AI is now developing so fast that it is pushing us towards a reckoning unlike any faced by any generation. \u201cIt cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,\u201d said Amodei. \u201cI believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022 Daniela Amodei makes her pitch for \u2018trustworthy\u2019 AI<\/a><\/p>\n In short, he is worried about the power of the machines that he, and others, are building. So last week, he did the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm, publishing a 19,000-word blog post titled The Adolescence of Technology. The gist: governments, companies and the public need to wake up to the tidal wave about to crash over society, in the form of machines, with Nobel prize-level competency, that will be as common and accessible as a toaster. <\/p>\n \u201cHumanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,\u201d Amodei wrote.<\/p>\n Dario Amodei with his sister Daniela<\/p>\n DAVID PAUL MORRIS\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n His missive read like a health warning for the human race. Bad actors could soon use AI to build bio-weapons. AI tools themselves might simply decide to exterminate humans. Mass job displacement and societal upheaval were almost guaranteed, within as little as one to five years.<\/p>\n Beyond the alarmism, his post scratched at a deeper question. When OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT was released in November 2022, it was a \u201cmoment\u201d \u2014 a singular event that kick-started a global AI boom. Yet doubts have begun to percolate as governments and companies have swept aside regulations to frantically erect data centres and pour hundreds of billions into the sector. Anthropic and its rival OpenAI may be growing like weeds, but they are also losing astounding amounts of money. Thousands of other start-ups have cropped up in their wake, but none has yet made a dent in the universe. <\/p>\n \u2022 Experts predict AI will lead to the extinction of humanity<\/a><\/p>\n The law of averages means that most never will.<\/p>\n So are we simply caught in a bubble, inflated by blinkered west coast techies? Or are we, instead, on the cusp of another \u201cChatGPT moment\u201d, when the technology starts to deliver on the hype, for good and for ill? <\/p>\n \u201cI think 2025 was maybe the most interesting year in my entire career and probably life. I would expect 2026 to exceed that,\u201d Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor, said last week. \u201cThis stuff is really working now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Smarts\u2019 aren\u2019t all we need<\/p>\n Nearly 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley, Ethan Mollick, a professor and co-director of the Generative AI Labs at Wharton business school in Philadelphia, offered a more nuanced view of a technology that is both advancing with incredible speed but seeping relatively slowly into the real world.<\/p>\n He had recently finished teaching a class of MBA students in which they were given three days to launch a start-up, from conceiving a business plan to creating a prototype, with help from AI. \u201cThey did ten times more in three days than they would have got through in a semester not long ago,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a real thing.\u201d<\/p>\n What he saw in his classroom appears to accord with Amodei\u2019s own experience. Two years ago, AI was \u201cbarely capable of writing a single line of code,\u201d Amodei wrote. Now, he said, it writes \u201call or almost all of the code for some people \u2014 including engineers at Anthropic. Soon, they may do the entire task of a software engineer end to end.\u201d <\/p>\n Now extrapolate this to every other task that requires grey matter. AI will be better, and not by a little bit: 10 or 100 or 1,000 times faster and smarter than humans. \u201cIt is hard for people to adapt to this pace of change,\u201d Amodei said.<\/p>\n Yet that dotted line \u2014 from coding agents to the end of the economy, society and the world as we know it \u2014 reflects Silicon Valley\u2019s uniquely simplistic world view, Mollick said; it\u2019s based on the assumption that everyone will instantly bin the old way of doing things. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s this hand-wavy idea that smarts are all you need \u2014 that AI is a bunch of geniuses in a data centre,\u201d he said. \u201cBut a genius without hands, for example, may be enough to make it far less useful for a huge amount of work.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, OpenAI\u2019s flashy new recruit, former chancellor George Osborne<\/a>, said last month that the San Francisco company would focus this year on closing the \u201ccapability overhang\u201d that already exists between what AI can do and how people and organisations are using it. The message, similar to Anthropic\u2019s, seems to be: all of us luddites just don\u2019t get it. <\/p>\n It\u2019s as if we have all discovered fire, but not yet realised we can use it to cook food, keep us warm and light our way.<\/p>\n \u201cThe goal of the AI labs is to replace all work, and they are sincere in their belief that they can build a tool capable of doing that. But they miss the idea of bottlenecks,\u201d Mollick said. \u201cIt is increasingly dawning on CEOs that this is the big one. Like, this is the steam engine. But it took a long time to figure out how to organise factories for the steam engine.\u201d<\/p>\n To wit: Charlie Nunn, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, said last week that the bank was already using 800 live AI models and has delivered \u00a31.9 billion of savings over four years through using AI. But it has not led to a jobs bloodbath, despite predictions from a recent Morgan Stanley report that 200,000 jobs in European banking would be lost.<\/p>\n Charlie Nunn<\/p>\n VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES<\/p>\n On the contrary. Lloyds, which owns Halifax and Bank of Scotland, employs 60,000 people and has hired 9,000 \u201cover the last few years\u201d in data and tech roles. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of new roles and skills we need and we are investing in those,\u201d said Nunn. \u201cI think the real debate you\u2019re teeing up is over the next five to ten years, how does this really play out? And I don\u2019t have a crystal ball at this stage.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Artificial intelligence costs more UK jobs than it creates<\/a><\/p>\n \u2018Wonders and a great emergency\u2019<\/p>\n![\"Dario](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/\/a91fd7f8-5aff-4460-8e04-8adaf307b869.jpg\")
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