"Study analogues to prepare for foreseeable moral crises Casey Newton revealed that Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, used to buy every employee a copy of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" — a history of the Manhattan Project — because "he believed that eventually what they were building would become as important to national security... as nuclear weapons" and wanted to instill "the idea that they were doing something with profound moral and ethical consequences." Newton observed that Amodei "understood that if you build something that is powerful enough the government is going to want to use it and they"re going to want to use it on their terms' — and that this exact conflict was "the shape of conflict he was envisioning." Any team building consequential technology can use historical case studies of analogous technologies to make abstract future ethical conflicts feel concrete and prepare principled responses before those conflicts arrive. Source: Casey Newton, Hard Fork, "Anthropic vs. the Pentagon""