The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table
The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table
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AI Is Self-Evolving, and Nobody Understands It - Bioweapons, China Race, Sentience | Robert Wright
1 hour 30 minutes Posted Jul 10, 2026 at 12:46 pm.
Intro Robert Wright and The God Test
A 27-ton computer and a buried headline
Interviewing the Godfather of AI in 1983 and missing it
Not programmed evolved
The "fancy autocomplete" myth
Dukakis, Reagan, and how minds file words
Best case: medicine, education, and an MRI story
Worst case: bioweapons, jailbreaks, designer babies
An AI that believes what the Ayatollah believes
The China race overdone and dangerous?
Nazis, the Hamas charter, and bombing over AI
Authoritarianism through the back door
Sociopaths, the ship of Theseus, and machine morality
Is it sentient? Should you be nice to it?
AI as judge: my legal experiment
The God Test
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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.