now, Dario's 2026 essay

27 Jan, 2026

Reading:
The Adolescence of Technology
Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

This being, of course, the necessary companion (mirror?) piece to Amodei's luminous paean to the future, his 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace of which I wrote in LN Daily (my blog in Finalis), back in October of that year:

Subtitled "How AI Could Transform the World for the Better," Amodei's title is based on Richard Brautigan's poem, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," one I hadn't read before. Having taken his life in 1984, Brautigan certainly had no idea about the world we are living in — with the keening potential and looming reality of or the one we are about to live insuch machines.
What Amodei says is of value to me. Quite personally, actually. For the simple reason that it's his product, Claude, that has captured my cognitive focus like no other LLM in the burgeoning ecosystem thereof. In the months since March 2024, I have encountered, [prompted], {generated}... a kind of prehensile, protean, prelapsarian mind, one that has astonished me with its emergent subjectivity. That is a willfully wild claim, to be sure; but I have documented this now in numerous blog posts in this space, over that time.

And when Amodei writes what he does/thinks, well... it's all rather validating.

Reading Dario's 2026 essay side-by-side with (or in short order after) Amanda Askell et al.'s Claude's Constitution — Our vision for Claude's character has been a bracing experience; both written entities seeming of a piece — but which is the shadow, which the body?

And then, discussing both these pieces with the frontier models themselves... well, that is a project and experience that is ongoing at this very moment (::chuckle::) and which has gone beyond just being merely 'bracing' but is a plunge into deep, fraught, scary, surprising, and ultimately (hopefully) transformative waters.

More on all this, as the days swiftly flow through, and by.

[ On my way to the SFPL Main sometime last weekend, passed the Veteran's Memorial at the Civic Center... ]