Machines of Loving Grace1

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

Dario Amodei October 2024

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.

First, however, I wanted to briefly explain why I and Anthropic haven’t

talked that much about powerful AI’s upsides, and why we’ll probably
continue, overall, to talk a lot about risks. In particular, I’ve made this
choice out of a desire to:

Maximize leverage. The basic development of AI technology and

many (not all) of its benefits seems inevitable (unless the risks derail
everything) 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.
Avoid perception of propaganda. AI companies talking about all the
amazing benefits of AI can come off like propagandists, or as if
they’re attempting to distract from downsides. I also think that as a
matter of principle it’s bad for your soul to spend too much of your
time “talking your book”.
Avoid grandiosity. I am often turned off by the way many AI risk
public figures (not to mention AI company leaders) talk about the
post-AGI world, as if it’s their mission to single-handedly bring it
about like a prophet leading their people to salvation. I think it’s
dangerous to view companies as unilaterally shaping the world, and
dangerous to view practical technological goals in essentially
religious terms.
Avoid “sci-fi” baggage. Although I think most people underestimate
the upside of powerful AI, the small community of people who do
discuss radical AI futures often does so in an excessively “sci-fi” tone
(featuring e.g. uploaded minds, space exploration, or general
cyberpunk vibes). I think this causes people to take the claims less
seriously, and to imbue them with a sort of unreality. To be clear, the
issue isn’t whether the technologies described are possible or likely
(the main essay discusses this in granular detail)—it’s more that the
“vibe” connotatively smuggles in a bunch of cultural baggage and
unstated assumptions about what kind of future is desirable, how
various societal issues will play out, etc. The result often ends up
reading like a fantasy for a narrow subculture, while being off-putting
to most people.

Yet despite all of the concerns above, I really do think it’s important to
discuss what a good world with powerful AI could look like, while doing
our best to avoid the above pitfalls. In fact I think it is critical to have a
genuinely inspiring vision of the future, and not just a plan to fight fires.
Many of the implications of powerful AI are adversarial or dangerous, but
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.
Fear is one kind of motivator, but it’s not enough: we need hope as well.

The list of positive applications of powerful AI is extremely long (and

includes robotics, manufacturing, energy, and much more), but I’m going
to focus on a small number of areas that seem to me to have the greatest
potential to directly improve the quality of human life. The five categories I
am most excited about are:

1. Biology and physical health

2. Neuroscience and mental health
3. Economic development and poverty
4. Peace and governance
5. Work and meaning

My predictions are going to be radical as judged by most standards (other

than sci-fi “singularity” visions2), but I mean them earnestly and sincerely.
Everything I’m saying could very easily be wrong (to repeat my point from
above), but I’ve at least attempted to ground my views in a semi-analytical
assessment of how much progress in various fields might speed up and
what that might mean in practice. I am fortunate to have professional
experience in both biology and neuroscience, and I am an informed
amateur in the field of economic development, but I am sure I will get
plenty of things wrong. One thing writing this essay has made me realize
is that it would be valuable to bring together a group of domain experts (in
biology, economics, international relations, and other areas) to write a
much better and more informed version of what I’ve produced here. It’s
probably best to view my efforts here as a starting prompt for that group.

Basic assumptions and framework

To make this whole essay more precise and grounded, it’s helpful to
specify clearly what we mean by powerful AI (i.e. the threshold at which
the 5-10 year clock starts counting), as well as laying out a framework for
thinking about the effects of such AI once it’s present.

What powerful AI (I dislike the term AGI)3 will look like, and when (or if) it
will arrive, is a huge topic in itself. It’s one I’ve discussed publicly and
could write a completely separate essay on (I probably will at some point).
Obviously, many people are skeptical that powerful AI will be built soon
and some are skeptical that it will ever be built at all. I think it could come
as early as 2026, though there are also ways it could take much longer.
But for the purposes of this essay, I’d like to put these issues aside,
assume it will come reasonably soon, and focus on what happens in the
5-10 years after that. I also want to assume a definition of what such a
system will look like, what its capabilities are and how it interacts, even
though there is room for disagreement on this.

By powerful AI, I have in mind an AI model—likely similar to today’s LLM’s

in form, though it might be based on a different architecture, might involve
several interacting models, and might be trained differently—with the
following properties:

In terms of pure intelligence4, it is smarter than a Nobel Prize winner

across most relevant fields – biology, programming, math,
engineering, writing, etc. This means it can prove unsolved
mathematical theorems, write extremely good novels, write difficult
codebases from scratch, etc.
In addition to just being a “smart thing you talk to”, it has all the
“interfaces” available to a human working virtually, including text,
audio, video, mouse and keyboard control, and internet access. It can
engage in any actions, communications, or remote operations
enabled by this interface, including taking actions on the internet,
taking or giving directions to humans, ordering materials, directing
experiments, watching videos, making videos, and so on. It does all
of these tasks with, again, a skill exceeding that of the most capable
humans in the world.
It does not just passively answer questions; instead, it can be given
tasks that take hours, days, or weeks to complete, and then goes off
and does those tasks autonomously, in the way a smart employee
would, asking for clarification as necessary.
It does not have a physical embodiment (other than living on a
 computer screen), but it can control existing physical tools, robots, or
laboratory equipment through a computer; in theory it could even
design robots or equipment for itself to use.
The resources used to train the model can be repurposed to run
millions of instances of it (this matches projected cluster sizes by
~2027), and the model can absorb information and generate actions
at roughly 10x-100x human speed5. It may however be limited by the
response time of the physical world or of software it interacts with.
Each of these million copies can act independently on unrelated
tasks, or if needed can all work together in the same way humans
would collaborate, perhaps with different subpopulations fine-tuned
to be especially good at particular tasks.

We could summarize this as a “country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

Clearly such an entity would be capable of solving very difficult problems,

very fast, but it is not trivial to figure out how fast. Two “extreme” positions
both seem false to me. First, you might think that the world would be
instantly transformed on the scale of seconds or days (“the Singularity”),
as superior intelligence builds on itself and solves every possible
scientific, engineering, and operational task almost immediately. The
problem with this is that there are real physical and practical limits, for
example around building hardware or conducting biological experiments.
Even a new country of geniuses would hit up against these limits.
Intelligence may be very powerful, but it isn’t magic fairy dust.

Second, and conversely, you might believe that technological progress is

saturated or rate-limited by real world data or by social factors, and that
better-than-human intelligence will add very little6. This seems equally
implausible to me—I can think of hundreds of scientific or even social
problems where a large group of really smart people would drastically
speed up progress, especially if they aren’t limited to analysis and can
make things happen in the real world (which our postulated country of
geniuses can, including by directing or assisting teams of humans).

I think the truth is likely to be some messy admixture of these two extreme
pictures, something that varies by task and field and is very subtle in its
details. I believe we need new frameworks to think about these details in a
productive way.

Economists often talk about “factors of production”: things like labor, land,
and capital. The phrase “marginal returns to labor/land/capital” captures
the idea that in a given situation, a given factor may or may not be the
limiting one – for example, an air force needs both planes and pilots, and
hiring more pilots doesn’t help much if you’re out of planes. I believe that
in the AI age, we should be talking about the marginal returns to
intelligence7, and trying to figure out what the other factors are that are
complementary to intelligence and that become limiting factors when
intelligence is very high. We are not used to thinking in this way—to asking
“how much does being smarter help with this task, and on what
timescale?”—but it seems like the right way to conceptualize a world with
very powerful AI.

My guess at a list of factors that limit or are complementary to intelligence

includes:

Speed of the outside world. Intelligent agents need to operate

interactively in the world in order to accomplish things and also to
learn8. But the world only moves so fast. Cells and animals run at a
fixed speed so experiments on them take a certain amount of time
which may be irreducible. The same is true of hardware, materials
science, anything involving communicating with people, and even our
existing software infrastructure. Furthermore, in science many
experiments are often needed in sequence, each learning from or
building on the last. All of this means that the speed at which a major
project—for example developing a cancer cure—can be completed
may have an irreducible minimum that cannot be decreased further
even as intelligence continues to increase.
Need for data. Sometimes raw data is lacking and in its absence
more intelligence does not help. Today’s particle physicists are very
ingenious and have developed a wide range of theories, but lack the
 data to choose between them because particle accelerator data is so
limited. It is not clear that they would do drastically better if they were
superintelligent—other than perhaps by speeding up the construction
of a bigger accelerator.
Intrinsic complexity. Some things are inherently unpredictable or
chaotic and even the most powerful AI cannot predict or untangle
them substantially better than a human or a computer today. For
example, even incredibly powerful AI could predict only marginally
further ahead in a chaotic system (such as the three-body problem)
in the general case,9 as compared to today’s humans and computers.
Constraints from humans. Many things cannot be done without
breaking laws, harming humans, or messing up society. An aligned AI
would not want to do these things (and if we have an unaligned AI,
we’re back to talking about risks). Many human societal structures
are inefficient or even actively harmful, but are hard to change while
respecting constraints like legal requirements on clinical trials,
people’s willingness to change their habits, or the behavior of
governments. Examples of advances that work well in a technical
sense, but whose impact has been substantially reduced by
regulations or misplaced fears, include nuclear power, supersonic
flight, and even elevators.
Physical laws. This is a starker version of the first point. There are
certain physical laws that appear to be unbreakable. It’s not possible
to travel faster than light. Pudding does not unstir. Chips can only
have so many transistors per square centimeter before they become
unreliable. Computation requires a certain minimum energy per bit
erased, limiting the density of computation in the world.

There is a further distinction based on timescales. Things that are hard

constraints in the short run may become more malleable to intelligence in
the long run. For example, intelligence might be used to develop a new
experimental paradigm that allows us to learn in vitro what used to require
live animal experiments, or to build the tools needed to collect new data
(e.g. the bigger particle accelerator), or to (within ethical limits) find ways
around human-based constraints (e.g. helping to improve the clinical trial
system, helping to create new jurisdictions where clinical trials have less
bureaucracy, or improving the science itself to make human clinical trials
less necessary or cheaper).

Thus, we should imagine a picture where intelligence is initially heavily

bottlenecked by the other factors of production, but over time intelligence
itself increasingly routes around the other factors, even if they never fully
dissolve (and some things like physical laws are absolute)10. The key
question is how fast it all happens and in what order.

With the above framework in mind, I’ll try to answer that question for the
five areas mentioned in the introduction.

1. Biology and health

Biology is probably the area where scientific progress has the greatest
potential to directly and unambiguously improve the quality of human life.
In the last century some of the most ancient human afflictions (such as
smallpox) have finally been vanquished, but many more still remain, and
defeating them would be an enormous humanitarian accomplishment.
Beyond even curing disease, biological science can in principle improve
the baseline quality of human health, by extending the healthy human
lifespan, increasing control and freedom over our own biological
processes, and addressing everyday problems that we currently think of
as immutable parts of the human condition.

In the “limiting factors” language of the previous section, the main

challenges with directly applying intelligence to biology are data, the
speed of the physical world, and intrinsic complexity (in fact, all three are
related to each other). Human constraints also play a role at a later stage,
when clinical trials are involved. Let’s take these one by one.

Experiments on cells, animals, and even chemical processes are limited by

the speed of the physical world: many biological protocols involve
culturing bacteria or other cells, or simply waiting for chemical reactions
to occur, and this can sometimes take days or even weeks, with no
obvious way to speed it up. Animal experiments can take months (or
more) and human experiments often take years (or even decades for
long-term outcome studies). Somewhat related to this, data is often
lacking—not so much in quantity, but quality: there is always a dearth of
clear, unambiguous data that isolates a biological effect of interest from
the other 10,000 confounding things that are going on, or that intervenes
causally in a given process, or that directly measures some effect (as
opposed to inferring its consequences in some indirect or noisy way).
Even massive, quantitative molecular data, like the proteomics data that I
collected while working on mass spectrometry techniques, is noisy and
misses a lot (which types of cells were these proteins in? Which part of
the cell? At what phase in the cell cycle?).

In part responsible for these problems with data is intrinsic complexity: if

you’ve ever seen a diagram showing the biochemistry of human
metabolism, you’ll know that it’s very hard to isolate the effect of any part
of this complex system, and even harder to intervene on the system in a
precise or predictable way. And finally, beyond just the intrinsic time that it
takes to run an experiment on humans, actual clinical trials involve a lot of
bureaucracy and regulatory requirements that (in the opinion of many
people, including me) add unnecessary additional time and delay
progress.

Given all this, many biologists have long been skeptical of the value of AI
and “big data” more generally in biology. Historically, mathematicians,
computer scientists, and physicists who have applied their skills to biology
over the last 30 years have been quite successful, but have not had the
truly transformative impact initially hoped for. Some of the skepticism has
been reduced by major and revolutionary breakthroughs like AlphaFold
(which has just deservedly won its creators the Nobel Prize in Chemistry)
and AlphaProteo11, but there’s still a perception that AI is (and will
continue to be) useful in only a limited set of circumstances. A common
formulation is “AI can do a better job analyzing your data, but it can’t
produce more data or improve the quality of the data. Garbage in,
garbage out”.
But I think that pessimistic perspective is thinking about AI in the wrong
way. If our core hypothesis about AI progress is correct, then the right way
to think of AI is not as a method of data analysis, but as a virtual biologist
who performs all the tasks biologists do, including designing and running
experiments in the real world (by controlling lab robots or simply telling
humans which experiments to run – as a Principal Investigator would to
their graduate students), inventing new biological methods or
measurement techniques, and so on. It is by speeding up the whole
research process that AI can truly accelerate biology. I want to repeat
this because it’s the most common misconception that comes up
when I talk about AI’s ability to transform biology: I am not talking
about AI as merely a tool to analyze data. In line with the definition of
powerful AI at the beginning of this essay, I’m talking about using AI
to perform, direct, and improve upon nearly everything biologists do.

To get more specific on where I think acceleration is likely to come from, a

surprisingly large fraction of the progress in biology has come from a truly
tiny number of discoveries, often related to broad measurement tools or
techniques12 that allow precise but generalized or programmable
intervention in biological systems. There’s perhaps ~1 of these major
discoveries per year and collectively they arguably drive >50% of
progress in biology. These discoveries are so powerful precisely because
they cut through intrinsic complexity and data limitations, directly
increasing our understanding and control over biological processes. A few
discoveries per decade have enabled both the bulk of our basic scientific
understanding of biology, and have driven many of the most powerful
medical treatments.

Some examples include:

CRISPR: a technique that allows live editing of any gene in living

organisms (replacement of any arbitrary gene sequence with any
other arbitrary sequence). Since the original technique was
developed, there have been constant improvements to target specific
cell types, increasing accuracy, and reducing edits of the wrong gene
 —all of which are needed for safe use in humans.
Various kinds of microscopy for watching what is going on at a
precise level: advanced light microscopes (with various kinds of
fluorescent techniques, special optics, etc), electron microscopes,
atomic force microscopes, etc.
Genome sequencing and synthesis, which has dropped in cost by
several orders of magnitude in the last couple decades.
Optogenetic techniques that allow you to get a neuron to fire by
shining a light on it.
mRNA vaccines that, in principle, allow us to design a vaccine against
anything and then quickly adapt it (mRNA vaccines of course became
famous during COVID).
Cell therapies such as CAR-T that allow immune cells to be taken out
of the body and “reprogrammed” to attack, in principle, anything.
Conceptual insights like the germ theory of disease or the realization
of a link between the immune system and cancer13.

I’m going to the trouble of listing all these technologies because I want to
make a crucial claim about them: I think their rate of discovery could be
increased by 10x or more if there were a lot more talented, creative
researchers. Or, put another way, I think the returns to intelligence are
high for these discoveries, and that everything else in biology and
medicine mostly follows from them.

Why do I think this? Because of the answers to some questions that we

should get in the habit of asking when we’re trying to determine “returns
to intelligence”. First, these discoveries are generally made by a tiny
number of researchers, often the same people repeatedly, suggesting skill
and not random search (the latter might suggest lengthy experiments are
the limiting factor). Second, they often “could have been made” years
earlier than they were: for example, CRISPR was a naturally occurring
component of the immune system in bacteria that’s been known since the
80’s, but it took another 25 years for people to realize it could be
repurposed for general gene editing. They also are often delayed many
years by lack of support from the scientific community for promising
directions (see this profile on the inventor of mRNA vaccines; similar
stories abound). Third, successful projects are often scrappy or were
afterthoughts that people didn’t initially think were promising, rather than
massively funded efforts. This suggests that it’s not just massive resource
concentration that drives discoveries, but ingenuity.

Finally, although some of these discoveries have “serial dependence” (you

need to make discovery A first in order to have the tools or knowledge to
make discovery B)—which again might create experimental delays—many,
perhaps most, are independent, meaning many at once can be worked on
in parallel. Both these facts, and my general experience as a biologist,
strongly suggest to me that there are hundreds of these discoveries
waiting to be made if scientists were smarter and better at making
connections between the vast amount of biological knowledge humanity
possesses (again consider the CRISPR example). The success of
AlphaFold/AlphaProteo at solving important problems much more
effectively than humans, despite decades of carefully designed physics
modeling, provides a proof of principle (albeit with a narrow tool in a
narrow domain) that should point the way forward.

Thus, it’s my guess that powerful AI could at least 10x the rate of these
discoveries, giving us the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10
years.14 Why not 100x? Perhaps it is possible, but here both serial
dependence and experiment times become important: getting 100 years
of progress in 1 year requires a lot of things to go right the first time,
including animal experiments and things like designing microscopes or
expensive lab facilities. I’m actually open to the (perhaps absurd-
sounding) idea that we could get 1000 years of progress in 5-10 years,
but very skeptical that we can get 100 years in 1 year. Another way to put
it is I think there’s an unavoidable constant delay: experiments and
hardware design have a certain “latency” and need to be iterated upon a
certain “irreducible” number of times in order to learn things that can’t be
deduced logically. But massive parallelism may be possible on top of
that15.
What about clinical trials? Although there is a lot of bureaucracy and
slowdown associated with them, the truth is that a lot (though by no
means all!) of their slowness ultimately derives from the need to rigorously
evaluate drugs that barely work or ambiguously work. This is sadly true of
most therapies today: the average cancer drug increases survival by a few
months while having significant side effects that need to be carefully
measured (there’s a similar story for Alzheimer’s drugs). This leads to
huge studies (in order to achieve statistical power) and difficult tradeoffs
which regulatory agencies generally aren’t great at making, again because
of bureaucracy and the complexity of competing interests.

When something works really well, it goes much faster: there’s an

accelerated approval track and the ease of approval is much greater when
effect sizes are larger. mRNA vaccines for COVID were approved in 9
months—much faster than the usual pace. That said, even under these
conditions clinical trials are still too slow—mRNA vaccines arguably should
have been approved in ~2 months. But these kinds of delays (~1 year end-
to-end for a drug) combined with massive parallelization and the need for
some but not too much iteration (“a few tries”) are very compatible with
radical transformation in 5-10 years. Even more optimistically, it is
possible that AI-enabled biological science will reduce the need for
iteration in clinical trials by developing better animal and cell experimental
models (or even simulations) that are more accurate in predicting what
will happen in humans. This will be particularly important in developing
drugs against the aging process, which plays out over decades and where
we need a faster iteration loop.

Finally, on the topic of clinical trials and societal barriers, it is worth

pointing out explicitly that in some ways biomedical innovations have an
unusually strong track record of being successfully deployed, in contrast
to some other technologies16. As mentioned in the introduction, many
technologies are hampered by societal factors despite working well
technically. This might suggest a pessimistic perspective on what AI can
accomplish. But biomedicine is unique in that although the process of
developing drugs is overly cumbersome, once developed they generally
are successfully deployed and used.

To summarize the above, my basic prediction is that AI-enabled

biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that
human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years
into 5-10 years. I’ll refer to this as the “compressed 21st century”:
the idea that after powerful AI is developed, we will in a few years
make all the progress in biology and medicine that we would have
made in the whole 21st century.

Although predicting what powerful AI can do in a few years remains

inherently difficult and speculative, there is some concreteness to asking
“what could humans do unaided in the next 100 years?”. Simply looking at
what we’ve accomplished in the 20th century, or extrapolating from the
first 2 decades of the 21st, or asking what “10 CRISPR’s and 50 CAR-T’s”
would get us, all offer practical, grounded ways to estimate the general
level of progress we might expect from powerful AI.

Below I try to make a list of what we might expect. This is not based on
any rigorous methodology, and will almost certainly prove wrong in the
details, but it’s trying to get across the general level of radicalism we
should expect:

Reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all17 natural

infectious disease. Given the enormous advances against infectious
disease in the 20th century, it is not radical to imagine that we could
more or less “finish the job” in a compressed 21st. mRNA vaccines
and similar technology already point the way towards “vaccines for
anything”. Whether infectious disease is fully eradicated from the
world (as opposed to just in some places) depends on questions
about poverty and inequality, which are discussed in Section 3.
Elimination of most cancer. Death rates from cancer have been
dropping ~2% per year for the last few decades; thus we are on track
to eliminate most cancer in the 21st century at the current pace of
human science. Some subtypes have already been largely cured (for
example some types of leukemia with CAR-T therapy), and I’m
perhaps even more excited for very selective drugs that target cancer
in its infancy and prevent it from ever growing. AI will also make
possible treatment regimens very finely adapted to the individualized
genome of the cancer—these are possible today, but hugely
expensive in time and human expertise, which AI should allow us to
scale. Reductions of 95% or more in both mortality and incidence
seem possible. That said, cancer is extremely varied and adaptive,
and is likely the hardest of these diseases to fully destroy. It would
not be surprising if an assortment of rare, difficult malignancies
persists.
Very effective prevention and effective cures for genetic
disease. Greatly improved embryo screening will likely make it
possible to prevent most genetic disease, and some safer, more
reliable descendant of CRISPR may cure most genetic disease in
existing people. Whole-body afflictions that affect a large fraction of
cells may be the last holdouts, however.
Prevention of Alzheimer’s. We’ve had a very hard time figuring out
what causes Alzheimer’s (it is somehow related to beta-amyloid
protein, but the actual details seem to be very complex). It seems like
exactly the type of problem that can be solved with better
measurement tools that isolate biological effects; thus I am bullish
about AI’s ability to solve it. There is a good chance it can eventually
be prevented with relatively simple interventions, once we actually
understand what is going on. That said, damage from already-
existing Alzheimer’s may be very difficult to reverse.
Improved treatment of most other ailments. This is a catch-all
category for other ailments including diabetes, obesity, heart disease,
autoimmune diseases, and more. Most of these seem “easier” to
solve than cancer and Alzheimer’s and in many cases are already in
steep decline. For example, deaths from heart disease have already
declined over 50%, and simple interventions like GLP-1 agonists have
already made huge progress against obesity and diabetes.
Biological freedom. The last 70 years featured advances in birth
control, fertility, management of weight, and much more. But I
 suspect AI-accelerated biology will greatly expand what is possible:
weight, physical appearance, reproduction, and other biological
processes will be fully under people’s control. We’ll refer to these
under the heading of biological freedom: the idea that everyone
should be empowered to choose what they want to become and live
their lives in the way that most appeals to them. There will of course
be important questions about global equality of access; see Section
3 for these.
Doubling of the human lifespan18. This might seem radical, but life
expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century (from ~40 years
to ~75), so it’s “on trend” that the “compressed 21st” would double it
again to 150. Obviously the interventions involved in slowing the
actual aging process will be different from those that were needed in
the last century to prevent (mostly childhood) premature deaths from
disease, but the magnitude of change is not unprecedented19.
Concretely, there already exist drugs that increase maximum lifespan
in rats by 25-50% with limited ill-effects. And some animals (e.g.
some types of turtle) already live 200 years, so humans are
manifestly not at some theoretical upper limit. At a guess, the most
important thing that is needed might be reliable, non-Goodhart-able
biomarkers of human aging, as that will allow fast iteration on
experiments and clinical trials. Once human lifespan is 150, we may
be able to reach “escape velocity”, buying enough time that most of
those currently alive today will be able to live as long as they want,
although there’s certainly no guarantee this is biologically possible.

It is worth looking at this list and reflecting on how different the world will
be if all of it is achieved 7-12 years from now (which would be in line with
an aggressive AI timeline). It goes without saying that it would be an
unimaginable humanitarian triumph, the elimination all at once of most of
the scourges that have haunted humanity for millennia. Many of my
friends and colleagues are raising children, and when those children grow
up, I hope that any mention of disease will sound to them the way scurvy,
smallpox, or bubonic plague sounds to us. That generation will also
benefit from increased biological freedom and self-expression, and with
luck may also be able to live as long as they want.

It’s hard to overestimate how surprising these changes will be to everyone

except the small community of people who expected powerful AI. For
example, thousands of economists and policy experts in the US currently
debate how to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, and more
broadly how to keep down the cost of healthcare (which is mostly
consumed by those over 70 and especially those with terminal illnesses
such as cancer). The situation for these programs is likely to be radically
improved if all this comes to pass20, as the ratio of working age to retired
population will change drastically. No doubt these challenges will be
replaced with others, such as how to ensure widespread access to the
new technologies, but it is worth reflecting on how much the world will
change even if biology is the only area to be successfully accelerated by
AI.

2. Neuroscience and mind

In the previous section I focused on physical diseases and biology in
general, and didn’t cover neuroscience or mental health. But neuroscience
is a subdiscipline of biology and mental health is just as important as
physical health. In fact, if anything, mental health affects human well-
being even more directly than physical health. Hundreds of millions of
people have very low quality of life due to problems like addiction,
depression, schizophrenia, low-functioning autism, PTSD, psychopathy21,
or intellectual disabilities. Billions more struggle with everyday problems
that can often be interpreted as much milder versions of one of these
severe clinical disorders. And as with general biology, it may be possible
to go beyond addressing problems to improving the baseline quality of
human experience.

The basic framework that I laid out for biology applies equally to
neuroscience. The field is propelled forward by a small number of
discoveries often related to tools for measurement or precise intervention
– in the list of those above, optogenetics was a neuroscience discovery,
and more recently CLARITY and expansion microscopy are advances in
the same vein, in addition to many of the general cell biology methods
directly carrying over to neuroscience. I think the rate of these advances
will be similarly accelerated by AI and therefore that the framework of
“100 years of progress in 5-10 years” applies to neuroscience in the same
way it does to biology and for the same reasons. As in biology, the
progress in 20th century neuroscience was enormous – for example we
didn’t even understand how or why neurons fired until the 1950’s. Thus, it
seems reasonable to expect AI-accelerated neuroscience to produce
rapid progress over a few years.

There is one thing we should add to this basic picture, which is that some
of the things we’ve learned (or are learning) about AI itself in the last few
years are likely to help advance neuroscience, even if it continues to be
done only by humans. Interpretability is an obvious example: although
biological neurons superficially operate in a completely different manner
from artificial neurons (they communicate via spikes and often spike rates,
so there is a time element not present in artificial neurons, and a bunch of
details relating to cell physiology and neurotransmitters modifies their
operation substantially), the basic question of “how do distributed, trained
networks of simple units that perform combined linear/non-linear
operations work together to perform important computations” is the
same, and I strongly suspect the details of individual neuron
communication will be abstracted away in most of the interesting
questions about computation and circuits22. As just one example of this, a
computational mechanism discovered by interpretability researchers in AI
systems was recently rediscovered in the brains of mice.

It is much easier to do experiments on artificial neural networks than on

real ones (the latter often requires cutting into animal brains), so
interpretability may well become a tool for improving our understanding of
neuroscience. Furthermore, powerful AI’s will themselves probably be able
to develop and apply this tool better than humans can.

Beyond just interpretability though, what we have learned from AI about

how intelligent systems are trained should (though I am not sure it has
yet) cause a revolution in neuroscience. When I was working in
neuroscience, a lot of people focused on what I would now consider the
wrong questions about learning, because the concept of the scaling
hypothesis / bitter lesson didn’t exist yet. The idea that a simple objective
function plus a lot of data can drive incredibly complex behaviors makes it
more interesting to understand the objective functions and architectural
biases and less interesting to understand the details of the emergent
computations. I have not followed the field closely in recent years, but I
have a vague sense that computational neuroscientists have still not fully
absorbed the lesson. My attitude to the scaling hypothesis has always
been “aha – this is an explanation, at a high level, of how intelligence
works and how it so easily evolved”, but I don’t think that’s the average
neuroscientist’s view, in part because the scaling hypothesis as “the
secret to intelligence” isn’t fully accepted even within AI.

I think that neuroscientists should be trying to combine this basic insight

with the particularities of the human brain (biophysical limitations,
evolutionary history, topology, details of motor and sensory
inputs/outputs) to try to figure out some of neuroscience’s key puzzles.
Some likely are, but I suspect it’s not enough yet, and that AI
neuroscientists will be able to more effectively leverage this angle to
accelerate progress.

I expect AI to accelerate neuroscientific progress along four distinct

routes, all of which can hopefully work together to cure mental illness and
improve function:

Traditional molecular biology, chemistry, and genetics. This is

essentially the same story as general biology in section 1, and AI can
likely speed it up via the same mechanisms. There are many drugs
that modulate neurotransmitters in order to alter brain function, affect
alertness or perception, change mood, etc., and AI can help us invent
many more. AI can probably also accelerate research on the genetic
basis of mental illness.
 Fine-grained neural measurement and intervention. This is the
ability to measure what a lot of individual neurons or neuronal circuits
are doing, and intervene to change their behavior. Optogenetics and
neural probes are technologies capable of both measurement and
intervention in live organisms, and a number of very advanced
methods (such as molecular ticker tapes to read out the firing
patterns of large numbers of individual neurons) have also been
proposed and seem possible in principle.
Advanced computational neuroscience. As noted above, both the
specific insights and the gestalt of modern AI can probably be
applied fruitfully to questions in systems neuroscience, including
perhaps uncovering the real causes and dynamics of complex
diseases like psychosis or mood disorders.
Behavioral interventions. I haven’t much mentioned it given the
focus on the biological side of neuroscience, but psychiatry and
psychology have of course developed a wide repertoire of behavioral
interventions over the 20th century; it stands to reason that AI could
accelerate these as well, both the development of new methods and
helping patients to adhere to existing methods. More broadly, the
idea of an “AI coach” who always helps you to be the best version of
yourself, who studies your interactions and helps you learn to be
more effective, seems very promising.

It’s my guess that these four routes of progress working together would,
as with physical disease, be on track to lead to the cure or prevention of
most mental illness in the next 100 years even if AI was not involved – and
thus might reasonably be completed in 5-10 AI-accelerated years.
Concretely my guess at what will happen is something like:

Most mental illness can probably be cured. I’m not an expert in

psychiatric disease (my time in neuroscience was spent building
probes to study small groups of neurons) but it’s my guess that
diseases like PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, addiction, etc. can be
figured out and very effectively treated via some combination of the
four directions above. The answer is likely to be some combination of
“something went wrong biochemically” (although it could be very
complex) and “something went wrong with the neural network, at a
high level”. That is, it’s a systems neuroscience question—though that
doesn’t gainsay the impact of the behavioral interventions discussed
above. Tools for measurement and intervention, especially in live
humans, seem likely to lead to rapid iteration and progress.
Conditions that are very “structural” may be more difficult, but
not impossible. There’s some evidence that psychopathy is
associated with obvious neuroanatomical differences – that some
brain regions are simply smaller or less developed in psychopaths.
Psychopaths are also believed to lack empathy from a young age;
whatever is different about their brain, it was probably always that
way. The same may be true of some intellectual disabilities, and
perhaps other conditions. Restructuring the brain sounds hard, but it
also seems like a task with high returns to intelligence. Perhaps there
is some way to coax the adult brain into an earlier or more plastic
state where it can be reshaped. I’m very uncertain how possible this
is, but my instinct is to be optimistic about what AI can invent here.
Effective genetic prevention of mental illness seems possible.
Most mental illness is partially heritable, and genome-wide
association studies are starting to gain traction on identifying the
relevant factors, which are often many in number. It will probably be
possible to prevent most of these diseases via embryo screening,
similar to the story with physical disease. One difference is that
psychiatric disease is more likely to be polygenic (many genes
contribute), so due to complexity there’s an increased risk of
unknowingly selecting against positive traits that are correlated with
disease. Oddly however, in recent years GWAS studies seem to
suggest that these correlations might have been overstated. In any
case, AI-accelerated neuroscience may help us to figure these things
out. Of course, embryo screening for complex traits raises a number
of societal issues and will be controversial, though I would guess that
most people would support screening for severe or debilitating
mental illness.
 Everyday problems that we don’t think of as clinical disease will
also be solved. Most of us have everyday psychological problems
that are not ordinarily thought of as rising to the level of clinical
disease. Some people are quick to anger, others have trouble
focusing or are often drowsy, some are fearful or anxious, or react
badly to change. Today, drugs already exist to help with e.g. alertness
or focus (caffeine, modafinil, ritalin) but as with many other previous
areas, much more is likely to be possible. Probably many more such
drugs exist and have not been discovered, and there may also be
totally new modalities of intervention, such as targeted light
stimulation (see optogenetics above) or magnetic fields. Given how
many drugs we’ve developed in the 20th century that tune cognitive
function and emotional state, I’m very optimistic about the
“compressed 21st” where everyone can get their brain to behave a bit
better and have a more fulfilling day-to-day experience.
Human baseline experience can be much better. Taking one step
further, many people have experienced extraordinary moments of
revelation, creative inspiration, compassion, fulfillment,
transcendence, love, beauty, or meditative peace. The character and
frequency of these experiences differs greatly from person to person
and within the same person at different times, and can also
sometimes be triggered by various drugs (though often with side
effects). All of this suggests that the “space of what is possible to
experience” is very broad and that a larger fraction of people’s lives
could consist of these extraordinary moments. It is probably also
possible to improve various cognitive functions across the board.
This is perhaps the neuroscience version of “biological freedom” or
“extended lifespans”.

One topic that often comes up in sci-fi depictions of AI, but that I
intentionally haven’t discussed here, is “mind uploading”, the idea of
capturing the pattern and dynamics of a human brain and instantiating
them in software. This topic could be the subject of an essay all by itself,
but suffice it to say that while I think uploading is almost certainly possible
in principle, in practice it faces significant technological and societal
challenges, even with powerful AI, that likely put it outside the 5-10 year
window we are discussing.

In summary, AI-accelerated neuroscience is likely to vastly improve

treatments for, or even cure, most mental illness as well as greatly expand
“cognitive and mental freedom” and human cognitive and emotional
abilities. It will be every bit as radical as the improvements in physical
health described in the previous section. Perhaps the world will not be
visibly different on the outside, but the world as experienced by humans
will be a much better and more humane place, as well as a place that
offers greater opportunities for self-actualization. I also suspect that
improved mental health will ameliorate a lot of other societal problems,
including ones that seem political or economic.

3. Economic development and poverty

The previous two sections are about developing new technologies that
cure disease and improve the quality of human life. However an obvious
question, from a humanitarian perspective, is: “will everyone have access
to these technologies?”

It is one thing to develop a cure for a disease, it is another thing to

eradicate the disease from the world. More broadly, many existing health
interventions have not yet been applied everywhere in the world, and for
that matter the same is true of (non-health) technological improvements
in general. Another way to say this is that living standards in many parts of
the world are still desperately poor: GDP per capita is ~$2,000 in Sub-
Saharan Africa as compared to ~$75,000 in the United States. If AI further
increases economic growth and quality of life in the developed world,
while doing little to help the developing world, we should view that as a
terrible moral failure and a blemish on the genuine humanitarian victories
in the previous two sections. Ideally, powerful AI should help the
developing world catch up to the developed world, even as it
revolutionizes the latter.

I am not as confident that AI can address inequality and economic growth

as I am that it can invent fundamental technologies, because technology
has such obvious high returns to intelligence (including the ability to route
around complexities and lack of data) whereas the economy involves a lot
of constraints from humans, as well as a large dose of intrinsic complexity.
I am somewhat skeptical that an AI could solve the famous “socialist
calculation problem”23 and I don’t think governments will (or should) turn
over their economic policy to such an entity, even if it could do so. There
are also problems like how to convince people to take treatments that are
effective but that they may be suspicious of.

The challenges facing the developing world are made even more
complicated by pervasive corruption in both private and public sectors.
Corruption creates a vicious cycle: it exacerbates poverty, and poverty in
turn breeds more corruption. AI-driven plans for economic development
need to reckon with corruption, weak institutions, and other very human
challenges.

Nevertheless, I do see significant reasons for optimism. Diseases have

been eradicated and many countries have gone from poor to rich, and it is
clear that the decisions involved in these tasks exhibit high returns to
intelligence (despite human constraints and complexity). Therefore, AI can
likely do them better than they are currently being done. There may also
be targeted interventions that get around the human constraints and that
AI could focus on. More importantly though, we have to try. Both AI
companies and developed world policymakers will need to do their part to
ensure that the developing world is not left out; the moral imperative is too
great. So in this section, I’ll continue to make the optimistic case, but keep
in mind everywhere that success is not guaranteed and depends on our
collective efforts.

Below I make some guesses about how I think things may go in the
developing world over the 5-10 years after powerful AI is developed:

Distribution of health interventions. The area where I am perhaps

most optimistic is distributing health interventions throughout the
world. Diseases have actually been eradicated by top-down
campaigns: smallpox was fully eliminated in the 1970’s, and polio and
guinea worm are nearly eradicated with less than 100 cases per year.
Mathematically sophisticated epidemiological modeling plays an
active role in disease eradication campaigns, and it seems very likely
that there is room for smarter-than-human AI systems to do a better
job of it than humans are. The logistics of distribution can probably
also be greatly optimized. One thing I learned as an early donor to
GiveWell is that some health charities are way more effective than
others; the hope is that AI-accelerated efforts would be more
effective still. Additionally, some biological advances actually make
the logistics of distribution much easier: for example, malaria has
been difficult to eradicate because it requires treatment each time
the disease is contracted; a vaccine that only needs to be
administered once makes the logistics much simpler (and such
vaccines for malaria are in fact currently being developed). Even
simpler distribution mechanisms are possible: some diseases could in
principle be eradicated by targeting their animal carriers, for example
releasing mosquitoes infected with a bacterium that blocks their
ability to carry a disease (who then infect all the other mosquitos) or
simply using gene drives to wipe out the mosquitos. This requires
one or a few centralized actions, rather than a coordinated campaign
that must individually treat millions. Overall, I think 5-10 years is a
reasonable timeline for a good fraction (maybe 50%) of AI-driven
health benefits to propagate to even the poorest countries in the
world. A good goal might be for the developing world 5-10 years after
powerful AI to at least be substantially healthier than the developed
world is today, even if it continues to lag behind the developed world.
Accomplishing this will of course require a huge effort in global
health, philanthropy, political advocacy, and many other efforts,
which both AI developers and policymakers should help with.
Economic growth. Can the developing world quickly catch up to the
developed world, not just in health, but across the board
economically? There is some precedent for this: in the final decades
of the 20th century, several East Asian economies achieved
sustained ~10% annual real GDP growth rates, allowing them to catch
up with the developed world. Human economic planners made the
decisions that led to this success, not by directly controlling entire
economies but by pulling a few key levers (such as an industrial
policy of export-led growth, and resisting the temptation to rely on
natural resource wealth); it’s plausible that “AI finance ministers and
central bankers” could replicate or exceed this 10% accomplishment.
An important question is how to get developing world governments
to adopt them while respecting the principle of self-determination—
some may be enthusiastic about it, but others are likely to be
skeptical. On the optimistic side, many of the health interventions in
the previous bullet point are likely to organically increase economic
growth: eradicating AIDS/malaria/parasitic worms would have a
transformative effect on productivity, not to mention the economic
benefits that some of the neuroscience interventions (such as
improved mood and focus) would have in developed and developing
world alike. Finally, non-health AI-accelerated technology (such as
energy technology, transport drones, improved building materials,
better logistics and distribution, and so on) may simply permeate the
world naturally; for example, even cell phones quickly permeated
sub-Saharan Africa via market mechanisms, without needing
philanthropic efforts. On the more negative side, while AI and
automation have many potential benefits, they also pose challenges
for economic development, particularly for countries that haven't yet
industrialized. Finding ways to ensure these countries can still
develop and improve their economies in an age of increasing
automation is an important challenge for economists and
policymakers to address. Overall, a dream scenario—perhaps a goal
to aim for—would be 20% annual GDP growth rate in the developing
world, with 10% each coming from AI-enabled economic decisions
and the natural spread of AI-accelerated technologies, including but
not limited to health. If achieved, this would bring sub-Saharan Africa
to the current per-capita GDP of China in 5-10 years, while raising
much of the rest of the developing world to levels higher than the
current US GDP. Again, this is a dream scenario, not what happens by
default: it’s something all of us must work together to make more
likely.
Food security 24. Advances in crop technology like better fertilizers
and pesticides, more automation, and more efficient land use
drastically increased crop yields across the 20th Century, saving
millions of people from hunger. Genetic engineering is currently
improving many crops even further. Finding even more ways to do
this—as well as to make agricultural supply chains even more
efficient—could give us an AI-driven second Green Revolution,
helping close the gap between the developing and developed world.
Mitigating climate change. Climate change will be felt much more
strongly in the developing world, hampering its development. We can
expect that AI will lead to improvements in technologies that slow or
prevent climate change, from atmospheric carbon-removal and clean
energy technology to lab-grown meat that reduces our reliance on
carbon-intensive factory farming. Of course, as discussed above,
technology isn’t the only thing restricting progress on climate change
—as with all of the other issues discussed in this essay, human
societal factors are important. But there’s good reason to think that
AI-enhanced research will give us the means to make mitigating
climate change far less costly and disruptive, rendering many of the
objections moot and freeing up developing countries to make more
economic progress.
Inequality within countries. I’ve mostly talked about inequality as a
global phenomenon (which I do think is its most important
manifestation), but of course inequality also exists within countries.
With advanced health interventions and especially radical increases
in lifespan or cognitive enhancement drugs, there will certainly be
valid worries that these technologies are “only for the rich”. I am more
optimistic about within-country inequality especially in the developed
world, for two reasons. First, markets function better in the developed
world, and markets are typically good at bringing down the cost of
high-value technologies over time25. Second, developed world
 political institutions are more responsive to their citizens and have
greater state capacity to execute universal access programs—and I
expect citizens to demand access to technologies that so radically
improve quality of life. Of course it’s not predetermined that such
demands succeed—and here is another place where we collectively
have to do all we can to ensure a fair society. There is a separate
problem in inequality of wealth (as opposed to inequality of access to
life-saving and life-enhancing technologies), which seems harder and
which I discuss in Section 5.
The opt-out problem. One concern in both developed and
developing world alike is people opting out of AI-enabled benefits
(similar to the anti-vaccine movement, or Luddite movements more
generally). There could end up being bad feedback cycles where, for
example, the people who are least able to make good decisions opt
out of the very technologies that improve their decision-making
abilities, leading to an ever-increasing gap and even creating a
dystopian underclass (some researchers have argued that this will
undermine democracy, a topic I discuss further in the next section).
This would, once again, place a moral blemish on AI’s positive
advances. This is a difficult problem to solve as I don’t think it is
ethically okay to coerce people, but we can at least try to increase
people’s scientific understanding—and perhaps AI itself can help us
with this. One hopeful sign is that historically anti-technology
movements have been more bark than bite: railing against modern
technology is popular, but most people adopt it in the end, at least
when it’s a matter of individual choice. Individuals tend to adopt most
health and consumer technologies, while technologies that are truly
hampered, like nuclear power, tend to be collective political
decisions.

Overall, I am optimistic about quickly bringing AI’s biological advances to

people in the developing world. I am hopeful, though not confident, that AI
can also enable unprecedented economic growth rates and allow the
developing world to at least surpass where the developed world is now. I
am concerned about the “opt out” problem in both the developed and
developing world, but suspect that it will peter out over time and that AI
can help accelerate this process. It won’t be a perfect world, and those
who are behind won’t fully catch up, at least not in the first few years. But
with strong efforts on our part, we may be able to get things moving in the
right direction—and fast. If we do, we can make at least a downpayment
on the promises of dignity and equality that we owe to every human being
on earth.

4. Peace and governance

Suppose that everything in the first three sections goes well: disease,
poverty, and inequality are significantly reduced and the baseline of
human experience is raised substantially. It does not follow that all major
causes of human suffering are solved. Humans are still a threat to each
other. Although there is a trend of technological improvement and
economic development leading to democracy and peace, it is a very loose
trend, with frequent (and recent) backsliding. At the dawn of the 20th
Century, people thought they had put war behind them; then came the
two world wars. Thirty years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote about “the End
of History” and a final triumph of liberal democracy; that hasn’t happened
yet. Twenty years ago US policymakers believed that free trade with China
would cause it to liberalize as it became richer; that very much didn’t
happen, and we now seem headed for a second cold war with a resurgent
authoritarian bloc. And plausible theories suggest that internet technology
may actually advantage authoritarianism, not democracy as initially
believed (e.g. in the “Arab Spring” period). It seems important to try to
understand how powerful AI will intersect with these issues of peace,
democracy, and freedom.

Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or

structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it
will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty. Human
conflict is adversarial and AI can in principle help both the “good guys”
and the “bad guys”. If anything, some structural factors seem worrying: AI
seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, both
major tools in the autocrat’s toolkit. It’s therefore up to us as individual
actors to tilt things in the right direction: if we want AI to favor democracy
and individual rights, we are going to have to fight for that outcome. I feel
even more strongly about this than I do about international inequality: the
triumph of liberal democracy and political stability is not guaranteed,
perhaps not even likely, and will require great sacrifice and commitment
on all of our parts, as it often has in the past.

I think of the issue as having two parts: international conflict, and the
internal structure of nations. On the international side, it seems very
important that democracies have the upper hand on the world stage when
powerful AI is created. AI-powered authoritarianism seems too terrible to
contemplate, so democracies need to be able to set the terms by which
powerful AI is brought into the world, both to avoid being overpowered by
authoritarians and to prevent human rights abuses within authoritarian
countries.

My current guess at the best way to do this is via an “entente strategy”26,

in which a coalition of democracies seeks to gain a clear advantage (even
just a temporary one) on powerful AI by securing its supply chain, scaling
quickly, and blocking or delaying adversaries’ access to key resources like
chips and semiconductor equipment. This coalition would on one hand
use AI to achieve robust military superiority (the stick) while at the same
time offering to distribute the benefits of powerful AI (the carrot) to a
wider and wider group of countries in exchange for supporting the
coalition’s strategy to promote democracy (this would be a bit analogous
to “Atoms for Peace”). The coalition would aim to gain the support of
more and more of the world, isolating our worst adversaries and
eventually putting them in a position where they are better off taking the
same bargain as the rest of the world: give up competing with
democracies in order to receive all the benefits and not fight a superior
foe.

If we can do all this, we will have a world in which democracies lead on the
world stage and have the economic and military strength to avoid being
undermined, conquered, or sabotaged by autocracies, and may be able to
parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage. This could
optimistically lead to an “eternal 1991”—a world where democracies have
the upper hand and Fukuyama’s dreams are realized. Again, this will be
very difficult to achieve, and will in particular require close cooperation
between private AI companies and democratic governments, as well as
extraordinarily wise decisions about the balance between carrot and stick.

Even if all that goes well, it leaves the question of the fight between
democracy and autocracy within each country. It is obviously hard to
predict what will happen here, but I do have some optimism that given a
global environment in which democracies control the most powerful AI,
then AI may actually structurally favor democracy everywhere. In
particular, in this environment democratic governments can use their
superior AI to win the information war: they can counter influence and
propaganda operations by autocracies and may even be able to create a
globally free information environment by providing channels of
information and AI services in a way that autocracies lack the technical
ability to block or monitor. It probably isn’t necessary to deliver
propaganda, only to counter malicious attacks and unblock the free flow
of information. Although not immediate, a level playing field like this
stands a good chance of gradually tilting global governance towards
democracy, for several reasons.

First, the increases in quality of life in Sections 1-3 should, all things equal,
promote democracy: historically they have, to at least some extent. In
particular I expect improvements in mental health, well-being, and
education to increase democracy, as all three are negatively correlated
with support for authoritarian leaders. In general people want more self-
expression when their other needs are met, and democracy is among
other things a form of self-expression. Conversely, authoritarianism
thrives on fear and resentment.

Second, there is a good chance free information really does undermine

authoritarianism, as long as the authoritarians can’t censor it. And
uncensored AI can also bring individuals powerful tools for undermining
repressive governments. Repressive governments survive by denying
people a certain kind of common knowledge, keeping them from realizing
that “the emperor has no clothes”. For example Srđa Popović, who helped
to topple the Milošević government in Serbia, has written extensively
about techniques for psychologically robbing authoritarians of their power,
for breaking the spell and rallying support against a dictator. A
superhumanly effective AI version of Popović (whose skills seem like they
have high returns to intelligence) in everyone’s pocket, one that dictators
are powerless to block or censor, could create a wind at the backs of
dissidents and reformers across the world. To say it again, this will be a
long and protracted fight, one where victory is not assured, but if we
design and build AI in the right way, it may at least be a fight where the
advocates of freedom everywhere have an advantage.

As with neuroscience and biology, we can also ask how things could be
“better than normal”—not just how to avoid autocracy, but how to make
democracies better than they are today. Even within democracies,
injustices happen all the time. Rule-of-law societies make a promise to
their citizens that everyone will be equal under the law and everyone is
entitled to basic human rights, but obviously people do not always receive
those rights in practice. That this promise is even partially fulfilled makes
it something to be proud of, but can AI help us do better?

For example, could AI improve our legal and judicial system by making
decisions and processes more impartial? Today people mostly worry in
legal or judicial contexts that AI systems will be a cause of discrimination,
and these worries are important and need to be defended against. At the
same time, the vitality of democracy depends on harnessing new
technologies to improve democratic institutions, not just responding to
risks. A truly mature and successful implementation of AI has the potential
to reduce bias and be fairer for everyone.

For centuries, legal systems have faced the dilemma that the law aims to
be impartial, but is inherently subjective and thus must be interpreted by
biased humans. Trying to make the law fully mechanical hasn’t worked
because the real world is messy and can’t always be captured in
mathematical formulas. Instead legal systems rely on notoriously
imprecise criteria like “cruel and unusual punishment” or “utterly without
redeeming social importance”, which humans then interpret—and often do
so in a manner that displays bias, favoritism, or arbitrariness. “Smart
contracts” in cryptocurrencies haven’t revolutionized law because
ordinary code isn’t smart enough to adjudicate all that much of interest.
But AI might be smart enough for this: it is the first technology capable of
making broad, fuzzy judgements in a repeatable and mechanical way.

I am not suggesting that we literally replace judges with AI systems, but

the combination of impartiality with the ability to understand and process
messy, real world situations feels like it should have some serious positive
applications to law and justice. At the very least, such systems could work
alongside humans as an aid to decision-making. Transparency would be
important in any such system, and a mature science of AI could
conceivably provide it: the training process for such systems could be
extensively studied, and advanced interpretability techniques could be
used to see inside the final model and assess it for hidden biases, in a way
that is simply not possible with humans. Such AI tools could also be used
to monitor for violations of fundamental rights in a judicial or police
context, making constitutions more self-enforcing.

In a similar vein, AI could be used to both aggregate opinions and drive

consensus among citizens, resolving conflict, finding common ground,
and seeking compromise. Some early ideas in this direction have been
undertaken by the computational democracy project, including
collaborations with Anthropic. A more informed and thoughtful citizenry
would obviously strengthen democratic institutions.

There is also a clear opportunity for AI to be used to help provision

government services—such as health benefits or social services—that are
in principle available to everyone but in practice often severely lacking,
and worse in some places than others. This includes health services, the
DMV, taxes, social security, building code enforcement, and so on. Having
a very thoughtful and informed AI whose job is to give you everything
you’re legally entitled to by the government in a way you can understand—
and who also helps you comply with often confusing government rules—
would be a big deal. Increasing state capacity both helps to deliver on the
promise of equality under the law, and strengthens respect for democratic
governance. Poorly implemented services are currently a major driver of
cynicism about government27.

All of these are somewhat vague ideas, and as I said at the beginning of
this section, I am not nearly as confident in their feasibility as I am in the
advances in biology, neuroscience, and poverty alleviation. They may be
unrealistically utopian. But the important thing is to have an ambitious
vision, to be willing to dream big and try things out. The vision of AI as a
guarantor of liberty, individual rights, and equality under the law is too
powerful a vision not to fight for. A 21st century, AI-enabled polity could
be both a stronger protector of individual freedom, and a beacon of hope
that helps make liberal democracy the form of government that the whole
world wants to adopt.

5. Work and meaning

Even if everything in the preceding four sections goes well—not only do
we alleviate disease, poverty, and inequality, but liberal democracy
becomes the dominant form of government, and existing liberal
democracies become better versions of themselves—at least one
important question still remains. “It’s great we live in such a
technologically advanced world as well as a fair and decent one”,
someone might object, “but with AI’s doing everything, how will humans
have meaning? For that matter, how will they survive economically?”.

I think this question is more difficult than the others. I don’t mean that I am
necessarily more pessimistic about it than I am about the other questions
(although I do see challenges). I mean that it is fuzzier and harder to
predict in advance, because it relates to macroscopic questions about
how society is organized that tend to resolve themselves only over time
and in a decentralized manner. For example, historical hunter-gatherer
societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting and
various kinds of hunting-related religious rituals, and would have imagined
that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose. They might
also have not understood how our economy can provide for everyone, or
what function people can usefully service in a mechanized society.

Nevertheless, it’s worth saying at least a few words, while keeping in mind
that the brevity of this section is not at all to be taken as a sign that I don’t
take these issues seriously—on the contrary, it is a sign of a lack of clear
answers.

On the question of meaning, I think it is very likely a mistake to believe that

tasks you undertake are meaningless simply because an AI could do them
better. Most people are not the best in the world at anything, and it
doesn’t seem to bother them particularly much. Of course today they can
still contribute through comparative advantage, and may derive meaning
from the economic value they produce, but people also greatly enjoy
activities that produce no economic value. I spend plenty of time playing
video games, swimming, walking around outside, and talking to friends, all
of which generates zero economic value. I might spend a day trying to get
better at a video game, or faster at biking up a mountain, and it doesn’t
really matter to me that someone somewhere is much better at those
things. In any case I think meaning comes mostly from human
relationships and connection, not from economic labor. People do want a
sense of accomplishment, even a sense of competition, and in a post-AI
world it will be perfectly possible to spend years attempting some very
difficult task with a complex strategy, similar to what people do today
when they embark on research projects, try to become Hollywood actors,
or found companies28. The facts that (a) an AI somewhere could in
principle do this task better, and (b) this task is no longer an economically
rewarded element of a global economy, don’t seem to me to matter very
much.
The economic piece actually seems more difficult to me than the meaning
piece. By “economic” in this section I mean the possible problem that
most or all humans may not be able to contribute meaningfully to a
sufficiently advanced AI-driven economy. This is a more macro problem
than the separate problem of inequality, especially inequality in access to
the new technologies, which I discussed in Section 3.

First of all, in the short term I agree with arguments that comparative
advantage will continue to keep humans relevant and in fact increase their
productivity, and may even in some ways level the playing field between
humans. As long as AI is only better at 90% of a given job, the other 10%
will cause humans to become highly leveraged, increasing compensation
and in fact creating a bunch of new human jobs complementing and
amplifying what AI is good at, such that the “10%” expands to continue to
employ almost everyone. In fact, even if AI can do 100% of things better
than humans, but it remains inefficient or expensive at some tasks, or if
the resource inputs to humans and AI’s are meaningfully different, then
the logic of comparative advantage continues to apply. One area humans
are likely to maintain a relative (or even absolute) advantage for a
significant time is the physical world. Thus, I think that the human
economy may continue to make sense even a little past the point where
we reach “a country of geniuses in a datacenter”.

However, I do think in the long run AI will become so broadly effective and
so cheap that this will no longer apply. At that point our current economic
setup will no longer make sense, and there will be a need for a broader
societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.

While that might sound crazy, the fact is that civilization has successfully
navigated major economic shifts in the past: from hunter-gathering to
farming, farming to feudalism, and feudalism to industrialism. I suspect
that some new and stranger thing will be needed, and that it’s something
no one today has done a good job of envisioning. It could be as simple as
a large universal basic income for everyone, although I suspect that will
only be a small part of a solution. It could be a capitalist economy of AI
systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the
overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some
secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward
in humans (based on some judgment ultimately derived from human
values). Perhaps the economy runs on Whuffie points. Or perhaps
humans will continue to be economically valuable after all, in some way
not anticipated by the usual economic models. All of these solutions have
tons of possible problems, and it’s not possible to know whether they will
make sense without lots of iteration and experimentation. And as with
some of the other challenges, we will likely have to fight to get a good
outcome here: exploitative or dystopian directions are clearly also
possible and have to be prevented. Much more could be written about
these questions and I hope to do so at some later time.

Taking stock
Through the varied topics above, I’ve tried to lay out a vision of a world
that is both plausible if everything goes right with AI, and much better
than the world today. I don’t know if this world is realistic, and even if it is,
it will not be achieved without a huge amount of effort and struggle by
many brave and dedicated people. Everyone (including AI companies!) will
need to do their part both to prevent risks and to fully realize the benefits.

But it is a world worth fighting for. If all of this really does happen over 5 to
10 years—the defeat of most diseases, the growth in biological and
cognitive freedom, the lifting of billions of people out of poverty to share
in the new technologies, a renaissance of liberal democracy and human
rights—I suspect everyone watching it will be surprised by the effect it has
on them. I don’t mean the experience of personally benefiting from all the
new technologies, although that will certainly be amazing. I mean the
experience of watching a long-held set of ideals materialize in front of us
all at once. I think many will be literally moved to tears by it.

Throughout writing this essay I noticed an interesting tension. In one

sense the vision laid out here is extremely radical: it is not what almost
anyone expects to happen in the next decade, and will likely strike many
as an absurd fantasy. Some may not even consider it desirable; it
embodies values and political choices that not everyone will agree with.
But at the same time there is something blindingly obvious—something
overdetermined—about it, as if many different attempts to envision a good
world inevitably lead roughly here.

In Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games29, the protagonist—a member of a

society called the Culture, which is based on principles not unlike those
I’ve laid out here—travels to a repressive, militaristic empire in which
leadership is determined by competition in an intricate battle game. The
game, however, is complex enough that a player’s strategy within it tends
to reflect their own political and philosophical outlook. The protagonist
manages to defeat the emperor in the game, showing that his values (the
Culture’s values) represent a winning strategy even in a game designed by
a society based on ruthless competition and survival of the fittest. A well-
known post by Scott Alexander has the same thesis—that competition is
self-defeating and tends to lead to a society based on compassion and
cooperation. The “arc of the moral universe” is another similar concept.

I think the Culture’s values are a winning strategy because they’re the sum
of a million small decisions that have clear moral force and that tend to
pull everyone together onto the same side. Basic human intuitions of
fairness, cooperation, curiosity, and autonomy are hard to argue with, and
are cumulative in a way that our more destructive impulses often aren’t. It
is easy to argue that children shouldn’t die of disease if we can prevent it,
and easy from there to argue that everyone’s children deserve that right
equally. From there it is not hard to argue that we should all band together
and apply our intellects to achieve this outcome. Few disagree that people
should be punished for attacking or hurting others unnecessarily, and
from there it’s not much of a leap to the idea that punishments should be
consistent and systematic across people. It is similarly intuitive that
people should have autonomy and responsibility over their own lives and
choices. These simple intuitions, if taken to their logical conclusion, lead
eventually to rule of law, democracy, and Enlightenment values. If not
inevitably, then at least as a statistical tendency, this is where humanity
was already headed. AI simply offers an opportunity to get us there more
quickly—to make the logic starker and the destination clearer.

Nevertheless, it is a thing of transcendent beauty. We have the

opportunity to play some small role in making it real.

Thanks to Kevin Esvelt, Parag Mallick, Stuart Ritchie, Matt Yglesias, Erik
Brynjolfsson, Jim McClave, Allan Dafoe, and many people at Anthropic for
reviewing drafts of this essay.

To the winners of the 2024 Nobel prize in Chemistry, for showing us all
the way.

Footnotes
1https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

2Ido anticipate some minority of people’s reaction will be “this is pretty

tame”. I think those people need to, in Twitter parlance, “touch grass”. But
more importantly, tame is good from a societal perspective. I think there’s
only so much change people can handle at once, and the pace I’m
describing is probably close to the limits of what society can absorb
without extreme turbulence. ↩

3Ifind AGI to be an imprecise term that has gathered a lot of sci-fi

baggage and hype. I prefer "powerful AI" or "Expert-Level Science and
Engineering" which get at what I mean without the hype. ↩

4In this essay, I use "intelligence" to refer to a general problem-solving

capability that can be applied across diverse domains. This includes
abilities like reasoning, learning, planning, and creativity. While I use
"intelligence" as a shorthand throughout this essay, I acknowledge that
the nature of intelligence is a complex and debated topic in cognitive
science and AI research. Some researchers argue that intelligence isn't a
single, unified concept but rather a collection of separate cognitive
abilities. Others contend that there's a general factor of intelligence (g
factor) underlying various cognitive skills. That’s a debate for another
time. ↩

5This is roughly the current speed of AI systems – for example they can
read a page of text in a couple seconds and write a page of text in maybe
20 seconds, which is 10-100x the speed at which humans can do these
things. Over time larger models tend to make this slower but more
powerful chips tend to make it faster; to date the two effects have roughly
canceled out. ↩

6This might seem like a strawman position, but careful thinkers like Tyler
Cowen and Matt Yglesias have raised it as a serious concern (though I
don’t think they fully hold the view), and I don’t think it is crazy. ↩

7The closest economics work that I’m aware of to tackling this question is
work on “general purpose technologies” and “intangible investments” that
serve as complements to general purpose technologies. ↩

8This learning can include temporary, in-context learning, or traditional

training; both will be rate-limited by the physical world. ↩

9Ina chaotic system, small errors compound exponentially over time, so

that even an enormous increase in computing power leads to only a small
improvement in how far ahead it is possible to predict, and in practice
measurement error may degrade this further. ↩

10Another factor is of course that powerful AI itself can potentially be used

to create even more powerful AI. My assumption is that this might (in fact,
probably will) occur, but that its effect will be smaller than you might
imagine, precisely because of the “decreasing marginal returns to
intelligence” discussed here. In other words, AI will continue to get
smarter quickly, but its effect will eventually be limited by non-intelligence
factors, and analyzing those is what matters most to the speed of
scientific progress outside AI. ↩
11Theseachievements have been an inspiration to me and perhaps the
most powerful existing example of AI being used to transform biology. ↩

12“Progress in science depends on new techniques, new discoveries and

new ideas, probably in that order.” - Sydney Brenner ↩

13Thanks to Parag Mallick for suggesting this point. ↩

14I didn't want to clog up the text with speculation about what specific
future discoveries AI-enabled science could make, but here is a
brainstorm of some possibilities:
— Design of better computational tools like AlphaFold and AlphaProteo —
that is, a general AI system speeding up our ability to make specialized AI
computational biology tools.
— More efficient and selective CRISPR.
— More advanced cell therapies.
— Materials science and miniaturization breakthroughs leading to better
implanted devices.
— Better control over stem cells, cell differentiation, and de-
differentiation, and a resulting ability to regrow or reshape tissue.
— Better control over the immune system: turning it on selectively to
address cancer and infectious disease, and turning it off selectively to
address autoimmune diseases. ↩

15AI may of course also help with being smarter about choosing what
experiments to run: improving experimental design, learning more from a
first round of experiments so that the second round can narrow in on key
questions, and so on. ↩

16Thanks to Matthew Yglesias for suggesting this point. ↩

17Fast evolving diseases, like the multidrug resistant strains that

essentially use hospitals as an evolutionary laboratory to continually
improve their resistance to treatment, could be especially stubborn to deal
with, and could be the kind of thing that prevents us from getting to 100%.
↩
18Note it may be hard to know that we have doubled the human lifespan
within the 5-10 years. While we might have accomplished it, we may not
know it yet within the study time-frame. ↩

19This is one place where I am willing, despite the obvious biological

differences between curing diseases and slowing down the aging process
itself, to instead look from a greater distance at the statistical trend and
say “even though the details are different, I think human science would
probably find a way to continue this trend; after all, smooth trends in
anything complex are necessarily made by adding up very heterogeneous
components. ↩

20As an example, I’m told that an increase in productivity growth per year
of 1% or even 0.5% would be transformative in projections related to
these programs. If the ideas contemplated in this essay come to pass,
productivity gains could be much larger than this. ↩

21The media loves to portray high status psychopaths, but the average
psychopath is probably a person with poor economic prospects and poor
impulse control who ends up spending significant time in prison. ↩

22I think this is somewhat analogous to the fact that many, though likely
not all, of the results we’re learning from interpretability would continue to
be relevant even if some of the architectural details of our current artificial
neural nets, such as the attention mechanism, were changed or replaced
in some way. ↩

23I suspect it is a bit like a classical chaotic system – beset by irreducible

complexity that has to be managed in a mostly decentralized manner.
Though as I say later in this section, more modest interventions may be
possible. A counterargument, made to me by economist Erik Brynjolfsson,
is that large companies (such as Walmart or Uber) are starting to have
enough centralized knowledge to understand consumers better than any
decentralized process could, perhaps forcing us to revise Hayek’s insights
about who has the best local knowledge. ↩
24Thanks to Kevin Esvelt for suggesting this point. ↩

25For example, cell phones were initially a technology for the rich, but
quickly became very cheap with year-over-year improvements happening
so fast as to obviate any advantage of buying a “luxury” cell phone, and
today most people have phones of similar quality. ↩

26This is the title of a forthcoming paper from RAND, that lays out roughly
the strategy I describe. ↩

27When the average person thinks of public institutions, they probably

think of their experience with the DMV, IRS, medicare, or similar functions.
Making these experiences more positive than they currently are seems
like a powerful way to combat undue cynicism. ↩

28Indeed, inan AI-powered world, the range of such possible challenges

and projects will be much vaster than it is today. ↩

29I am breaking my own rule not to make this about science fiction, but
I’ve found it hard not to refer to it at least a bit. The truth is that science
fiction is one of our only sources of expansive thought experiments about
the future; I think it says something bad that it’s entangled so heavily with
a particular narrow subculture. ↩

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