Re: The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman
Sam Altman of Open AI wrote a very hopeful essay about the net positive results expected with AI accelerated technological progress. As this is a topic I write about quite often, here's my four cents.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
I’m currently in a cafe from the 80s and it’s filled with invisible technology.
A computer on my lap, headphones and speakers playing tunes, and smartphones in hands around me. Every device is connected to millions of others on the global internet by the magical signal traveling through air. There’s power outlets that just output pure energy, automated lights that trigger every time someone walks past them.
The glass I’m drinking from has been tempered, mass produced and delivered here by gigantic freighters from half across the world. The chair I’m sitting on has metal bendable only at very high temperatures. Speaking of high temperature, the insulation inside the walls and windows, together with central ventilation are keeping it outside. Lets not forget I can just go poop in the back room in privacy and the waste will be taken to a central location and cleansed, automatically as I get up from the toilet seat.
Hell, the clothes I’m wearing are all synthetic materials. My body fit with tattoos and replacement teeth is technology.
People invent to stop thinking about the problems technology solves and for the joys it gives. When we do a great job technology integrates into our lives. When we do a poor job we forget about it. In rare cases our inventions become too scary and we limit or forbid them.
I think the near future iteration of AI is as fundamental as a pen, but not as much as a toilet. Just like a pen it has the power to create and destroy. Just like a pen the next generations will take it for granted and not know how it works or how to make one. I could live in the world without a pen. On the other hand I don’t want to keep shitting in a forest.
No one told you when to run, You missed the starting gun
It’s an unfortunate human limitation that we cannot keep up with advances in technology and increasing complexity. As adaptable as we are throughout our lives, only as younglings we automate and encode habits and behaviors.
This limitation can be lifted with the internet and AI, to work as the collective humanity’s brain to preserve and recover knowledge; or cybernetics that extend our processing capacity. How much will that transform the definition of what is human will be left to find out for all the new jobs.
We (the whole industry, not just OpenAI) are building a brain for the world. It will be extremely personalized and easy for everyone to use; we will be limited by good ideas. - Sam Altman
Natural evolution has always relied on parents preparing their children with their understanding of the world they grew up in. The elders pass on the lessons, morals and help the young navigate the world. But that has obviously radically changed.
Look at the times of my parents. They have seen the invention of the internet and personal computer. This new foreign thing replaced mass-printed books and libraries that have been around for hundreds of years. While books and libraries are still around, their relevance has fallen, and you would have been ridiculed if you thought that would be the future. My parents' choice was to tell me to trust this new thing as it was evolving, ignore it, or figure it out by my 8-year old self.
The same situation is now happening every couple of years.
The fact is you, I, and all the geniuses combined cannot know what will even the next year look like. As any builder will tell you, the more complex and innovative the project, the greater the chance we’ll deviate substantially from the original plan.
But let's have some fun and play out the idea of utopia moving at this exponential pace.
On Monday my bed was upgraded and optimized for my lumbar support.
On Tuesday AI discovered a low energy illness through an analysis of in-house poop of several million people across the globe.
On Wednesday it synthesized, permuted simulations, but failed to administer a cure, because it had no infrastructure for doing so. It will retry in several years, when all necessary distribution and policies are okayed by humans.
On Thursday the AI cracked space travel, but I put on pants and went to the office. Kids have to go to school, mostly to socialize, as they can just ask the AI to teach them anything.
The human world will continue to move at a human pace, even as technology eclipses us.
Eventually when us slowpokes catch up, maybe everything we do is travel, enjoy food, tell each other stories of seeing the world, or the galaxy. Maybe we give the AI “good ideas” that it hadn’t thought about, which with all of its compute I find hard to believe. AI will probably just sycophancily lie to Sam to make him feel super smart and special.
Finally when we get bored or too addicted to comfort, then maybe AI will come back and institute “No Tech Sundays,” where we have to do all chores by ourselves. Which in the great scheme of things is kinda Godlike as God didn’t work on Sundays either. Makes you think.
Technology took us from the cave to a farm, and from the farm to the office. In a similar way we’ll be taken from the office somewhere else: it might be back home, space, or a digital universe. Or it will offer us to travel the time and go to sleep for a hundred years. That’s the sweet sweet future.
Things must first break, to grow stronger
There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before. - Sam Altman
Any time you give people a way to question their worth it leads to an upheaval.
Around the year 1440 Gutenberg invented the printing press. The press amplified polarization over the coming centuries leading to the Reformation, which drowned Europe in decimating wars.
The printing press didn’t cause the wars. Prior traditions, allegiances, pride, prejudice, and greed caused the wars. During the centuries, thanks to the press literacy rates soared across Europe and the idea of free expression and the public sphere began to take root, laying early groundwork for the Enlightenment.
I think we have already entered our Reformation period when we connected over 50% of the world to the internet (about 70% is connected as of 2025).
People making $500 a year were exposed to regular people making $50,000 a year. Were these people really 100x better than them? Businesses quickly asked the same question and offshoring became a common practice. As the funds flowed into economies where each dollar equaled ten thousand, things started to belly flop.
The jobs always go away when their economic value is undermined.
Emotionally we value a C grade work by a human more, than an A- by a robot. Economically we choose robot work. The theme of every single one of our societies has been around “money” as the key exchange of value.
Sama wraps this key inflection point under “new policy ideas.” Today governments only know how to protect their population by giving them just enough freedom to build their own functioning economy (capitalism) or by being an active participant (socialism). The only real solution continues to be a moneyless society, but in thousands of years we haven't been able to figure it out.
The inherent issues of a moneyless society are claims and protection of non-fungible resources ie: Who should live in the villas of Malibu beach?
The hope is that perfectly working and trusted AI-driven distribution systems or post-scarcity automation could solve this. We’re very far away from that moment, evidenced by the technology itself failing in 70% of basic tasks, to complex issues like mistrust of being privately owned and built by the ultra wealthy elite.
The odd future of Meta-Humans and X-Men
Sama’s whole point is that AI will solve a bunch of substantial science and figure out the society along the way. The hopeful tone stays away from every engineering major worst fear: human nature.
Regardless of AI advancements, I can imagine a future of Meta-humans and X-Men.
Meta-humans will be jacked into the metaverse to transport between robot bodies and different systems, like plumbers going around fixing pipes. In this world they are super intelligent, able to actively multitask by controlling swarms of robots, while watching a movie or listening to an audiobook in the background.
X-Men will be more present in the physical world, with exoskeleton prosthetics, cybernetic upgrades, such as Neuralink, and extending their life through Blueprint. If we want to be playful, we could say they are following the Church of Elon who will take them to Mars and beyond.
In this mixed feeling of veteran PTSD and corporate management ego, both groups will have a hard time leaving their validated superiority at home. People who are several times stronger and smarter than regular humans, are not going to be taking out the thrash or fixing the thrash robots.
At the same time who’s lining up on time to scrub patients in a hospital. Some surely will, but will it be enough? How will AI “optimize” who needs to do what and when?
Let me end on this: in Seveneves Neal Stephenson puts the remaining humanity of seven people in space and asks the question: “How do we want to survive?” The answer is genetics. The answer is playing nature itself and changing who we are. This is not the future, but today.
I don’t think anyone really cares about the jobs, or even a purpose to live for as we always find something to fight off the boredom. I think people are really scared that in the hurry of technological progress we will gently become inhuman. Jacked in, turned to machines, or genetically rewritten.