We already knew what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks about artificial intelligence versus the human saga: it will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been nothing but consistent in countless interviews. For some reason, this week I found it necessary to summarize those opinions in a short blog post. “The age of intelligence”, as he calls it, it will be a time of abundance. “We can have shared prosperity at a level that seems unimaginable today; In the future, everyone’s life can be better than it is now,” he writes. “Although this will happen gradually, amazing triumphs (fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all physics) will eventually become commonplace.”
Perhaps you posted this to challenge a line of thinking that dismisses the apparent benefits of large language models as some kind of illusion. No-uh, he says. We’re getting this big advantage from AI because “deep learning works,” as he said in a interview later in the weekmocking those who said that programs like OpenAI’s GPT4o were simply stupid engines that delivered the next token in a queue. “Once you can start proving unproven mathematical theorems, do we really still want to debate, ‘Oh, but it’s just predicting the next token?'” he said.
No matter what you think of Sam Altman, it is indisputable that this is his truth: artificial general intelligence (AI that matches and then exceeds human capabilities) will eliminate the problems that plague humanity and usher in a golden age. I suggest we call this deus ex machina concept The Strawberry Shortcut, after the codename of OpenAI’s recent breakthrough in artificial reasoning. Like the cake, the premise looks appetizing but is less substantial when eaten.
Altman correctly points out that the advancement of technology has brought what were once luxuries to the common people, including some that were out of reach of pharaohs and lords. Charlemagne never enjoyed air conditioning! Working-class people and even some on public assistance have dishwashers, big-screen TVs, iPhones, and delivery services that bring pumpkin lattes and pet food to their doors. But Altman doesn’t acknowledge the whole story. Despite enormous wealth, not everyone prospers and many are homeless or severely impoverished. To paraphrase William Gibson, paradise is here, but it is not equally distributed. That’s not because the technology has failed.us have. I suspect the same will happen if AGI comes along, especially since many jobs will be automated.
Altman is not very specific about what life will be like when many of our current jobs follow the path of the 18th century lamplighters. We had a hint of his vision in a this week’s podcast which asked tech luminaries and celebrities to share their Spotify playlists. Explaining why he chose Rüfüs du Sol’s “Underwater,” Altman said it was a tribute to Burning Man, which he has attended several times. The festival, he says, “is part of what the post-AGI could be, where people are just focused on doing things for each other, taking care of each other, and giving amazing gifts to each other.”
Altman is a big supporter of universal basic income, which he seems to believe will cushion the blow of lost wages. Indeed, artificial intelligence could generate the wealth to make such a plan feasible, but there is little evidence that people making fortunes (or even those still earning a modest living) will be inclined to embrace the concept. Altman might have had a great experience at Burning Man, but some kind souls in Playa seem to be up in arms over a proposal, affecting only people worth more than $100 million, to tax some of their earnings from unrealized capital. It’s a dubious premise that those people (or others who get super rich working at AI companies) would open their coffers to fund the leisure time of the masses. One of America’s major political parties does not support Medicaid, so one can only imagine how populist demagogues will view UBI.
I also distrust the supposed prosperity that will come when all our big problems are resolved. Let’s admit that AI could actually solve humanity’s greatest puzzles. We humans would have to implement those solutions, and that is where we have failed time and time again. We don’t need some great language model to tell us that war is hell and that we shouldn’t kill each other. However, wars continue to occur.