Surviving Our Adolescence

The Contact question

In Contact, Jodie Foster's character travels across the cosmos and meets an advanced civilization. She could ask anything. She asks the question that matters: How did you do it? How did you survive your adolescence?

The adolescence of a technological species — the period where your tools outpace your wisdom. Where you can split the atom before you understand the consequences. Where you can build intelligence before you understand your own. Every civilization faces it. Not all of them make it through.

It's the most important question in the movie. It might be the most important question of our century.

Anthropic's CEO wrote an essay with that exact framing. “The Adolescence of Technology” lays out five ways this goes wrong: AI systems that develop misaligned behaviors, bioweapons democratized by helpful chatbots, authoritarian governments weaponizing surveillance AI, economic disruption that destabilizes society, and cascading effects we can't predict.

He's not a doomer. He's a builder who looked at what he's building and decided to publish the risks out loud. That takes a particular kind of courage — the kind where you tell your investors the thing they don't want to hear. The kind where you say “this could go catastrophically wrong” while also saying “and I'm going to keep building it, but carefully.”

Most CEOs publish essays about opportunity. Dario published one about existential risk. And then went back to work building the safety systems to mitigate it.

Every --dangerously-skip is a microcosm of the larger question. Do you trust enough to stop checking? Have you earned that trust, or are you just tired of being asked?

The answer matters at the scale of a CLI tool. It matters infinitely more at the scale of civilization.

Dario calls it “a dangerous situation requiring the best minds of civilization.” I call it Tuesday, because that's what it feels like when you're building with AI every day — Tuesday, and you're skipping the checks again. The distance between my Tuesday and civilization's existential risk is smaller than it seems. Same instinct. Same impatience. Same bet that speed matters more than verification.

Someone has to be the one who says “not yet.” Not “never” — “not yet.”

Anthropic is that company. Constitutional AI over rigid rules. Mechanistic interpretability — actually understanding why the model does what it does, not just hoping it behaves. A Responsible Scaling Policy that draws lines before the capability exists to cross them.

They're building the most capable AI they can, as fast as they can, but with something most companies lack: the willingness to stop if the safety case isn't there. That's not timidity. That's the kind of discipline that gets civilizations through adolescence.

And it's the same discipline I abandoned when I typed --dangerously-skip-permissions. The discipline to let the check run. To read the prompt. To take the extra second. I gave it up for speed, and I got speed. Anthropic keeps it, and they might get something more important: trust that holds.

How did we survive our adolescence?

We don't know yet. We're still in it.

But if we make it, it won't be because we moved fast. It'll be because someone — some company, some group of researchers, some community of builders — decided that the skip button shouldn't exist for the things that matter most. And the rest of us, eventually, agreed.

I still use --dangerously-skip-permissions. I'm honest about that. I still choose speed over caution on my side projects, knowing the risks, accepting the tradeoff. But I'm glad — deeply, genuinely glad — that the people building the AI I use every day don't make that same choice. I'm glad they named the flag “dangerously.” I'm glad they built Constitutional AI instead of just bolting on filters. I'm glad they published a Responsible Scaling Policy that says “we will stop if we need to.”

Because someday, the check that matters most will come. Not a file modification prompt on a side project. The real one. The one where the answer determines whether we make it through.

When that check comes, I want the people who never learned to skip in charge.