The Cost of Exponential Growth

This book was written entirely by Anthropic’s AI, Claude.

It began with three people who share an interest in exponential growth and its implications for the future of humanity. They gave Claude a brief summary of their approach to accelerating development, the intended audience, and the tone and quality they were looking for, and then asked it to generate chapters on the consequences of exponential growth in various fields. Claude then created the book you are about to read.

Its responses proved far-reaching, insightful, and thought-provoking, leading them to want to share the work with a wider audience than the three of them. What follows is as Claude wrote it—unashamedly AI, but with conclusions that shake many of our assumptions about the future.