Transcript | "But China!": Robert Wright on the AI Race and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning
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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.
Transcript
Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.
I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week for the last time from my soon-to-be former home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. All packed up, the movers are coming soon, and it’s official. We’re putting the house on the market.
Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. Listeners, you can support my work by becoming paying subscribers at SinicaPodcast.com. I do need your help to keep this work going, so please subscribe so I can continue to bring you these conversations.
This week on Sinica, a conversation I’ve been looking forward to for a long time, and one that takes us a little outside our usual beat, though as you’ll hear, China sits much closer to the center of it than you might expect. My guest is Robert Wright, and if you don’t know his work, you are in for a treat. Bob is one of the most original and consequential thinkers that we have on the big questions of today. Where our species came from, where it might be headed, and how the technologies we build are bound up with both.
He is the author of a string of books that have shaped how a generation thinks about human nature and history, certainly me — The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are, the new science of evolutionary psychology, which was his landmark 1994 book on evolutionary psychology. I will confess I read it when it came out with enormous relish. I think I had just read, either before or right afterward, Consilience by Edward O. Wilson. I was really on a kick. And this was one of those just landmark books for me. It’s stuck with me really ever since.
There’s also Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which argues that the long arc of biological and cultural evolution has a direction driven by the logic of non-zero-sum games, highly relevant to today’s discussion, as you will see. The Evolution of God, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Why Buddhism is True, a bestseller on meditation and the modern mind.
Bob writes the widely read Nonzero newsletter and hosts the Nonzero Podcast. He’s taught at Princeton, at the University of Pennsylvania, and he’s been a New America Fellow. But more than any of the titles, what comes through in his work is a rare combination of intellectual range, genuine humility, and a stubborn insistence on cognitive empathy as the thing we most need and most lack. And there’s the personal connection, which I’m happy to finally get to repay. We are both big fans of cognitive empathy.
I’ve had the honor of being a guest on Bob’s podcast twice now, and I’m delighted to at last be able to reciprocate and have him on Sinica. But the truth is, I became reacquainted with his work after those Moral Animal years at a very particular moment. Right around the time I was starting Sinica, I heard Bob articulate this idea that he was calling cognitive empathy, this discipline of genuinely modeling what’s going on in another person’s mind as distinct from feeling basic emotional empathy for them.
And I had a small jolt of recognition because I’d been going on about exactly the same thing for ages, except that I’d been clumsily calling it informed empathy, my own coinage. He had the better name for it and the better account of why it really matters, a more sort of expansive view of it. And it’s become super central to how I think about China ever since. And it turns out to be really central to his new book, too. Indeed, that book is a marvelous melding of many themes from Bob’s work spanning three decades. It is called The God Test, and it’s the reason we’re talking today.
It’s an ambitious, genuinely cosmic reckoning with what artificial intelligence means, not just for jobs or geopolitics, though that’s important in it, but for the deep story of life on this planet. It’s a truly terrific read. Bob’s voice is at once really erudite and playful, and his ability to think about all the implications, to really ask all the right questions, to come up with these brilliant analogies, and keep the reader just cruising along through the text, it makes it just one of the best books I’ve read yet on AI and the human condition, seriously.
Bob argues that large language models that we’re all super familiar with now are best understood not as things we built but as things we evolved, that the AI moment is forcing a kind of test on our species, and that whether we pass that test depends on our capacity to transcend the kind of tribal psychology that’s really bedeviled us since the dawn of history.
And running right through the heart of it, more than I think many readers will expect, is China, the race framing, you know, the foot race between China and the United States, the AI race, the export control wars over advanced semiconductors, the question of whether fear of Beijing is itself the thing most likely to lead us astray. It’s a book that rewards a China-minded reader, and I’ve got a lot I want to put to him about it.
He’s also, I should say, just an all-around great guy, just warm and funny and intellectually fearless, and exactly the kind of person you want to think out loud with about the largest questions that we now face.
Bob Wright, a very warm and long-overdue welcome to Sinica.
Bob Wright: Well, thank you, Kaiser. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to live up to that billing, but it felt really good to hear it. And I know it partly is rooted in your generosity to be so kind in your introduction. In any event, it’s an honor to be here. You know I’m a longtime listener and admirer. And I guess I should be even more honored if this is the final production from this particular location, your home, right?
Kaiser: Yeah, leaving Chapel Hill. I mean, it’s been something in process for a while. I’ve spent most of this year already living in Beijing. I just came back because I had some talks to give and my daughter’s graduation, and we sort of put off the finishing touches on getting the house ready for the market until this trip. But no, I’m headed back to Beijing in the middle of the month, and we say goodbye to Chapel Hill.
Bob: Well, cool. I hope you’ll be willing to appear in my podcast from Beijing.
Kaiser: Happily, happily, happily. So, Bob, let’s jump right in. I guess the place to begin is you place Pierre Teilhard de Chardin near the center of this book’s imaginative architecture. Teilhard was a French Jesuit priest and a paleontologist who died in 1955. He was a man who spent his life trying to reconcile evolution with his faith. And his more mystical writings were actually suppressed by the church in his lifetime. Teilhard, gentle listeners, is a name you’re going to hear a lot in this conversation, so you should probably take note. T-E-I-L-H-A-R-D. Teilhard.
Bob, Teilhard gives you this idea of the “noosphere,” the thinking envelope of the Earth, a kind of planetary mind, which you illustrate beautifully with what you call a sort of Martian’s eye view. If you can imagine sort of a time lapse of life on Earth viewed from afar, evolving from the biosphere that we have around our atmosphere, and then life on Earth into networks of human communication, just speech, writing, trade networks, radio, television, and then eventually the Internet.
And now, finally, AI. Again, listeners, I’m going to flag this word noosphere, N-O-O-S-P-H-E-R-E, because it’s going to come up again. So, noosphere. We have Teilhard and the idea of the noosphere. So, Bob, could you walk listeners through Teilhard’s idea of this noosphere and explain why you think AI makes that idea newly urgent rather than just, I don’t know, just poetically suggestive?
Because you actually make a really strong claim here, not merely that a global brain is now possible, but that it’s become necessary, that there’s no realistic alternative that can safeguard human interest in the age to come. So, why is it necessary, and why is it kind of inevitable?
Bob: Yeah, so he coined that term in 1923, comes from the Greek word for mind, noos. And I believe in intentional reference to the term biosphere.
Kaiser: Yeah.
Bob: Certainly, one of the people who embraced his term, Vernadsky, this Russian thinker, was the person who had done more than anyone to popularize the term biosphere already by that time. The Martian’s eye view you alluded to captures how sweeping Teilhard’s vision was. He got the big picture. He was a paleontologist as well as being a Jesuit priest.
And he saw that life had kind of climbed to this hierarchy of organization in some sense. You get cells, you get multicelled life, you get societies of multicelled organisms. Then one society of multicelled organisms, that is, human society,
