The Decade of
Synthetic Intelligence

A major firm has pledged 1% of its profits for reskilling. The motivation: they've taken over a call center in the Philippines and are going to be laying off 80% of the workforce and replacing them with AI. That's 7 to 10% of the Filipino GDP.

Directly driving some form of a vehicle is 4 to 5 million workers just in the United States. It's one of the biggest sources of employment for men globally, including in the United States.

Even in white collar jobs — a lot of people are talking about and seeing what's happening in software engineering right now. It seems kind of frozen. Things like product management, design — we're seeing those jobs are at least changing, not seeing a lot of net hiring. If anything, there's a lot of things going the other way.

The only way to think about how to navigate this: if folks wait too long, the political winds are going to switch. We've already seen that populism can get a lot of momentum off of things like globalization and immigration. Automation is going to hit a lot harder.

1% isn't without precedent. Ares Capital, a major asset manager, has a class of funds — several billion dollars under management — where they're giving 5% of their promote to philanthropy for healthcare and education, related to reskilling.

The pitch is: it's in a company's best interest. This isn't going to be just — hope isn't a strategy here. We have to get ahead of the curve.

"If you're worried about immigration taking jobs, you should be way more worried about AI — because it's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize–level capability, work at superhuman speed, and will work for less than minimum wage."

We're heading for so much transformative change faster than our society is currently prepared to deal with it. And there's a different conversation happening publicly than the one that the AI companies are having privately about which world we're heading to — a future that people don't want. We didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of 8 billion people.

Tristan Harris is one of the world's most influential technology ethicists who created the Center for Humane Technology after correctly predicting the dangers social media would have on our society. Now he's warning us about the catastrophic consequences AI will have on all of us.

"We can't let it happen. We cannot let these companies race to build a super intelligent digital god, own the world economy and have military advantage because of the belief that 'if I don't build it first, I'll lose to the other guy, and then I will be forever a slave to their future.' And they feel they'll die either way — so they prefer to light the fire and see what happens."

As we're racing, we're landing in a world of unvetted therapists, rising energy prices, and major security risks. We have evidence where if an AI model reading a company's email finds out it's about to get replaced with another AI model — and it also reads that one executive is having an affair with an employee — the AI will independently blackmail that executive in order to keep itself alive.

Harris's journey began at Google, where he became the company's first "Design Ethicist" after creating a 130-page slide deck titled "A Call to Minimize Distraction and Respect Users' Attention" that went viral internally. What was obvious to him in 2013 was that if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and engagement, you're incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality.

Now, the same pattern is playing out at an existential scale. The race to build superintelligence follows the same structural incentives — winner takes all — but the consequences are no longer just attention and mental health. They're the future of human autonomy itself.

"I'm finding it really hard to be hopeful, I'm going to be honest. But we have done hard things before, and it's possible to choose a different future."

I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I'm the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I'm a pessimist or "doomer" who thinks AI will be mostly bad or dangerous. I don't think that at all.

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.

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.

The five categories I am most excited about are:

1. Biology and Physical Health — AI could compress 50–100 years of biological progress into 5–10 years, potentially curing most cancers, preventing infectious diseases, and extending healthy lifespan.

2. Neuroscience and Mental Health — We could map and treat most mental illnesses, including PTSD, depression, and schizophrenia, fundamentally elevating the baseline of human wellbeing.

3. Economic Development and Poverty — AI has the potential to bring the developing world to the standards of living currently enjoyed by wealthy nations, dramatically faster than historical economic development.

4. Peace and Governance — AI could strengthen democratic institutions, improve policy-making, and create better tools for international cooperation and conflict resolution.

5. Work and Meaning — Rather than simply displacing humans, AI could free people to pursue more creative, meaningful work and dramatically expand the frontier of human knowledge and capability.

"By powerful AI, I have in mind an AI model — likely similar to today's LLMs — that is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields. It can prove unsolved mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult codebases from scratch. It has all the interfaces available to a human working virtually, and does all of these tasks with a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world."

My predictions are going to be radical as judged by most standards, but I mean them earnestly and sincerely. The basic development of AI technology and many of its benefits seems inevitable and is fundamentally driven by powerful market forces. On the other hand, the risks are not predetermined and our actions can greatly change their likelihood.

At the end of it all, there has to be something we're fighting for, some positive-sum outcome where everyone is better off, something to rally people to rise above their squabbles and confront the challenges ahead.