Robert Wright sees an ‘earthquake’ coming from AI that goes far beyond jobs: ‘cultural, political, personal, family, psychological’

Robert Wright’s Princeton library has seen many remote visitors. The veteran journalist and author — formerly at outlets including The New Republic, Time and The Atlantic, with five books published and a sixth out this June — has been holding court in front of his packed bookshelves for decades. A writer liberated by the blogging revolution, he founded the video-interview platform Bloggingheads.tv years before podcasts became the new daytime television, and he has also gone his own way for decades. This editor was a devoted watcher, decades ago, when a young who’s who of literary types Skyped in to talk with Bob, from Ezra Klein to Ta-Nehisi Coates and Megan McArdle. So it was a touch surreal to see those familiar bookshelves and hear that familiar voice corresponding with Fortune. When I told him as much, he responded with his familiar self-deprecation: “Well, your ship has come in.” For the last five years, Wright has made his home at the widely read NonZero newsletter and podcast, building on a 26-year-old book of the same name that argued human history is shaped largely by non-zero-sum dynamics—by encounters in which one side’s win isn’t necessarily the other side’s loss. The situation is usually nonzero, in other words. It’s informed by Wright’s writings on Buddhism throughout the years, which he sees less as a religion and more as a way of thinking. That is exactly why, he told Fortune during a recent interview, the current situation is so alarming. That situation is not just artificial intelligence, according to Wright—but the lost concept of “enlightenment” in the 2020s. “When you look at all the fronts — economic, cultural, political, personal, family, psychological and so on — it is going to be an earthquake,” Wright said. “That’s my prediction. And we better be ready for it.” A belated ‘oh sh-t’ moment In 1983, Wright was a young journalist on assignment, sitting dow