[ed. A followup to the New Yorker's Sam Altman profile posted here previously, which should definitely be a Pulitzer prize candidate. Why people continue to trust obvious liars - from politicians to tech bros... to anyone actually, is beyond me. Probably just the obvious endpoint to the vicious capitalistic system we live in now where winner takes all, whatever the methods or consequences. We're all NPCs now.]
If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.Everything is getting better; indeed, it’s getting better faster thanks to “self-reinforcing loops” like this. Downsides? Trick question! There aren’t any real downsides because people get used to things. Quickly. Just listen to how great it’s gonna be:
The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything. 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. We probably won’t adopt a new social contract all at once, but when we look back in a few decades, the gradual changes will have amounted to something big.Perhaps you have looked around at the world recently and wondered whether building “ever-more-wonderful things for each other” is actually a good description of what you are seeing.
If history is any guide, we will figure out new things to do and new things to want, and assimilate new tools quickly (job change after the industrial revolution is a good recent example). Expectations will go up, but capabilities will go up equally quickly, and we’ll all get better stuff. We will build ever-more-wonderful things for each other.
But any niggles you might have—questions about the insane violence of the post-Industrial Revolution world, for instance, or whether “better stuff” is even the solution to many human problems—barely need to be addressed in Altman’s world. The future’s so bright we need to wear (AI-powered) shades!
(This simplistic attitude is shockingly common among smart Silicon Valley types. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Netscape co-founder, wrote an infamous 2023 essay in the same “No downsides!” vein. It was stuffed with non-ironic statements like “We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet.” It featured the genre’s Randian fetishization of “the great technologists and industrialists who came before us,” some Nietzsche quotes, and of course howlers like “We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.”
Silicon Valley—where nuance goes to die, where “hubris” is just a synonym for “success,” and where nerds see themselves as apex predators.
Meanwhile, tech investor Peter Thiel travels around the globe ranting about the Antichrist, while Mark Zuckerberg drops $80 billion on a failed “metaverse.” These dudes are just not the world-bestriding geniuses they think they are. But they do share a certain will to power—and a sense that they deserve to wield this power.)
If you have doubts about just how great a world dominated by people like Sam Altman might be, you owe it to yourself to read the long (loooooong) profile of him that appeared yesterday in our sister publication The New Yorker. Yes, it’s over 16,000 words, and yes, you will encounter the diaeresis a disturbing number of times, but it is absolutely worth the effort. [...]
For their piece, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz interviewed over 100 people, including Altman, and the report they bring back from this effort is quite depressing; the words “lying” and “sociopath” are used repeatedly. Here are just a few of the relevant quotes:
A board member offered a different interpretation of [Altman’s] statement: “What it meant was ‘I have this trait where I lie to people, and I’m not going to stop.’”…The piece documents what appear to be incredibly flexible ethical and political views. Altman slides smoothly from Democratic booster to Trump whisperer, from hoping that the “insane sci-fi future comes true for all of us” to taking meetings with dictators. AI safety, such a key part of OpenAI’s stated mission a few years back, has largely fallen by the wayside as Altman chased money, power, and deals.
Altman’s attitude in childhood, his brother told The New Yorker, in 2016, was “I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything”…
As Mark Jacobstein, an older Loopt employee who was asked by investors to act as Altman’s “babysitter,” later told Keach Hagey, for “The Optimist,” a biography of Altman, “There’s a blurring between ‘I think I can maybe accomplish this thing’ and ‘I have already accomplished this thing’ that in its most toxic form leads to Theranos,” Elizabeth Holmes’s fraudulent startup…
Multiple senior executives at Microsoft said that, despite [Satya] Nadella’s long-standing loyalty, the company’s relationship with Altman has become fraught. “He has misrepresented, distorted, renegotiated, reneged on agreements,” one said…
Altman has a relentless will to power that, even among industrialists who put their names on spaceships, sets him apart. “He’s unconstrained by truth,” the board member told us…
One of Altman’s batch mates in the first Y Combinator cohort was Aaron Swartz, a brilliant but troubled coder who died by suicide in 2013 and is now remembered in many tech circles as something of a sage. Not long before his death, Swartz expressed concerns about Altman to several friends. “You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted,” he told one. “He is a sociopath. He would do anything.”
One of the article’s subtexts is that the negative traits on display here aren’t actually bad for business; indeed, they’re quite good for (short-term) business. Whether they are good for business in the long term, where you actually need people to trust you, is an open question.
by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Getty
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Inequality is such a fact of American life that it’s easy to shrug off. But we are in uncharted terrain. The amassed wealth of today’s tech titans makes the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts look quaint. Over the past two years, 19 households have added $1.8 trillion to their coffers, the economist Gabriel Zucman told me — roughly the size of the economy of Australia.Into this fragile state enters artificial intelligence. It threatens to make a bad situation much worse.
Left on its current course, A.I. could deliver a bleak picture: lower- and middle-income jobs automated away, with top earners remaining unscathed. Income shifting from middle-wage workers doing the bulk of the labor toward those wealthy enough to bankroll the technology. Growth headwinds. Worsening affordability. So, too, a federal government less able to respond, thanks to a shrinking tax base.
For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we are no longer sharing in self-government.
