How Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s Writings Help Explain A.I. Fears
The collected essays of Dario Amodei help explain why some people are so worried about artificial intelligence.
“If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” Ronald Reagan is credited with saying. Silicon Valley disagrees. Ever since the drama around artificial intelligence began heating up, technologists have unleashed bushels of commentary.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, wrote 6,500 words about how people who use a lot of A.I. will survive best in the A.I. world to come. Bill Gates spent nearly 6,000 words arguing that A.I. will be mankind’s undoing unless we reorient human society and behavior around it. Sam Altman of OpenAI, whose San Francisco house was attacked, needed only 1,000 words to stress that “the world deserves huge amounts of A.I. and we must figure out how to make it happen.”
Dario Amodei, a co-founder and the chief executive of Anthropic, is one of the tech industry’s most prolific and polished explainers. He has contributed to dozens of scholarly papers and more recently wrote a half-dozen informal essays for the general public. Outside of a few references to such cultural artifacts as “The Lord of the Rings,” Carl Sagan and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” these essays are generally measured, colorless, equipped with footnotes — an engineer’s reflections. The most recent was on Saturday.
Putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs is an old-fashioned thing to do, particularly when the topic being explained is a technology so amazing it might as well be magic. But as Anthropic moves ahead with what may be the largest public offering in history as soon as this fall, Dr. Amodei needs to forcefully reassure everyone that everything is on track. He’s losing if he’s not explaining.
His collected essays are a chronicle of Silicon Valley’s constantly shifting methods of selling its own product to a public that is simultaneously enticed and horrified. It’s not an easy task, convincing the world that something is a slam-dunk even though it will make Silicon Valley richer and more powerful while possibly leaving ordinary folks unemployed or — who knows? — dead.
