Is AI The Next Stage Of Human Evolution? - Robert Wright - #1122
7/11/20261 hr 21 min
Robert Wright is a journalist and author.
Is AI the next stage of human development? Some see it as another tool, while others view human-machine integration as a major shift in how we develop. What do recent advances in AI tell us, and is evolution the right framework for understanding them?
Expect to learn why Robert is interested in AI through an evolutionary lens, why most people still don’t grasp the magnitude of what’s coming, how AI will fit into the broader context of human evolution and civilisation, what the most legitimate concerns from the AI doomer camp are, if we are close to hitting the singularity, and much more…
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsChris Williamson· Host0:00
I've told you this before, but you wrote probably the most influential book in my life, which was The Moral Animal, and it was the thing that got me started on the trajectory of thinking about evolutionary psychology, of studying human nature more deeply. Why are you now writing about AI, given your heritage?
Robert Wright· Guest0:16
Well, in some ways it's an extension of evolutionary thinking in a couple of senses that I think are so underappreciated. AI is a product of evolution and is still evolving. But the other connection to The Moral Animal, I think, is, first of all, well, The Moral Animal was about the human mind, and, uh, AI, uh, does a lot of things that traditionally onl- only human minds have done. The other thing I tried to do in The Moral Animal is highlight kind of, uh, what you might call moral biases, kind of self-serving moral biases. The, you know, the way we all think we're right and the other guy's wrong. Um, and I think if we're going to get through the AI revolution in good shape, among the things we're gonna have to do is grapple with that, with kind of what you might call the psychology of tribalism, a little more successfully than we have. And so I, I pay a certain amount of attention to that in this book as well.
Chris Williamson· Host1:13
What's the central question that you're wrestling with here?
Robert Wright· Guest1:16
Is it true that this technology, which obviously holds the potential to bring great wonders, is also in some respects