Robert Wright

speaker

123 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 23 Jun

Robert Wright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · Does AI mark an inflection point for civilization? · 23 Jun 2026 podcast

This is the first time a wholly new form of intelligence, not even based in biological material, in other words, it's not carbon based, has materialized.

So is that.

That's new.

And as it happens, this coincides with the development, the kind of emergence of what you could call a global brain.

I talk in the book about this thinker who in 1923 coined the term noosphere for this kind of planetary mind that he could already see was emerging.

And now with the Internet, we can see more clearly.

So we're going through these, you know, a couple of big thresholds are being crossed.

Information processing is reaching the planetary level.

And now, I mean, that was happening anyway, 30, 40 years ago, you know, connections among human brains were kind of forming this brain of brains, as this thinker Teilhard de Chardin had put it.

But now we have this wholly new form of silicon-based intelligence that itself will be, you know, these will be neurons in this global brain.

So you've got these two things happening at once.

And they are both epic, even against the backdrop of all of life.

So that's what I mean when I talk in such grand terms.

I think pretty concerned.

This was predicted by some very far-seeing people that AI would, you know, it's not that it has a will to power.

in the sense that humans made by virtue of their own evolutionary history, it's more like it just understands that to pursue certain goals, power helps.

And, you know, there are now a lot of examples coming from laboratory experiments with these machines where it turns out they understand, you know, how to get things done.

I mean, a famous case was

They set it up so that the AI would discover, you know, these are fake emails, but the AI didn't know that.

So, you know, you say you're in this workplace.

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