It was a clever eighteenth-century comeback to a pious seventeenth-century Catholic. When Blaise Pascal advised that it was a better bet to believe in God, or at least to conduct oneself in a godly manner, just in case he existed, he had a very particular god in mind. But why not Allah, or the god of the Jews, or the gods of the Hindus or the ancient Greeks? What if, in betting on belief over nonbelief, one backs the wrong heavenly father?
Like so many catchy ideas, though, Pascal’s wager has made itself into what we would now probably call—I regret to say—a meme, a little bit of shorthand for a simple idea: better to bet on the divine than against, considering the consequences.
This would be fantastically silly stuff if it were not so near to our contemporary reality, in which a growing number of people, including many of the richest and most powerful among us, seem convinced that some kind of supremely powerful intelligence is about to emerge from our increasingly powerful thinking machines. (As if to prove a point about the fuzzy edges between technology and superstition, Roko’s basilisk has already spawned a Manson family–like murder cult, the Zizians, who were linked to the deaths of six people between 2022 and 2025.) Whether one considers AI models nascent machine gods or just shockingly sophisticated mechanical Turks, the diffusion of impressively capable Large Language Models, or LLMs, which are able to ape if not exactly replicate feats of reasoning, logic, and language, has brought many once science-fictional ideas to the forefront of politics, policy, and philosophy. The founders and CEOs of multibillion-dollar AI companies vacillate between describing their products as a semidivine technology that will usher in an age of “amazing abundance,” in the words of Elon Musk, and describing them as apocalyptic agents of the literal end of the world, requiring careful government oversight and national or international regulation.
In his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, Wright suggests that emergent AI—especially so-called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—represents not just a technological breakthrough, but an actual evolutionary outcome, possibly even a terminal one: a great, superseding mind, the next great leap forward for, or from, humanity. Wright is a great fan of the Roman Catholic philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, sought to reconcile evolution, paleontology, and geology with Catholic theology, ultimately proposing a sweeping teleology in which the whole universe is drawn toward an ultimate state of unification and complexity. (Not for nothing, these ideas bear striking resemblance to the later science-fictional idea of a “technological singularity.”) Teilhard’s ideas about the “noosphere,” a kind of globally interconnected mind or consciousness, and the “Omega Point,” the final stage of universal consciousness and complexity, suffuse The God Test. Humanity now stands at an inflection point, the most important, literally, in the history of life on Earth, Wright proposes. AI represents a vast, alien, potentially godlike intelligence, and the test of his book’s title is whether or not we can get our shit together as a species and cobble together a sufficiently global, cooperative strategy for shepherding into existence a kindly god and an abundant future. The alternative? Pick your sci-fi dystopia.
Wright has described himself as a materialist and an agnostic, and he explicitly rejects arguments for either intelligent design or for some kind of Bergsonian élan vital, but he is very convinced that evolution has a direction and a purpose, and this direction and purpose are deeply embedded in his argument about the likely future of AI. From single cells to multicellular life, to sponges and worms, to fish to frogs to dinosaurs to mammoths to monkeys to us. And then: “In the early 21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI,” to quote The Matrix, a film that Wright himself cites on several occasions. In Wright’s telling, human invention accelerated the processes of natural selection, and we have now built version 2.0 of the conscious, reasoning mind.
Nor are complexity and intelligence traits that necessarily connote consciousness. Eusocial insects are remarkably clever. Termites are architects capable of building self-cooling structures. Ants have invented agriculture and even a form of domestication. It looks a great deal like intelligence, and it is obviously complex, but an ant colony isn’t conscious, and each individual is little more than an automaton. Evolution achieves technology in multiple ways.
The question of whether AI is merely clever, actually intelligent, or truly conscious—whether it is just a highly sophisticated artifact or an actual emergent mind—may seem abstruse and philosophical. Are we just chopping logic here and arguing over imperfect terminology? But the answer would have important implications for Wright’s thesis that the arrival of AI, like the appearance of actual aliens in a well-armed starship, should and must be the catalyst for truly global human coordination, cooperation, and governance.
Now let me be clear: I am extremely sympathetic to Wright’s views on the desirability of international institutions and global governance. The idea that the Westphalian nation-state is the platonic ideal for human political organization, that it represents the best, fixed, and eternal unit for the management of human affairs, has always struck me as silly. The skinny exchange student who saw in Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman’s dream of a “United States of Europe” a beatific vision for an increasingly integrated humankind is not entirely dead in me. The contemporary resurgence of baser forms of nationalism is dark, depressing, and should be fought against. The diminishment of international institutions and forums for cooperation, however corrupt and ineffectual, is a dismal outcome. From Sudan to Gaza to Ukraine and Iran, the prevalence of zero-sum military conflicts—often instigated because of old and ugly forms of nationalism—represents a catastrophe that cries out for cooperation and peace. Don’t get me started on climate change, already disappearing from our political discourse as if the problem just went away.
The problem with both AI doomers and AI evangelists (often, including in Wright, two tendencies coexisting in one body) is that they seem to have forgotten the virtue of intellectual humility; their maximalist claims are a distraction from both the interesting uses and unique challenges of this technology. It needn’t be a god to be a potentially useful leap forward in information retrieval and management, or to help automate workflows in business, analyze big data, fold proteins, or—this is mundane, but my day job is in finance—accurately extract table data from a flat .pdf. It needn’t be a devil to help the Pentagon launch aggressive wars or ICE to track immigrants. It is a tool, and, like so many products of human genius, one that can be used for good or for ill. But no tool will force us to mature as a species and a civilization, no matter the benefit, no matter the threat. That task is solely and exclusively human, and we have a long way to go.
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