Camp is away this week and I thought I’d take up the slack and dive into one topic that seems to be impacting our world, from finances to politics, from science to philosophy: Artificial Intelligence or AI.

Since neither I nor Camp know an awful lot about AI, I decided to read up on it. While scanning a myriad of articles on the subject a friend pointed me to this guy. Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the leading AI developers. 

Here are some excerpts from two long essays he wrote in 2023 and 2025 respectively.  The first one: ‘Machines of loving grace’, is a bit of a love-story in which he expands on the usefulness and limitless potential of Artificial Intelligence and its effects on modern democracy and indeed the survival of it. The second essay deals with the possible risks and downsides. A more sober view. Both are very informative, written by Dario himself or his team of experts. 

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology#top

One concern in both developed and developing worlds alike is people opting out of AI-enabled benefits (similar to the anti-vaccine movement, or Luddite movements more generally). There could end up being bad feedback cycles where, for example, the people who are least able to make good decisions opt out of the very technologies that improve their decision-making abilities, leading to an ever-increasing gap and even creating a dystopian underclass. 

AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit. It’s therefore up to us as individual actors to tilt things in the right direction: if we want AI to favor democracy and individual rights, we are going to have to fight for that outcome. I feel even more strongly about this than I do about international inequality: the triumph of liberal democracy and political stability is not guaranteed, perhaps not even likely, and will require great sacrifice and commitment on all of our parts, as it often has in the past.

Just as feudalism became unworkable with the industrial revolution, the AI age could lead inevitably and logically to the conclusion that democracy (and, hopefully, democracy improved and reinvigorated by AI, as I discuss in Machines of Loving Grace) is the only viable form of government if humanity is to have a good future.

Another kind of disempowerment can occur if there is such a huge concentration of wealth that a small group of people effectively controls government policy with their influence, and ordinary citizens have no influence because they lack economic leverage. Democracy is ultimately backstopped by the idea that the population as a whole is necessary for the operation of the economy. If that economic leverage goes away, then the implicit social contract of democracy may stop working.

Related to this, the coupling of this economic concentration of wealth with the political system already concerns me. AI datacenters already represent a substantial fraction of US economic growth and are thus strongly tying together the financial interests of large tech companies (which are increasingly focused on either AI or AI infrastructure) and the political interests of the government in a way that can produce perverse incentives. We already see this through the reluctance of tech companies to criticize the US government, and the government’s support for extreme anti-regulatory policies on AI.

Taking time to carefully build AI systems so they do not autonomously threaten humanity is in genuine tension with the need for democratic nations to stay ahead of authoritarian nations and not be subjugated by them.