AI safety lab Anthropic hires economist who calculated our extinction price
When a self-proclaimed 'AI safety' company hires the one guy who mathematically justified sacrificing a third of humanity for economic growth, you know the tech industry has reached peak irony.
Stanford economic growth expert Chad Jones is taking a leave of absence to join the newly launched Anthropic Institute. This research hub was created by co-founder Jack Clark to study AI's long-term impact on society, but Chad Jones brings some incredibly spicy academic baggage with him.
In his infamous 2023 paper, 'The AI Dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk,' he built a mathematical model to calculate exactly when risking the end of human civilization becomes a smart investment. He found that if we accept a 1% annual risk of complete extinction over a 40-year period, the math actually checks out. That leaves us with a roughly 67% chance of surviving the AI transition, which is basically a 1-in-3 chance of everyone dying.
In exchange for playing Russian roulette with humanity, his model promises a 55-fold increase in our standard of living. Apparently, a world of unimaginable luxury is worth a quick trip to the cosmic graveyard if the dice land on the wrong number. This is the exact type of cold-blooded optimization that gets tech executives excited, proving that even the apocalypse can be turned into a spreadsheet metric.
The hiring spree highlights how the 'responsible' AI lab, led by Dario Amodei, is trying to quantify the unquantifiable. Chad Jones joins other high-profile economists at the institute, including Anton Korinek from the University of Virginia and former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig.
It is a masterclass in corporate cognitive dissonance to market oneself as the savior of humanity while hiring the minds that calculate the optimal price of its liquidation. In Silicon Valley, even the end of the world is just another metric waiting to be optimized.
Source: Financial Times
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