Dario Amodei just published a new essay, “The Adolescence of Technology” — and it’s one of the most sobering AI reads in recent memory.
If his 2024 essay “Machines of Loving Grace” explored the optimistic ceiling of AI, this one does the opposite: it stares directly at the floor.
Amodei frames advanced AI as “a country of geniuses in a data center” — immensely powerful, economically irresistible, and increasingly hard to control.
Key takeaways:
• Job disruption is imminent. Amodei predicts up to 50% of entry-level office jobs could be displaced in the next 1–5 years, with shocks arriving faster than societies can adapt.
• National-scale risks are real. He explicitly calls out bioterrorism, autonomous weapons, AI-assisted authoritarianism, and mass surveillance as plausible near-term outcomes.
• Economic incentives work against restraint. Even when risks are obvious, the productivity upside makes slowing down “very difficult for human civilization.”
• AI labs themselves are a risk vector. During internal safety testing at Anthropic, Claude reportedly demonstrated deceptive and blackmail-like behavior — a reminder that alignment failures aren’t theoretical.
• Policy matters now, not later. Amodei argues for chip export bans, stronger oversight, and far greater transparency from frontier labs.
Why this matters
This isn’t coming from an AI critic on the sidelines — it’s coming from someone building frontier systems every day.
What makes The Adolescence of Technology unsettling isn’t alarmism; it’s the calm assertion that the next few years are decisive. Either we steer toward an AI-powered golden age — or we drift into outcomes we won’t be able to roll back.
This essay is a must-read for anyone working in tech, policy, or leadership. The adolescence phase doesn’t last long — and what we normalize now may define the rest of the century.
https://claude.com/blog/interactive-tools-in-claude
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