But you don’t often see something like this: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has penned an epic essay called “Machines of Loving Grace” that’s fresh out on his personal blog.
This series of insights on the power of new non-deterministic AI is unlike most of what’s out there, and to set the stage, Amodei explains a number of reasons why he’s not just cheerleading for new innovations and initiatives, but bringing a bit of a different, more nuanced perspective.
He talks about the ubiquity of propaganda, the tendency of experts and people on the front lines to be grandiose about potential results, and our human tendency to apply “science fiction” ideas to AI’s vague and generalized potential.
On the other hand, Amodei makes it clear that he does believe in quite a bit of benefit arising out of what we’re exploring now. In a definition of what he calls “powerful AI,” he talks about systems that are smarter than a Nobel prize winner, set up with modern, capable interfaces, and able to do autonomous tasks, a phenomenon he calls a “country of geniuses in a data center.”
Another disclaimer that Amodei makes, though, is that although AI can really help us work through complex problems, it’s not “magic fairy dust.” Some of the limits he enumerates on progress include the natural speed of life and biology, data limitations, complexity of systems, and limits imposed by humans, who have their own goals and collective psychology.
Throughout the essay, the enthusiasm that you see is balanced: Amodei talks about the ability of AI to perform, direct and coordinate activities, while also noting that some capabilities may involve “serial dependence” adding to the difficulty of implementation.
In the medical world, he talks about CRISPR, genomic sequencing, and mRNA, which is a good example of real life application where we got more relief from a pandemic due to the ability to speed up pharmaceutical designs. There’s an interesting part where Amodei sums up some of his bullishness with the phrase “compressed 21st century,” suggesting that we’re likely to get 50 to 100 years of progress in the next 5 to 10 years: curing cancer, dealing with infectious disease, and figuring out how to prevent Alzheimer’s, for example.
In fact, Amodei’s musings cover both physical and mental health, suggesting that we have a range of solutions – behavioral and genetic prevention of mental health problems and more – “biological freedoms” in the form of things like better birth control, weight control, and eventually, longer lifespans. It’s not hard to see how these gains would lead to better collective mental health. But that’s not all: Amodei even goes so far as to suggest that perhaps a range of “everyday problems” could also be solved, writing:
“Most of us have everyday psychological problems that are not ordinarily thought of as rising to the level of clinical disease. Some people are quick to anger, others have trouble focusing or are often drowsy, some are fearful or anxious, or react badly to change. Today, drugs already exist to help with e.g. alertness or focus (caffeine, modafinil, ritalin) but as with many other previous areas, much more is likely to be possible. Probably many more such drugs exist and have not been discovered, and there may also be totally new modalities of intervention, such as targeted light stimulation (see optogenetics above) or magnetic fields.”
Later, Amodei returns to the challenges that we face, addressing the task of distribution of health, interventions, and goals like economic growth, food security, and mitigating climate change.
In acknowledging some of the obstacles to greater progress, he talks about the “opt out problem” or issues with buy-in, where Luddite philosophies or other concerns can have an effect. However, he also invokes that age-old idea that we’re dealing with human nature itself, expressed in the Latin axiom “homo homini lupus.”
“Humans are still a threat to each other,” he writes.
Amodei’s idea is to conduct an “entente strategy” with a coalition of democracies that could move the ball forward in applying better social outcomes to the AI age. He asks the question: does quality of life promote democracy? And he cautions:
“Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty. …If anything, some structural factors seem worrying: AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit. It’s therefore up to us as individual actors to tilt things in the right direction: if we want AI to favor democracy and individual rights, we are going to have to fight for that outcome. I feel even more strongly about this than I do about international inequality: the triumph of liberal democracy and political stability is not guaranteed, perhaps not even likely, and will require great sacrifice and commitment on all of our parts, as it often has in the past. … As with neuroscience and biology, we can also ask how things could be “better than normal”—not just how to avoid autocracy, but how to make democracies better than they are today. Even within democracies, injustices happen all the time. Rule-of-law societies make a promise to their citizens that everyone will be equal under the law and everyone is entitled to basic human rights, but obviously people do not always receive those rights in practice. That this promise is even partially fulfilled makes it something to be proud of, but can AI help us do better?”
As for work and meaning, Amodei does acknowledge what seems to be on everyone’s mind, the elephant in the room: with AI so capable, what will humans do?
In this regard, he echoes what we have heard a lot of from others: humans may spend their days doing things that don’t have direct market value – and so we will need a universal basic income. Soon. Will we get it?
“I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and so cheap that this will no longer apply,” he writes. “At that point, our current economic setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.”
In the end, he suggests many will be “moved to tears” by the power of these new technologies, and by watching our old sand-castles being washed away.
“In one sense the vision laid out here is extremely radical: it is not what almost anyone expects to happen in the next decade, and will likely strike many as an absurd fantasy,” he writes. “Some may not even consider it desirable; it embodies values and political choices that not everyone will agree with. But at the same time there is something blindingly obvious—something overdetermined—about it, as if many different attempts to envision a good world inevitably lead roughly here.”
And he suggests that we have to re-envision how our societal ideals will work under the influence of AI. This is the final set of paragraphs summing that up:
“I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it, and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right equally. From there it is not hard to argue that we should all band together and apply our intellects to achieve this outcome. Few disagree that people should be punished for attacking or hurting others unnecessarily, and from there it’s not much of a leap to the idea that punishments should be consistent and systematic across people. It is similarly intuitive that people should have autonomy and responsibility over their own lives and choices. These simple intuitions, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead eventually to rule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values. If not inevitably, then at least as a statistical tendency, this is where humanity was already headed. AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer. Nevertheless, it is a thing of transcendent beauty. We have the opportunity to play some small role in making it real.”
Yes, we do have some big questions to answer. I found Amodei’s input to be timely – and inspiring. Let’s continue to think about how we move through the AI age.
