This piece originally appeared in Arena.
If you have paid attention to artificial intelligence at all in the past two years, there is a good chance that you have heard more about its risks than its benefits. Some believe you should be worried about existential or catastrophic risks—the notion that AI systems may one day be so powerful that they could exterminate humanity or be used by malicious humans to cause widespread harm. Others think that category of risks is “hype” or “marketing,” and that you should instead focus on a variety of alleged “present-day” harms of AI such as misinformation and discrimination. Perhaps the central debate in AI discourse of the last two years is not whether you should fixate on risk, but instead which kind of risk should be your primary interest.
This alone is a remarkable fact. There is no other general-purpose technology in human history that entered society with such obsession over its risks. It isn’t healthy. Most risk prognosticators are happy to pay lip service to the “benefits” of AI, but these are almost invariably ill-defined—“curing disease,” “helping with climate change,” and the like. But what, really, are the benefits? How will they be realized? Why, after all, should we bear all these supposed risks? What are we striving for? Our answers to these questions are shockingly under-developed. Too often, we rely on platitudes to express what many now agree will be the most important technology transition of our era, if not ever.
Last October, Dario Amodei, CEO of the frontier AI company Anthropic (they make Claude models) tried to fill this void with an essay called “Machines of Loving Grace,” its title borrowed from a poem by Richard Brautigan. It is among the most sophisticated and concrete treatments yet of a crucial topic: what, precisely, does it mean for “AI” to “go well”? The essay envisions the rapid development of what Amodei calls “powerful AI” (what others might call “artificial general intelligence” or even “artificial superintelligence”), enabling a century’s worth of scientific progress to be compressed into a decade or so and perhaps even securing the long-term hegemony of Western democracies.
