A curious feature of the artificial intelligence boom is how many commentators reach for the great books to understand it. Peter Thiel borrowed the name of Palantir, the firm he founded, from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and has delivered lectures reinterpreting the Antichrist of the New Testament as a force blocking the road to a transhumanist heaven on earth. Pope Leo explicitly rebuked him when he quoted Gandalf, the wizard from the series, in his first encyclical on how to preserve human dignity at a time of breakneck change. The Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Robert Wright has found his own sage in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist who suggested that the atomic age might usher in the spiritual integration of mankind.

The God Test draws on Teilhard’s faith in the coming of a “planetary mind,” “noosphere,” or “brain of brains” to generate ways of coping with AI. Wright believes the technology is going to trigger “the most abruptly dramatic transformation of human experience and human society in the history of our species.” He offers us a manifesto for moving slowly and repairing things, written with the rangy open-mindedness that characterizes his prolific podcasting.

The God Test starts by explaining why we should feel “awe” and some fear at the coming of AI machines. In the 1940s, Teilhard suggested that a dense web of media and communications constituted a “generalized nervous system, emanating from certain defined centers and covering the entire surface of the globe.” The messaging it fostered would consign nations and national enmities to the past. The prophecy was premature, but Wright has seen enough of today’s AI technologies to feel sure that they will soon combine to form a “global brain.” The first task Wright sets himself is to explain the limitless, even cosmic potential of these technologies; the second is to argue that there is still time to turn their risky power to good.