Dario Amodei: the technological adolescence of humanity.

I just read the latest essay by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, entitled “The Adolescence of Technology,” and I must admit that some of his reflections made me think more than usual, so I decided to write about them in this new newsletter article.

Amodei is not catastrophist; in fact, Amodei is explicitly optimistic. But the data he put together, combined with what is already happening in Western labor markets, draw a scenario that concerns us closely, even here in Italy and Switzerland.

Amodei's central thesis is that humanity is going through an unprecedented technological “rite of passage.” In a year or two, perhaps even sooner, we may have access to what he calls “powerful AI”: artificial intelligence models smarter than any Nobel Prize winner in almost any field, capable of operating autonomously for days or weeks on complex tasks, and scalable to millions of instances working at speeds ten or a hundred times faster than human speeds. It is as if a “country of geniuses in a datacenter,” to use his words, should materialize somewhere in the world in 2027.