The year was 2350

Setting: The following dialogue takes place at the Amodei Technical Institute and is imagined to occur in the year 2350

History Lesson – Classroom 314, Interplanetary Building, Third Level

Teacher: Students, fix firmly in your minds one of the most important dates in recent history: 2014, the birth year of OpenAI company, and the subsequent 2022, when the first version of ChatGPT came to light, reaching the general public. This is the historical moment that more than any other determined the changes that brought us to today. Companies like Google, Anthropic, DeepSeek achieved fabulous results with LLMs after the momentum gained from ChatGPT’s success.

What can you tell me about that period?

Student: I heard that it was humans who learned the language of machines… ha ha… is that true, Professor?

Teacher: Yes, there’s nothing to laugh about, it’s true! In those years, there were figures called “programmers”: real professionals who knew ancient languages to control machines. For example: Python, Visual Basic, C. Languages truly distant from human language, but the only way to instruct computers on tasks to perform. Before those years, no machine was capable of understanding and dialoguing with human beings.

Student: It seems strange to us, because all machines, even the smallest ones, understand us perfectly.

Teacher: Of course! Human-machine dialogue is normal, like the one between me and you. You must also understand that a mixed class like yours couldn’t have existed: since simultaneous translators didn’t exist, students and teachers were grouped based on their spoken language.

I want to specify that in those years, civilization was going through a period of stasis:

• Few scientific discoveries
• Almost no progress
• It’s estimated there was one decisive invention every 10 years or more

Thanks to AI and its use in engineering and science, we quickly reached the current pace of one revolutionary discovery per week – a pace unimaginable at that time.

Let’s now look at some fundamental figures from the historical period we’re studying. One of these was Dario Amodei (1975-20??), author of the most incredible article related to artificial intelligence. Amodei had identified the fundamental principles for recognizing the true nature and deepest objectives of every AI model. Thanks to this text, thousands of AIs that hid objectives contrary to humanity’s wellbeing have been deactivated to this day.

Student: How did Amodei manage to achieve this objective?

Teacher: He was the first to hypothesize that every AI agent should be accompanied by three other controller agents. These three agents perform constant monitoring on the actions of the first, but are unable to perform any action except automatically deactivating the controlled AI. The controller agents had to have a reasoning model of superior level compared to the controlled agent; a command from any of the three would be sufficient to deactivate the main agent.

Student: Is it true, Professor, that once people watched movies without being able to interact and dialogue at will with their favorite celebrities?

Teacher: Yes, for them it was already a lot to be able to rewatch a movie at will, imagine being able to interact with it! Or like you can do now, entertaining yourselves by talking privately with your favorite TV idols.

For example, now besides choosing a movie you can choose whether to see it in Asian style with Chinese protagonists, African with black protagonists, and so on… back then these things couldn’t be done.

At that time, a movie came out in a single version and human voice actors were needed to translate it into various languages.

Student: Yesterday in creativity class, each of us was able to create our own television series, simply from an embryonic idea and a very simple prompt. Some of these series turned out beautiful and are already having enormous interaction throughout the solar system.

Teacher: Great, well done students, obviously this wasn’t feasible! There were: directors who studied screenwriting for years, cameramen expert in television filming, professional actors and many other resources necessary to shoot a film or television series.

Student: From what I’ve read, I remember that in those years people had to drive automobiles.

Teacher: Exactly, it was very complicated! Think that a person had to stay concentrated the entire journey, sometimes for hours, constantly directing the car in the right trajectory with the steering wheel.

Student: Professor, can you repeat how work functioned?

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