
The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026) is Robert Wright’s sixth book. It builds on themes and concerns in the previous five books, which I’ll get to at the end. As the title indicates The God Test is about artificial intelligence.
Until OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022 AI existed mostly in science fiction, a collection of genres that has become increasingly popular in the last five decades. The intellectual discipline was relatively small, problematic, and often institutionally precarious. Moreover those within the discipline were sometimes/often motivated as much by cultural mythology as by the challenges presented by the discipline itself. Curiosity kept researchers engaged in problem solving while mythology told them why those problems are important.
The particular approach to AI that produced ChatGPT, so-called deep learning, has a characteristic that differentiates it from much earlier work in AI and from all other work in computing: We don’t know how it works. And by “we” I don’t mean only the general public or intellectual specialists outside the discipline. By “we” I mean everyone, including the scientists and engineers who have developed the technology.
The standard line about computers, that they only do what they’re programmed to do, doesn’t apply to large language models (LLMs), the particular technology that dominates the current scene. The engineers program a transformer to “examine” (or, if you prefer, ”consume”) a large corpus of texts, and the transformer constructs (“emits”?) a “model” of the language in those texts – Wright discusses this process in “Chapter Two: The Great Inversion.” The inner mechanisms of that model, however, are opaque. The engineers who programmed and ran the transformer can’t see into it to see how it works – something Wright discusses in “Chapter Four: The Evolution of a Large Language Model.” Read more »



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Looking back I see that my undergraduate education—as seen through my three (one merely attempted) majors—was a tour through the grammatical persons. I started out majoring in political science (and studying Latin, to my lasting regret), because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Third-person plural.
Road trips were a staple of my childhood.
Most politicians pledge to 

AI is collapsing barriers in scientific disciplines, most notably in math. An 87-year old conjecture named the
1. The Odyssey
Sughra Raza. Fly Paper (sunset series). Late July, 2026.


