2025-10-15: Technological Optimism and Appropriate Fear
A commentary
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Here’s today at a glance:
Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, just wrote a long post, flowery in language, on his view that it was appropriate to be fearful of AI, with quotes like:
that’s not an artificial intelligence about to go into a hard takeoff, it’s just a tool that will be put to work in our economy. It’s just a machine, and machines are things we master.But make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.Jack Clark
The baseline view he has can be summarized as
a) AGI is possible and will happen, probably in the near future - putting him in the technology optimist group vs the pessimists who do not believe it is possible at all (why worry then?) or that it will take a hundred years or longer.
b) that we should be fearful lest we tip the AI development process i…
