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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We need to get on the same page as a planet and recognize that it's in all our interest for this thing to proceed a little more slowly and so we can wrestle with these very difficult questions.
And there can be a happy ending in principle, but I don't think there will be one if we move too fast.
Well, I think passing the God test, the reason I call it the God test is because, for one thing, it's the kind of test you might expect the God to set up, right?
I mean, in a number of religious traditions, you see this theme.
You certainly see it in the Bible where humans are expected to be, you know, good people and better things will happen to them if they're good people than if they're not good people.
Good people in a moral sense.
And I think that's where we are with AI.
I think the future will work out much better if our species undergoes a kind of moral advance.
All of us get better at looking at things from the perspectives of other people
not because they're always right, but just because that's the way to work out cooperative arrangements in general, is to understand what it is in the perspective of the other person that may be getting in the way, what is important to them, what's not so important to them, why they might be threatened by you, even though you don't mean things in an offensive way, and why possibly you're afraid of them
or you've been convinced to be afraid of them by politicians or whoever, even though they actually don't have such hostile intent after all.
I just think we need this kind of understanding, which is really one of the pillars, I think, of good moral conduct, is just start out by looking at things from the other person's point of view.
It's called cognitive empathy.
Not to be confused with emotional empathy.
It's not necessarily feeling their pain.
It's not even necessarily really caring about them.
It's just understanding them.
And I think if we can get better at that and understanding other nations, other ethnic groups, other religions and so on, things can work out.
But this is the kind of test I would expect a god or at least a god I'd consider a good god to subject you to.
In other words, this is the kind of improvement that I would expect, you know, the kinds of gods we've traditionally talked about to want.
Showing 101–120 of 123 · page 6 of 7
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