Technology

More than a year before his recent standoff with the Pentagon, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 15,000-word manifesto describing a glorious AI future. Its title, “Machines of Loving Grace,” is borrowed from a Richard Brautigan poem, but as Amodei acknowledged, with some embarrassment, its utopian vision bears some resemblance to science fiction. According to Amodei, we will soon create the first polymath AIs with abilities that surpass those of Nobel Prize winners in “most relevant fields,” and we’ll have millions of them, a “country of geniuses,” all packed into the glowing server racks of a data center, working together. With access to tools that operate directly on our physical world, these AIs would be able to get up to a great deal of dangerous mischief, but according to Amodei, if they’re developed—or “grown,” as staffers at Anthropic are fond of saying—in the correct way, they will decide to greatly improve our lives.

Amodei does not explain precisely how the AIs will accomplish this. In most cases, he expects them to do what the smartest humans do, but much more rapidly, compressing decades of scientific progress. He says that by 2035, we could have the theories, cures, and technologies of the early 22nd century. Our infectious diseases and cancers could be cured, and we could live twice as long, and slow the decay of our brains. Demis Hassabis, the head of Google DeepMind, has similarly conceived of superintelligent AI as the ultimate tool to accelerate scientific discovery, and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has said that advanced AI may even solve physics.

Amodei does not say that this utopian AI future is inevitable. To the contrary, among the chief executives at the top AI labs, he may be the one who worries most about the technology’s dangers. “Machines of Loving Grace” is an optimistic outlier in his larger oeuvre of published writing, much of which concerns the risks that will accompany the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence. Amodei seems to think of today’s AI researchers as comparable to Manhattan Project scientists, and has been known to recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. In his telling, superhuman AI could be even more dangerous than nuclear weapons, which is why AI needs to be developed the right way, by the right people, so that it doesn’t overpower humanity or tip the global balance of power toward autocracies.