When I first started writing about Robert Wright’s The God Test I told myself: “I’m going to end up publishing a review in 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve got lots of time. I’ll write a series of blog posts dealing with the book which I can reference in the review proper. I’ve got a couple, three weeks. Piece of cake.” I wake up this morning, realize the review’s due this coming Sunday, I’ve only written four blog posts [the ones tagged with “GT-X”, the others are along for the ride], not yet finished the book, and ... Yikes! I’m not ready.
One problem is that I can’t help but see the book on two levels. On the one hand it’s a book about the current AI “revolution.” But it’s also an example of how our society is coming to grips with the technology. In the first case I’m assessing Wright’s work, the work of an individual journalist. In the second case I’m looking at the culture and society of which Wright is a member. That’s very different.
Starting at that first level, how well does Wright explain the technology and its evolution? That’s one level. But it’s also about what AI portends for the future and how we should deal with it. Well, we don’t really know the future, do we? These things are hard to predict. Moreover, surely what happens depends, in large extent, on how we decided to deal with it, no? And that’s why Wright is writing the book, to influence how we deal with the technology. That depends, in turn, on the capabilities of the technology itself, which we don’t really know, do we? Which is hotly debated. So in that context, on THAT level, the book becomes an example of how the culture, our culture (whatever that culture is, however you delimit it) is dealing with the technology. But because not even the experts know how the technology works, it’s a mess, and I can’t separate the two levels: 1) What’s he say about the technology, 2) Why’s he saying it (this is the society/culture level)?
Do you find that previous paragraph difficult and confused/confusing? Welcome to the club.
In a way what I want to do is factor the book into two components, one which I attribute to Wright the individual journalist, and the other to the culture in which he’s working. The culture provides him the conceptual tools he’s working with and the book is what he makes of them. What I really want to say is that Wright’s work is good – I like him, but he’s got an aggravating and invasive interview style which drives me bonkers sometimes – but the culture has given him lousy tools. The upshot: I have lots of problems with the book. But it’s NOT HIS FAULT. It’s the culture’s fault. It’s out fault. WE’RE NOT READY.
[And I’ve not even finished the book!]
Wright is a journalist. He’s got a number of beats. I first encountered with in The New Republic, where he was writing about politics and international affairs. He still does that. But he also wrote a book about evolutionary psychology. Which I’ve not read. That’s become a standard kind of book, a journalist explaining and interpreting a technical subject for a general audience. Back in 1984 he wrote an article on AI for The Wilson Quarterly, “Thinking Machines,” which he mentions in The God Test. I’ve read it, not back then, but now. It’s pretty good. But things have changed a lot since then. The technology Wright wrote about in that article could not have produced ChatGPT and the cultural explosion that’s followed. The seeds were there, but there was no way to predict... And it’s that explosion that motivated The God Test.
The thing is, the experts who created that technology, they knew how it worked. So Wright was in the business of explaining expert knowledge for a lay audience. The current technology is quite different. They experts know how they create the large language models that power these chatbots, and Wright talks about that. But they don’t know how those language models work. On that score, there’s no expert knowledge for Wright to interpret and explain. There’s just a black hole, a Rorschach blot.
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