Robert Wright: commitment

Transcript context

…ke exploring inventive space, right? And, and finding things. So many things have been multiply invented: wings, eyes, and so on. And, uh, then anyway, uh, you get societies of multi-celled organisms. In the case of our society, you know, once you reach our level of intelligence, this other kind of evolution kicks in, and our social organization starts growing, too. Hunter-gatherer band, you know, chiefdom, et cetera. Now we're on the verge of, I would say we're on the verge of a global community, and we need to form one if we're gonna handle the technological challenges we face wisely, especially AI. Now, if you want... 're on the verge of, I would say we're on the verge of a global community, and we need to form one if we're gonna handle the technological challenges we face wisely, especially AI. Now, if you want... Now, it seems the, the direction now... Well, the direction is clear. There's been a direction. I guess directionality consists of the view that there's been a tendency toward this, and I think that's the case. Uh, you don't have to get woo-ish or talk about spooky forces. It's just the nuts and bolts of natural selection and cultural evolution I think, for discernible reasons, have taken us here. That's a lot of what my book Nonzero was about. I, I, I, I, I described the growth of complexity, both in biological and cultural evolution, as a certain kind of interplay between zero-sum and non-zero-sum dynamics. Now, of course, Teilhard de Chardin, back to the noosphere, he was, in addition to being a paleontologist, he was a Catholic priest and theologian, a radical theologian whose work was suppressed by the Catholic Church. But he certainly saw this, uh, the, the, the noosphere as a manifestation of divine will or man- manifestation of divinity. And he thought accordingly, I guess, that the thing had kind of a moral direction, that we were gonna have to become better people morally to get over the conflicts that stand in the way of a kind of a coherent noosphere. I, I, you know, and at a certain level of abstraction, I agree with him absolutely, and I, and I talk about that in the book. Now, I don't have his assurance that this is, uh, divine will, so I, I can't be as optimistic as he may have been. But I, I do think, I will say that, you know, you can look at a directional system and have a rational argument about whether it does seem to have some of the hallmarks of purpose, which again, doesn't mean there are any spooky forces driving it. If, if it has a purpose, it just means it was set up either by some intelligent being or conceivably by some kind of meta selective process, you know? You- just as you can say that natural selection itself imbues organisms with a kind of purpose, right? Getting genes in the next generation. I mean, that's kind of the overarching goal. That's the criterion of their, quote, "design." Um, you can imagine that happening. I, I save... Well, look, I save all, almost all this for the appendix, so you can read the book without bumping into this stuff. But I, you know, Lee Smolin, the physicist, has this idea of cosmological natural selection. You know, it's speculative. He's not, he's not asserting it, but y- he, he's saying, you know, there, there could have been selection among universes. And basically, that's what you would need if indeed the directionality of evolution were purposive, and it wasn't designed by like a god or like aliens or any other, uh, intelligent being. You can imagine it being a meta- meta natural selection process. So there's all that, uh, which annoys some people. I even talk about some of the people I've annoyed in the book. But the, uh, w- one thing I want to emphasize is, like, when I say The God Test, you know, it's the title of the book, I, I don't mean that this was set up by a god. e people I've annoyed in the book. But the, uh, w- one thing I want to emphasize is, like, when I say The God Test, you know, it's the title of the book, I, I don't mean that this was set up by a god. I don't know. I'm agnostic on that. But we face, I think, the kind of tests that a, that a, that gods are known for setting up. So if you look at the Bible, you know, there are these, these, you know... Yes, salvation is possible, but you, you guys are gonna have to sha- shape up, whether they mean you're gonna have to worship Yahweh, you're gonna have to be better people, whatever. I think we're gonna have to become, you know, in a, in a sense, I don't want to sound too ambitious, but, you know, better people if we're gonna, if the conflict that currently afflicts relations among within nations is to subside sufficiently For us to get through the AI revolution in good shape, because I do think it's a, it's a global challenge. So did I exhaust your curiosity about that subject, Nathan?…

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