Dario Amodei at his own website:
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.
In this essay I try to sketch out what that upside might look like—what a world with powerful AI might look like if everything goes right. Of course no one can know the future with any certainty or precision, and the effects of powerful AI are likely to be even more unpredictable than past technological changes, so all of this is unavoidably going to consist of guesses. But I am aiming for at least educated and useful guesses, which capture the flavor of what will happen even if most details end up being wrong. I’m including lots of details mainly because I think a concrete vision does more to advance discussion than a highly hedged and abstract one.
More here.
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Alongside equality, freedom and opportunity, fear has long played a powerful role in political discourse. In ordinary life, fear is often a fitting response to danger. If you encounter a snake while out on a hike, fear will lead you to back away and exercise caution. If the snake is poisonous, fear will have saved your life. By contrast, the fears that dominate political discourse are less concrete. We are told to fear elites, terrorists, religious zealots, godless atheists, sexists, feminists, Marxists and the enemies of democracy. Yet even as these purported poisons are less obviously lethal, political rhetoricians have long understood that making them salient is a powerful way to shape citizens’ motivations. As Donald Trump told Bob Woodward: real power is fear.
Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary version of the concept of zero was born.
For the first time, an off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy has been used to treat potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorders in three people. With a single shot, 
Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed life, or is the drama of our Earth a singular cosmic accident? And what about other minds and civilizations? Have others in the universe, through their success as tool-builders and world-makers, also brought themselves to the brink of collapse?
In Amrith’s view, all history is environmental history. And that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. He cites evidence, for example, suggesting that a “medieval warm period” spanned most of Europe and parts of North America and western Asia through the 13th century. The period’s benign climate and rainfall, he argues, allowed societies to clear land, expand cultivation, build cities, and grow their populations. He also assesses the rise and fall of the Mongols, who swept across Asia quickly before being thwarted by limited grasses for their horses, intense snowstorms and earthquakes, and deadly plagues that the Mongolian expansion helped spread.
I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning. This place necessarily has structure, if it feels like a place. There’s a classic architecture book called Why Buildings Stand Up. We call any building, or part of a building, or thing like a building, a structure, if it succeeds in standing up. The structure is the system of elements in the building that make things go up—the load-bearing elements, walls and beams and columns, that counteract gravity. They counteract quote-unquote nothing, so empty space becomes a place.
Recently, a team at Stanford University fished something new out of the vast, uncharted, and almost entirely unclassified world of genetic material sometimes known as biological dark matter. They called it an “obelisk,” a shell-less RNA of maybe 1,000 base pairs (shorter than any viral genome), which seems to self-organize into a rodlike shape. It appears to be the structural equivalent of a plant viroid or a fungal ambivirus, two other bits of self-replicating genetic material whose discovery widened the boundaries of what we know about microbiology. But the obelisks weren’t found in either plants or fungi. They were discovered in human intestines.
Interest in