“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it’s deeply unclear whether we can handle it” – that’s the warning from one of the most powerful men in artificial intelligence – so, is he right?

If you don’t have plans for the weekend you could do worse than to sit down and read the 20,000 word essay penned by the co-founder of the £350bn AI giant Anthropic, but take my advice and pour yourself a stiff drink to go with it.

I say that as a non-expert and one of the reasons why the essay is so good is because someone like me can just about keep up with it. I say someone like me because I don’t live at the cutting edge of AI; I’ve just started to use Gemini to help out with my inbox and I occasionally have an argument with Chat GPT about the economics of news media or whether the A303 is better than the M4.

The essay in question has sparked debate among experts and fear among the rest of us.

Dario Amodei co-founded Anthropic in 2021 and went on to launch Claude, one of the leading AI platforms. His warnings focus on the emergence of “powerful AI” – described as a model “smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields” able to perform multiple complex tasks with “a skill exceeding that of the most capable humans in the world.”

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He predicts that “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.”has warned that “humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power” as the technology advances and warned that “it is deeply unclear........

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