Ross Douthat

From New York Times Opinion, I'm Ross Douthat, and this is Interesting Times.

are the lords of artificial intelligence on the side of the human race.

It's going to feel very sci-fi.

That's the core question that I had for this week's guest.

He's the head of Anthropic, one of the fastest growing AI companies.

He's something of a utopian when it comes to the potential benefits of the technology that he's unleashing on the world.

Can we use our lead in AI to shape liberty around the world?

But he also sees grave dangers ahead and inevitable disruption.

Dario Amadei, welcome to Interesting Times.

Thank you for having me, Ross.

Thank you for being here.

So you are, rather unusually, maybe for a tech CEO, an essayist.

You have written two long, very interesting essays about the promise and the peril of artificial intelligence.

And we're going to talk about the perils in this conversation, but I thought it would be good to start with the promise and with...

The optimistic vision, indeed, I would say the utopian vision that you laid out a couple of years ago in an essay entitled Machines of Loving Grace, which we'll come back to that title, I think, at the end.

But, you know, I think a lot of people encounter AI news through technology.

headlines predicting, you know, a bloodbath for white-collar jobs, these kinds of things.

Sometimes your own quotes have encouraged these things.

And I think there's a commonplace sense of what is AI for that people have?

So why don't you answer that question to start out?