Robert Wright discusses his new book, The God Test, with Paul Bloom [Awe? Bob, Awe!?]

Time stamps:

0:00 Whose baby is cuter?
2:49 Bob's new book on AI, The God Test
9:52 Varieties of AI awe
13:23 Geoffrey Hinton’s vision
17:50 How LLMs do more than predict and parrot
21:20 How powerful will AI get?
25:56 Can AI’s impact be predicted?
30:48 Taking doomerism seriously
37:53 The AI governance dilemma
48:42 Heading to Overtime

Concerning awe, back in the mid 1990s I went to Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral and reacted to it with awe.

I drove east through central Florida, which was much like a desert except that it had lots of plants. I arrived at Kennedy Space Center around noon. I parked the van wherever, walked past a parade of rockets on display, and purchased a ticket for one of the standard tours. The NASA guides took us through some launch pads, around and even up into a couple gantry towers, and we saw a couple control rooms–one, as I recall, mocked up as though a mission were in progress. And then we saw it, a Saturn V suspended from the ceiling of a long, low building. The physical scale was humbling, but it was more than that. Big is big – that Saturn was the length of a football field – but this earth and these buildings birthed journeys that took us to the Moon. There is sacred energy in this soil and these structures where humankind ventured beyond ourselves, not merely into space, but into an almost living presence above and beyond.

That’s what floored me. This ground, this very ground where I was standing, was once tangibly connected to the moon 238,900 miles (384,400 km) away. Men had suited up in a building on this site, gotten into a small capsule atop a large rocket, and four days later got out and walked on the all of a sudden here and now beneath our feet, the moon. And then – How they ever did it I’ll never know because when you’ve been there how do you ever but you have no choice, do you? You want to live, to see your wife and children again – they got back into their landing craft, took off from the moon, and returned to earth in another four days. Eight days from the earth to the moon and back.

In over three years of extensive interaction with ChatGPT and Claude I have been delighted, surprised, astounded, even laughed myself silly (well, that’s an exaggeration), but I’ve not felt anything like what I felt at Kennedy Space Flight Center. Note that back in 1990 David Hays and I published an article in which we said: “Sooner or later we will create a technology capable of doing what, heretofore, only we could.” We are certainly advancing into the territory. But super-intelligence? I fail to find the idea compelling. Just why, I’m not quite sure.

I’m thinking.