Why The AI Doomers Might Be Right - Robert Wright - #1122

0:00I've told you this before, but you wrote probably the most influential book in my life, which was The Moral Animal, and it was the thing that got me started on the trajectory of thinking about evolutionary psychology, of studying human nature more deeply.

0:12Why are you now writing about AI, given your heritage?

0:18Well, in some ways, it's an extension of evolutionary thinking in a couple of senses that I think are so underappreciated.

0:25AI is a product of evolution and is still evolving.

0:30But the other connection to the moral animal, I think, is, first of all, well, the moral animal was about the human mind.

0:37And AI does a lot of things that traditionally only human minds have done.

0:43The other thing I tried to do in the moral animal is highlight kind of what you might call moral biases, kind of self-serving moral biases, you know, the way we all think we're right and the other guy's wrong.

0:56And I think if we're going to get through the AI revolution in good shape, among the things we're going to have to do is grapple with that, with kind of what you might call the psychology of tribalism a little more successfully than we have.