The Adolescence of Technology - Dario Amodei

# The Adolescence of Technology

# The Adolescence of Technology

Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful AI

January 2026

There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book _Contact_ where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet the aliens. The international panel interviewing her asks, “If you could ask \[the aliens\] just one question, what would it be?” Her reply is: “I’d ask them, ‘How did you do it? How did you evolve, how did you survive this technological adolescence without destroying yourself?” When I think about where humanity is now with AI—about what we’re on the cusp of—my mind keeps going back to that scene, because the question is so apt for our current situation, and I wish we had the aliens’ answer to guide us. I believe we are entering a rite of passage, both turbulent and inevitable, which will test who we are as a species. Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.

In my essay [_Machines of Loving Grace_](https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace), I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood, where the risks had been addressed and powerful AI was applied with skill and compassion to raise the quality of life for everyone. I suggested that AI could contribute to enormous advances in biology, neuroscience, economic development, global peace, and work and meaning. I felt it was important to give people something inspiring to fight for, a task at which both AI accelerationists and AI safety advocates seemed—oddly—to have failed. But in this current essay, I want to confront the rite of passage itself: to map out the risks that we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them. I believe deeply in our ability to prevail, in humanity’s spirit and its nobility, but we must face the situation squarely and without illusions.

As with talking about the benefits, I think it is important to discuss risks in a careful and well-considered manner. In particular, I think it is critical to:

- **Avoid doomerism.** Here,I mean “doomerism” not just in the sense of believing doom is inevitable (which is both a false and self-fulfilling belief), but more generally, thinking about AI risks in a quasi-religious way.[1](https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology#fn:1)
1 This is symmetric to a point I made in _Machines of Loving Grace_, where I started by saying that AI’s upsides shouldn’t be thought of in terms of a prophecy of salvation, and that it’s important to be concrete and grounded and to avoid grandiosity. Ultimately, prophecies of salvation and prophecies of doom are unhelpful for confronting the real world, for basically the same reasons.
Many people have been thinking i

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