That’s essentially what Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is worried about. If he’s worried, it’s for sure we should be worried too.
Imagine you build a robot that’s smarter than every person on Earth.
At first, it’s wonderful! It can cure diseases, invent amazing things, solve complicated problems, and do work that would take humans hundreds of years. But there’s a catch.
What happens when that robot becomes so smart that humans can no longer understand what it’s doing, control its decisions, or stop it?
If the CEO of a company building some of the world’s most powerful AI believes that technology could someday threaten humanity’s existence, why is his company continuing to make it more powerful?
I would sort of like to stop time to ensure we keep what we’ve got. 🙂
And I keep coming back to one question:
If a company discovers that its next AI model is dangerously powerful, will it actually delay releasing it—even if its competitors keep moving forward?
That’s the question I’d most like Amodei, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and every other AI leader to answer with something more substantial than a promise.
Now you know: The word robot comes from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor. It was introduced to the world in a 1920 play by Karel Čapek called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). In the play, humans create artificial workers to make life easier. The workers eventually rebel and wipe out humanity.
