Description Written By Fable/Max: Robert Wright interviewed Geoffrey Hinton in 1983 and, by his own account, got the story 180 degrees wrong. Forty years later Hinton is the "Godfather of AI," two of the three godfathers are frightened of their own creation, and Wright has written The God Test to figure out what he missed and what's coming. We talk about how these machines evolved rather than being programmed - nobody fully understands them, including the people who build them - why "fancy autocomplete" was always wrong, the best case (an AI caught a radiologist's error in his cancer MRI), the worst case (a bioweapon that incubates silently for six weeks), why racing China to superintelligence may cause the war it's meant to prevent, and whether unplugging a machine could ever be murder. Plus an experiment of my own: I put a legal dispute in front of the AI and handed the laptop to the other side.

0:00 Intro - Robert Wright and The God Test

2:13 A 27-ton computer and a buried headline

4:11 Interviewing the Godfather of AI in 1983 - and missing it

10:15 Not programmed - evolved

17:27 The "fancy autocomplete" myth

24:17 Dukakis, Reagan, and how minds file words

35:49 Best case: medicine, education, and an MRI story

42:38 Worst case: bioweapons, jailbreaks, designer babies

48:51 An AI that believes what the Ayatollah believes

50:30 The China race - overdone and dangerous?

57:33 Nazis, the Hamas charter, and bombing over AI

59:46 Authoritarianism through the back door

1:03:35 Sociopaths, the ship of Theseus, and machine morality

1:14:34 Is it sentient? Should you be nice to it?

1:21:54 AI as judge: my legal experiment

1:26:20 The God Test