At a time when the populist right is on the rise, progressives are shooting blanks while history rushes headlong into an automated future
Canberra rolled out the red carpet this week to one of the AI overlords whose technology is driving the world down the path of creative destruction. Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, the putative “good” tech oligarch, was spinning his version of a machine-driven future with the elan of a man who has untangled the mysteries of the universe – or at least built a predictive text model that can scrape the output of humanity and spit out compelling summaries of our collective consciousness.
He regaled the prime minister, assorted elected officials and the tech sector’s glitterati with his pitch for good AI that would transform the economy, before becoming the first to sign up to the government’s new datacentre principles, conveniently released just a week earlier. It was compelling shill and, to be fair, Amodei is not the worst of the gods. He created Anthropic after leaving Open AI when the company dispensed with its not-for-profit, “safety first” mission. He regularly shares thoughtful essays on the path of technology and has been open about his fears for the impact of his own products. He broke with the Trump administration over the limits to how his technology would be used to spy on citizens and enable autonomous weapons, turning himself into an enemy of the state.
