The Michael Shermer Show

Robert Wright joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, and why he thinks the AI revolution may be moving much faster than most people realize. Wright argues that deep learning is not just a new way of programming computers. In an important sense, it resembles evolution: neural networks discover solutions for themselves, sometimes recreating cognitive functions that natural selection built into human brains. That helps explain why AI capabilities have advanced so quickly, and why increasingly autonomous systems and recursive self-improvement could accelerate the process even further.
Shermer presses Wright on what all of this actually means. Does an AI understand what it says? Could it be conscious? Why would a superintelligence ever seek power? Is human extinction a realistic possibility, or science-fiction doomerism? They discuss AI deception and theory of mind, John Searle's Chinese Room, bioweapons and cyberattacks, the risk of a U.S.-China AI arms race, regulation, surveillance, and the growing concentration of power in governments and tech companies.
The conversation ends with Wright's larger philosophical question: if humanity really is building something with godlike power, what kind of god are we going to build, and are we mature enough to survive it?
Robert Wright is the New York Times bestselling author of The Evolution of God (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and Three Scientists and their Gods (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania and at Princeton University, where he also created the popular online course "Buddhism and Modern Psychology." He is currently Visiting Professor of Science and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Michael Shermer speaks with Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger shortly after Sanger was permanently banned from editing the site he helped create.
Sanger tells the story of Wikipedia's founding, how its ideal of open collaboration hardened into a system dominated by a relatively small group of powerful editors, and why he believes its rules on sourcing and "consensus" now produce political and religious bias.
In the second half of the conversation, Shermer and Sanger shift gears completely and discuss whether religious faith can be rational, the philosophical case for God, the resurrection, the Trinity, repentance and salvation, and whether a future superintelligent AI could become indistinguishable from God.

Michael Shermer speaks with political scientist Marlene Laruelle about Russia's turbulent transformation during the 1990s and the rise of Vladimir Putin, why the Kremlin so badly misjudged Ukraine, China's rise and its ambitions regarding Taiwan, why killing Iran's Supreme Leader and much of its senior leadership did not bring down the regime, the limits of foreign aid and sanctions, mass surveillance, economic nationalism, and whether Western democracy can survive an age of economic pessimism and technological control.
Marlene Laruelle is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Luiss University in Rome. From 2011 to 2025, she served as research professor of international affairs and political science at George Washington University. She directs the Illiberalism Studies Program, a transatlantic initiative based in Washington, D.C., and Paris at Inalco. A specialist in Russia and the post-Soviet region, her work examines ideology, geopolitics, and culture, with a current focus on the rise of illiberal and postliberal ideologies in Europe and the United States.

How do men and women differ? Where do the differences come from? And how do they shape modern life?
Drawing on a century of research and a billion years of evolution, Steve Stewart-Williams explains why many sex differences appear despite socialization, not because of it; why in our mating and parenting patterns, humans are more like the average bird than the average mammal; and why sex differences are sometimes a sign of societal health rather than injustice.
Steve Stewart-Williams is a professor of psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. His first book, Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life, was published in 2010. His second, The Ape That Understood the Universe, was published in 2018. His new book is A Billion Years of Sex Differences.

Michael Shermer makes the case that the U.S. Founding Fathers were not only steeped in Enlightenment values on which the Declaration of Independence was based, but they were also scientists searching to discover moral truths and values on which to base a rational society, which they succeeded in doing in this document along with the Constitution.