A curious feature of the artificial intelligence boom is how many commentators reach for the great books to understand it. Peter Thiel borrowed the name of Palantir, the firm he founded, from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and has delivered lectures reinterpreting the Antichrist of the New Testament as a force blocking the road to a transhumanist heaven on earth. Pope Leo explicitly rebuked him when he quoted Gandalf, the wizard from the series, in his first encyclical on how to preserve human dignity at a time of breakneck change. The Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Robert Wright has found his own sage in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist who suggested that the atomic age might usher in the spiritual integration of mankind.
The God Test draws on Teilhard’s faith in the coming of a “planetary mind,” “noosphere,” or “brain of brains” to generate ways of coping with AI. Wright believes the technology is going to trigger “the most abruptly dramatic transformation of human experience and human society in the history of our species.” He offers us a manifesto for moving slowly and repairing things, written with the rangy open-mindedness that characterizes his prolific podcasting.
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