Dario Amodei: belief

Transcript context

…It seems like in an offense-dominant world, over the course of the next century—the idea is that AI is making the progress that would happen over the next century happen in some period of five to ten years—we would still need the same mechanisms, or balance of power would be similarly intractable, even if humans were the only game in town. I guess we have the advice of AI. But it fundamentally doesn’t seem like a totally different ball game here. If checks and balances were going to work, they would work with humans as well. If they aren’t going to work, they wouldn’t work with AIs as well. So maybe this just dooms human checks and balances as well. Again, I think there’s some way to make this happen. The governments of the world may have to work together to make it happen. We may have to talk to AIs about building societal structures in such a way that these defenses are possible. I don’t know. I don’t want to say this is so far ahead in time, but it’s so far ahead in technological ability that may happen over a short period of time, that it’s hard for us to anticipate it in advance. Speaking of governments getting involved, on December 26, the Tennessee legislature introduced a bill which said, “It would be an offense for a person to knowingly train artificial intelligence to provide emotional support, including through open-ended conversations with a user.” Of course, one of the things that Claude attempts to do is be a thoughtful, knowledgeable friend. In general, it seems like we’re going to have this patchwork of state laws. A lot of the benefits that normal people could experience as a result of AI are going to be curtailed, especially when we get into the kinds of things you discuss in “Machines of Loving Grace”: biological freedom, mental health improvements, et cetera. It seems easy to imagine worlds in which these get Whac-A-Moled away by different laws, whereas bills like this don’t seem to address the actual existential threats that you’re concerned about. I’m curious to understand, in the context of things like this, Anthropic’s position against the federal moratorium on state AI laws.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.