You Should Be Terrified of What's Happening With AI

The Sam Altman OpenAI story is being covered as a Succession-style drama. It's actually about the future of humanity.

Photo by Andy Kelly on Unsplash

Last week, the story of Sam Altman leaving OpenAI dominated the US headlines, in part because it was just all so dramatic: A young genius who checks all the Silicon Valley boxes (white guy / prepper / dropped out of Stanford / extremely confident he is changing the world for the better) who is also widely recognized as the most important person in AI was unceremoniously pushed out of the AI company he ran, leading to a staff revolt against the board that pushed him out, a soft landing at Microsoft, and then, within days, reinstatement into his old position and a quick reshuffling of the board in which all the women were removed and replaced with men, including Larry “men are better at math than women” Summers. Spicy!

But news outlets really did us all a disservice by initially framing this as a Success-style power struggle rather than what it really is: A battle for the future of humanity. And not just for our jobs, but for our very basic ability to survive as a species.

That framing, I realize, sounds even more dramatic than the initial story. But consider a few things:

• The tech optimists working in AI, including Altman, generally agree that the best-case scenario with more-powerful AI is an absolute leveling of industries from law to medicine to education. With that will come enormous numbers of people who are put out of work, although tech optimists argue they will find better jobs (what those better jobs might be is unclear, given that AI is not generally taking over unpleasant and dangerous manual labor tasks, but rather seems to be thriving in creative pursuits like stealing writers’ words and stealing artists’ art).

• These same tech optimists, though, also generally (if grudgingly) agree with people I think of as AI realists — and the most forceful of these skeptics are people who have dedicated their lives and careers to AI, and understand its potential better than just about anyone — that the worst-case scenario is total annihilation of humanity. Tech optimist Sam Altman has a full prepper setup prepared in case the robots take over: A parcel of land in Big Sur, guns, IDF-issued gas masks. Although, he says, none of that will help if AI gets too powerful.