From Asimov’s Robopsychologists to Real-World AI Safety
Isaac Asimov imagined robopsychologists — experts who would help society understand powerful intelligent machines before those machines caused real harm.
Today, Dario Amodei is doing something strikingly similar — but in real life.
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/the-adolescence-of-technology
In his recent essay “The Adolescence of Technology,” Amodei argues that AI has entered a phase where its power is growing faster than our social, political, and ethical maturity. The technology isn’t “evil” — it’s just more capable than the systems we’ve built to guide it.
That’s exactly the tension Asimov explored in his science fiction. The difference? Asimov had the luxury of clean rules, fictional safeguards, and time to think things through. Amodei is working inside today’s messy reality: market pressure, geopolitics, open deployment, and systems that evolve faster than regulation.
In a sense, Amodei is translating science fiction into practice — asking the questions about responsibility, alignment, and control before the story turns dark.
What Asimov warned us about through stories, Amodei is trying to address through policy, safety research, and public conversation.
And this time, it’s not fiction.