Fortunately, I don’t have to follow every statement Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, makes about the world. Many of these statements seem more like “problems” or “presentations” than attempts to speak reflectively about the future. Even if they are genuine statements of belief, they often read like a teenager’s first science fiction novel, written under the influence of marijuana and too much of it. trip to the stars.
Consider, for example, Altman’s blog post “A gentle singularity“, published last year and read by almost 600,000 people. Its central thesis seems to be that AI is on the rise; everything has been fantastic so far, and everything will be even better in the future! I mean, just wait until we build robots that we can insert these AIs into, and then tell those robots to make more robots.
If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain (dig and refine minerals, drive trucks, manage factories, etc.) to build more robots, which can build more chip manufacturing facilities, data centers, etc., then the pace of progress will obviously be very different.
Everything is improving; In fact, it’s getting better. faster thanks to “self-reinforcing loops” like this one. Disadvantages? Tricky question! there is none real disadvantages because people get used to things. Quickly. Just listen to how cool it will be:
The pace of technological progress will continue to accelerate and people will continue to be able to adapt to almost anything. There will be very difficult parts, like entire classes of jobs disappearing, but on the other hand, the world will get so rich and so quickly that we will be able to seriously consider new political ideas that we were never able to consider before. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back decades from now, incremental changes will have amounted to something big.
If history is any guide, we will discover new things to do and new things to want, and we will pick up new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will rise, but capabilities will rise just as quickly and we will all get better things. We will build more and more wonderful things for each other.
Perhaps you’ve recently looked at the world around you and wondered if building “more and more wonderful things for each other” is actually a good description of what you’re seeing.
