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Published · transcript-backed

Nathan Labenz: belief

23 Jun 2026 The Cognitive Revolution The God We Deserve: Nonzero's Robert Wright on AI as Humanity's Ultimate Test

“I'll give you what I think is, like, the short steel man, and I do think it's a real thread-the-needle scenario.”

— Nathan Labenz

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Nathan Labenz
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
23 Jun 2026
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, one thing that occurred to me is to the extent that you could separate The functionality and, you know, have a race towards some sort of good medical application, it, it would help if there were a prior agreement that, you know, whoever wins the trophy, the benefits are gonna be shared, right? Like, so both, both countries are gonna benefit from the competitive dynamic, have maybe some special arrangement about the intellectual property. The, the other thing I'd say relative to the question of, like, national pride is, you know, I like the idea of taking pride in the values that you see your nation as representing, if they're good values. I, I think b- part of the problem is that people by nature are not that clear-eyed about that stuff. We're, we're, we're kind of designed by natural selection to con- convince ourselves that we're better than we are. There's a lot of evidence about this. But what, what I'd like to see, I guess, is America take pride in the idea that, like, we're now at this threshold, okay? This technology, like it or not, is here. And if you agree with the many people who I think say when you press them, even if current competitive dynamics don't encourage them to say it out loud, but believe that ultimately some degree of international coordination and transparency and governance is gonna be in order, how about our mission as the world's leading AI power, and for the time being at least, maybe the world's military and economic power, like, our mission being to guide the world to the promised land where level of conflict is low enough and the level of coordination is high enough that this thing can work out. Like, why don't we focus on that? And I mean, to me, I'm sorry, just the idea that what we need is a breakneck race with anybody is just borderline... I don't understand how... Look, I understand how a lot of people don't share my view about how pow- how powerful this is and is going to become and so on. That's fine. I guess what bothers... What I don't totally get is the people who are self-professed AI safety hawks and are still talking like we need a breakneck international race. And I just do not, I don't, I don't get that. And I think with that, I've alienated whoever I had not alienated before. So- I think that... I'll give you what I think is, like, the short steel man, and I do think it's a real thread-the-needle scenario. But- Mm-hmm…

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