Machines of Loving Grace: How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

Faster AI reasoning would accelerate a project only as far as its other constraints permit. In his October 2024 essay, Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, proposes asking about the marginal returns to intelligence: how much being smarter helps with a particular task. Better reasoning can help choose experiments, but cells and animals run at a fixed speed, and many experiments must wait for earlier results.

His optimistic argument is that powerful AI could also develop better experimental methods and tools, gradually routing around some of those constraints. This is a conditional account of how scientific progress might accelerate: the relevant question is which bottlenecks intelligence can remove, and how quickly.

“In fact, one of my main reasons for focusing on risks is that they’re the only thing standing between us and what I see as a fundamentally positive future.”

“I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be , just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.”

“In fact I think it is critical to have a genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires.”

“Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well.”