Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, which draws attention with its new and ambitious projects in the field of artificial intelligence, recently published a 14,000-word blog post and explained his vision on how strong artificial intelligence (AGI) can transform human life in the future. In this vision, Amodei suggested that artificial intelligence could create groundbreaking effects in fields such as medicine, psychology and economy. However, while these views attracted attention, they also sparked great debates in the technology world.
The vision presented by Amodei includes quite ambitious predictions, such as that artificial intelligence will be able to compress 100 years of medical developments into 10 years in the coming decades, treat difficult diseases such as mental health problems, and transfer the human mind to the digital environment. Although such projections arouse great curiosity, they also raise questions about whether such forward-looking promises in the technology world are realistic. The timing of Amodei’s statements is noteworthy as it coincides with a period when the company is seeking a new investment round of $40 billion.
Big ideas, big questions
Amodei’s vision of artificial intelligence offers many positive expectations for the effects of technology on human life in the near future. However, it should be noted that the artificial intelligence systems used today are still far from realizing this vision. Amodei itself states that achieving these goals will require hundreds of billions of dollars of data processing capacity, and that this capacity will be provided through large energy consumption and huge data centers. So, there is still a long way to go for this vision to be realized, and its certainty is not clear.
The great competition in the field of artificial intelligence causes such projections to appear more frequently. For example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman similarly claimed in a blog post published last year that artificial intelligence would bring great prosperity to humanity in the future. Such statements are among the strategies used to attract investors and raise large-scale funds. However, whether these promises can be realized continues to be debated within the artificial intelligence community.
Anthropic had a more cautious attitude towards artificial intelligence security since its establishment and was known for this approach. However, the vision in Amodei’s latest article shows that the company now prefers to focus on a broader future. While this causes less emphasis on security issues, it also shows that the company is starting to take bolder steps.
Meanwhile, the number of new startups in the field of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly. While OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever has established a new artificial intelligence laboratory, there are rumors that former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati will also launch her own initiative. In this context, it’s no surprise that companies like Anthropic are having to present more ambitious visions in the race to raise major investment.
Criticisms of Amodei’s vision generally focus on the fact that such claims are incompatible with current technological capacity. Today’s AI systems are very good at analyzing large data sets and automating repetitive tasks. The advances made in areas such as finance, healthcare and autonomous vehicle technologies also prove this. However, serious steps have not yet been taken to enable these systems to achieve major goals such as uploading the human mind to the cloud or strengthening democracy.
This “technological utopia” vision, which is becoming increasingly popular among artificial intelligence leaders, attracts attention especially as a tool used to attract the attention of investors. It is known that technology giants have been marketing their innovations as solutions that will save the world for many years. For example, Elon Musk claimed that carrying humanity to other planets with SpaceX was a kind of insurance policy, while Mark Zuckerberg presented universal internet access as a solution to poverty. However, there have always been question marks in the public and the technology world as to whether such grand visions are realistic or not.
As a result, while this new vision of artificial intelligence offered by Amodei is promising for the future, it also requires a careful approach as to whether this vision can come true.