2019t necessarily the other side\u2019s loss. The situation is usually nonzero, in other words. It\u2019s informed by Wright\u2019s writings on Buddhism throughout the years, which he sees less as a religion and more as a way of thinking.<\/p>\n That is exactly why, he told Fortune<\/em> during a recent interview, the current situation is so alarming. That situation is not just artificial intelligence, according to Wright\u2014but the lost concept of \u201cenlightenment\u201d in the 2020s.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at all the fronts \u2014 economic, cultural, political, personal, family, psychological and so on \u2014 it is going to be an earthquake,\u201d Wright said. \u201cThat\u2019s my prediction. And we better be ready for it.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1983, Wright was a young journalist on assignment, sitting down with Geoffrey Hinton, years before the computer scientist was dubbed the \u201cgodfather of AI\u201d and years before Hinton resigned from Google DeepMind expressing regret at his creation. As Wright explains in his forthcoming book,\u00a0The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning<\/em>, he completely missed the significance of what he was being told about this concept called \u201cneural networks.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just did not \u2014\u00a0I was not remotely close to getting the picture,\u201d Wright said. He didn\u2019t know at the time that this computer tinkering would lead to what he now considers an inflection point \u2014\u00a0not just economic but civilizational. The grand test ahead of us now, he told me, is whether we are qualified to play God, and he\u2019s not sure that we\u2019ve shown we\u2019re capable.<\/p>\n Wright\u2019s reckoning with AI\u2019s true power came not in 1983 but in 2023, when he began experimenting with ChatGPT-4 while under contract for a different book entirely, one on cognitive empathy. One experience made him think of Hinton: he gave GPT-4 an elaborate, layered scenario about a student and a professor, asking what the student would feel at the end. The model\u2019s one-word answer:\u00a0schadenfreude<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought, \u2018oh sh-t,’\u201d Wright recalled. \u201cIt really understands human nature and is capable of putting itself in the perspective of another human being.\u201d<\/p>\n The experience sent Wright back to a 2018 lecture Hinton gave on how large language models actually work. The neural network that Hinton pioneered \u201cwill kind of reverse engineer the human mind,\u201d Wright said, cautioning that he hasn\u2019t heard many AI researchers put it in quite those words. That includes certain cognitive functions that natural selection engineered over millions of years, he added with astonishment. <\/p>\n \u201cThat was my big misunderstanding back in 1983,\u201d he added. \u201cI was assuming that if it was going to get good at handling language, we would have to implant in the machines the human understanding of the connection between the words and the meaning.\u201d But we didn\u2019t have to do any of that. \u201cIt just kind of quote \u2018figured out\u2019 that if it\u2019s going to get good at predicting how sentences will end or predicting anything else \u2026 it is going to have to have a way of representing the meaning of words.\u201d And he offered up a compelling example: it helped figure out an ambiguous MRI report on his own cancer.<\/p>\n Wright is currently cancer-free, he told me. His throat cancer had spread to his lymph nodes, but after successful treatment it hasn\u2019t come back since a surgery in 2025.<\/p>\n At one point, he told Fortune<\/em>, reiterating a story he related on NonZero in July 2025, he was trying to interpret a confusing doctor\u2019s report, so he fed it into various chatbots. They said it looked like something was worth investigating.<\/p>\n He pressed further, flagging a strange sentence, and Anthropic\u2019s Claude caught what his radiologist had missed. \u201cClaude said, \u2018Well, the radiologist meant to put the word \u2018no\u2019 at the beginning of that sentence: \u2018no abnormalities found.’\u201d<\/p>\n AI caught a crucial grammatical error\u2014a human error\u2014that could have scrambled his understanding of his recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say AIs hallucinate, they make mistakes,\u201d Wright said. \u201cHumans make mistakes. This human made a mistake and he\u2019s a doctor, okay, and about a pretty big thing.\u201d The question isn\u2019t whether AI will \u201ctake our jobs and become our lovers and do everything else,\u201d as Wright put it: it\u2019s more about whether AI is \u201cin any sense better overall than the people that were filling these roles.\u201d The answer to that is so obvious that Wright doesn\u2019t even have to say it. <\/p>\n \u201cThe thing doesn\u2019t have to be perfect by any means to replace a human,\u201d Wright said, \u201cespecially given the fact that it\u2019s going to be a lot cheaper and faster.\u201d<\/p>\n Wright\u2019s thinking on AI is similar to his stance on Buddhism: not religious, but a secular, Westernized variant based on journalistic investigation and first-principles thinking. His 2017 book\u00a0Why Buddhism Is True<\/em>\u00a0describes his engagement with Buddhism as a long personal journey predating the book itself, rooted in his earlier work on evolutionary psychology. Wright\u2019s explicit aim is not to bring readers into Buddhism as a religion, but to argue that its core psychological insights \u2014 particularly around suffering and perception \u2014 are validated by evolutionary biology and modern science.<\/p>\n If Wright\u2019s earthquake thesis puts him broadly in alignment with figures like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Microsoft\u2019s Mustafa Suleyman \u2014 both of whom have warned of dramatic near-term disruption \u2014 his sharpest departure from Silicon Valley\u2019s AI establishment is on geopolitics.<\/p>\n Amodei, in particular, has framed AI as an existential race with China, arguing that American dominance is essential to ensuring the technology develops safely. Wright called this a \u201csuicidal ideology.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDario sees us as in this existential AI race with China, and I personally think that mentality will lead us to a very, very, very bad outcome,\u201d Wright said.<\/p>\n He believes Amodei is \u201csincere, more than most of these people,\u201d but argued the entire framing is dangerously wrong. For Wright, true to his Nonzero beliefs, the only path to managing AI safely runs through global coordination, not competition. An arms race logic, in his view, forecloses exactly the kind of cooperative governance that could prevent catastrophe.<\/p>\n It is, he acknowledged with a wry smile, a very un-Buddhist way to approach an existential problem: each nation clinging to its own perspective, certain of its own righteousness, blind to the view from anywhere else.<\/p>\n He said his frustration with Anthropic sharpened recently following the company\u2019s public acknowledgment that recursive self-improvement \u2014 AI systems autonomously improving themselves \u2014 may be approaching. The company gestured toward the need for global coordination but offered no concrete plan. <\/p>\n \u201cWait a second, Dario: you above all have been predicting we get to exactly this moment for years and you guys don\u2019t have a plan?\u201d Wright asked, peppering in a rather colorful adjective. \u201cYou haven\u2019t devoted like a hundred dollars to looking into what it would take?\u201d <\/p>\n He noted that Anthropic is due to IPO soon at a nearly trillion-dollar valuation. \u201cIsn\u2019t that because the financial incentives point in the other direction?\u201d<\/p>\n Anthropic declined to comment.<\/p>\n For all his alarm, Wright resists being categorized as a pure doomsayer, and his trademark self-deprecation and good humor are on display throughout our conversation.<\/p>\n The title\u00a0The God Test<\/em>\u00a0is partly a biblical metaphor, he said: throughout the Old Testament, salvation is offered conditionally. Shape up, or face consequences. The choice is real.<\/p>\n \u201cWe face an interesting and climactic moment, in a certain sense, in the whole history of evolution,\u201d Wright said. \u201cWe\u2019re creating a whole new form of intelligence \u2014 hasn\u2019t happened before \u2014 in a new substrate that\u2019s not carbon-based. And if you wanted to bring good things and not overwhelmingly bad things, you better recognize immediately that you\u2019re proceeding too fast and recklessly, and you\u2019re gonna have to get together as a cohesive global community.\u201d<\/p>\n He pointed to two recent developments as cautious grounds for hope: a renewed U.S.-China dialogue on AI safety, and the Trump administration\u2019s reversal on reviewing powerful AI models \u2014 a position it had previously mocked under Biden. \u201cChange can happen,\u201d Wright said. \u201cI just hope the progress continues to come from developments that don\u2019t get tons of people killed.\u201d<\/p>\n The only way to pass the God test, he added, is to model what he calls \u201cenlightenment.\u201d He doesn\u2019t mean it in the 18th-century, Voltaire and salons and wigs sort of Western sense, he clarifies, but something closer to the Buddhist conception. \u201cIt really amounts to just clarity of perception and thought,\u201d he said. \u201cTranscending all of the kind of cognitive and perceptual biases that are built into us \u2014 that get in the way of a balanced view of the world. Like the world is viewed from some perspective other than yours.\u201d<\/p>\n Wright brought up \u201cthe view from Mars\u201d on the human condition and what that must look like, which he admitted is hard to hear without thinking of Elon Musk \u2014 whose SpaceX is the first company with the explicit mission of making David Bowie\u2019s vision a reality: life on Mars. <\/p>\n \u201cI mean, Elon Musk seems to me the opposite of enlightened,\u201d Wright said. \u201cIt\u2019s worrisome that the world\u2019s richest man is so incapable of getting outside of his own perspective.\u201d <\/p>\n The salvation for this unenlightened age that Wright sees the world living through, he added, will come from \u201clots of people, including influential people, getting better at viewing the world from outside of their own perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n This editor asked Wright if he was arguing for something like a Star Trek<\/em> future, a federation of planets under a one-government system, managing problems peaceably and resolving conflict. He pointed out that Star Trek<\/em> can\u2019t be seen outside of the context of its 1960s premiere occurring just 20 years after the catastrophe of World War II. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing, catastrophes lead to dramatic and ambitious thinking about restructuring orders \u2026 I hope it doesn\u2019t take a true catastrophe in this case to get us to take international coordination seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n He said he reaches for another science-fiction classic on the AI discussion: The Day The Earth Stood Still<\/em>. Like Star Trek<\/em>, it was a nuclear deterrence drama but it involved aliens visiting with a message for Earth to \u201cget your sh-t together and form a global community and get things under control.\u201d<\/p>\n In a way, he said, AI is sending a message \u201cmaybe not quite that dramatic but along the same lines.\u201d He returned to the Bible metaphor, full of instances where salvation is possible, \u201cbut you have to get your act together, you have to become better people \u2026 you\u2019re going to have to upgrade your game morally and in some sense spiritually or bad things, very bad things will happen. But very good things can happen, if you do the right thing.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Robert #Wright #sees #earthquake #cultural #political #personal #family #psychological<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Robert Wright\u2019s Princeton library has seen many remote visitors. The veteran journalist and author \u2014\u00a0formerly at outlets including The New Republic,\u00a0Time and\u00a0The Atlantic, with five books published and a sixth… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8961,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[536,3913,11028,3717,11027,6403,1574,675,11029,11025,1006,11026],"class_list":["post-8960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-anthropic","tag-books","tag-cultural","tag-dario-amodei","tag-earthquake","tag-family","tag-personal","tag-political","tag-psychological","tag-robert","tag-sees","tag-wright"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nA belated \u2018oh sh-t\u2019 moment<\/h2>\n
The doctor and the machine<\/h2>\n
The \u2018suicidal ideology\u2019<\/h2>\n
A God test, not a doom prediction<\/h2>\n