Dario Amodei

But I think for much longer than we might expect, we will see that, uh, small parts of the job that humans still do will expand to fill their entire job in order for the overall productivity to go up. That's something we've seen. You know, it used to be that, you know, writing and editing letters was very difficult and like writing the print was difficult.

Well, as soon as you had word processors and then computers, and it became easy to produce work and easy to share it, then that became instant and all the focus was on the ideas. So this logic of comparative advantage that expands tiny parts of the tasks to large parts of the tasks and creates new tasks in order to expand productivity, I think that's going to be the case.

someday AI will be better at everything and that logic won't apply. And then we all have, humanity will have to think about how to collectively deal with that. And we're thinking about that every day. And that's another one of the grand problems to deal with aside from misuse and autonomy. And we should take it very seriously.

But I think in the near term and maybe even in the medium term, like medium term, like two, three, four years, I expect that Humans will continue to have a huge role and the nature of programming will change, but programming as a role, programming as a job will not change. It'll just be less writing things line by line and it'll be more macroscopic.

I'm absolutely convinced that powerful IDEs, that there's so much low-hanging fruit to be grabbed there, that right now it's just like you talk to the model and it talks back. But look, I mean... IDs are great at lots of static analysis of so much as possible with static analysis, like many bugs you can find without even writing the code.

Then IDs are good for running particular things, organizing your code, measuring coverage of unit tests. There's so much that's been possible with the normal IDs. Now you add something like well, the model can now write code and run code.

I am absolutely convinced that over the next year or two, even if the quality of the models didn't improve, that there would be enormous opportunity to enhance people's productivity by catching a bunch of mistakes, doing a bunch of grunt work for people, and that we haven't even scratched the surface. Anthropic itself, I mean, you can't say no...

you know, it's hard to say what will happen in the future. Currently, we're not trying to make such IDs ourself. Rather, we're powering the companies like Cursor or like Cognition or some of the other, you know, Expo in the security space. You know, others that I can mention as well that are building such things themselves on top of our API. And our view has been let a thousand flowers bloom.

We don't internally have the, you know, the resources to try all these different things, let's let our customers try it. And, you know, we'll see who succeeds and maybe different customers will succeed in different ways.

So I both think this is super promising and, you know, it's not something, you know, Anthropic isn't eager to, at least right now, compete with all our companies in this space and maybe never.

It is. It is really astounding. I feel like, you know, as a CEO, I don't get to program that much. And I feel like if six months from now I go back, it'll be completely unrecognizable to me. Exactly.

Yeah.

This is something that I've written about a little bit in the essay, although I actually, I give it a bit short shrift, not for any principled reason, but this essay, if you believe it, was originally going to be two or three pages. I was going to talk about it at all hands. And the reason I realized it was an important underexplored topic is that I just kept writing things.

And I was just like, oh man, I can't do this justice. And so the thing ballooned to like 40 or 50 pages. And then when I got to the work and meaning section, I'm like, oh man, this isn't going to be a hundred pages. Like I'm going to have to write a whole other essay about that.

But meaning is actually interesting because you think about like the life that someone lives or something, or like, you know, like, you know, let's say you were to put me in like a, I don't know, like a simulated environment or something where like,

um you know like i have a job and i'm trying to accomplish things and i don't know i like do that for 60 years and then then you're like oh oh like oops this was this was actually all a game right does that really kind of rob you of the meaning of the whole thing you know like i still made important choices including moral choices i still sacrificed i still had to kind of gain all these skills or or or just like a similar exercise you know think back to like you know one of the historical figures who you know discovered electromagnetism or relativity or something

If you told them, well, actually, 20,000 years ago, some alien on this planet discovered this before you did, does that rob the meaning of the discovery? It doesn't really seem like it to me, right? It seems like the process is what matters and how it shows who you are as a person along the way and how you relate to other people and the decisions that you make along the way.

Those are consequential, right? I could imagine if we handle things badly in an AI world, we could set things up where people don't have any long-term source of meaning or any, but that's more a set of choices we make. That's more a set of the architecture of a society with these powerful models. If we design it badly and for shallow things, then that might happen.

I would also say that most people's lives today while admirably, you know, they work very hard to find meaning in those lives. Like, look, you know, we who are privileged and who are developing these technologies, we should have empathy for people, not just here, but in the rest of the world who, you know, spend a lot of their time kind of scraping by to like survive.

Assuming we can distribute the benefits of this technology to everywhere, like their lives are going to get a hell of a lot better. And, you know, meaning will be important to them as it is important to them now. But but, you know, we should not forget the importance of that.