Amodei x Fermi

No, it’s not the latest hot fashion collab. Rather, it’s the end of the world (maybe).

This week, Anthropic CEO and co-founder, Dario Amodei published a much-discussed essay on the dangers of the technology he’s playing a big hand in developing. 

The whole thing is well worth a read, but tl;dr - AI could wipe out jobs, put bioweapons within reach of basically anyone, and make controlling populations a whole lot easier. He does warn against doomerism though, so there’s that.

Amodei is hardly the only person to warn of the dangers of the new technology, although he’s probably the first to do so whilst increasing his AI company’s revenue forecast by 20%. 

In fact, his transparency and willingness to use his expertise and experience to progress a conversation around safeguards and regulation should be applauded, in the context of the AI wealth race at least.

The essay opens a lot of doors for discussion, but it also raises a much, much larger question.

The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the high probability of extraterrestrial life and the complete lack of evidence for it. Essentially, given the scale of the universe, we should not be alone in it, and yet it appears (so far) that we are.

One possible explanation for this is that every civilisation such as ours reaches something called ‘The Great Filter’, an event that is incredibly difficult for life to get past. Having evolved to this point, we could already be well past it. Or it could be in front of us. Like, right in front of us. Perhaps being described in a certain essay, for example.

Amodei was recently asked about this on a Davos panel with Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, but the answer wasn’t particularly enlightening.

This obviously has nothing to do with comms, and in hindsight, something about the power of long form writing to shape the agenda may have been more relevant. But hey, aliens and the apocalypse gets clicks.