TECH NEWS – According to Sam Altman, the situation is not nearly as simple as it may look.
Last week, someone reportedly threw an incendiary device at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Although Altman says the device bounced off the house and nobody was hurt, he shared his thoughts on the incident in a blog post. Altman argues that advancing everyone’s well-being is a moral obligation and that artificial intelligence will be the most effective tool for expanding human capability and opportunity that we have ever seen. He then goes on to say that people are right to worry about AI and that it will bring negative consequences, but that it should be democratized and remain adaptable. According to Altman, nobody yet fully understands the consequences of superintelligence, but they will be enormous.
He then reflects on his own personality, noting that he has made many mistakes during his time at OpenAI and that he is a flawed person in the middle of an extremely complex situation. Altman says there is a certain power to artificial general intelligence, AGI, meaning AI on the level of human intelligence, and that it affects people in strange ways. His personal lesson from the last few years, as well as his explanation for why there has been so much Shakespearean drama among companies in this sector, boils down to this: “Once you’ve seen AGI, you can never unsee it.”
He even compares it to the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings, the object Sauron uses to dominate others and which corrupts most of those who come into contact with it. It is an interesting analogy from someone trying to sell the benefits of AGI, although Altman quickly points out that it is not like the ring itself, but rather a useful summary of the argument over who should control AGI, if anyone. He believes there is a real “ring of power” dynamic to it and that it makes people do crazy things. He does not mean AGI itself is the ring, but rather the totalitarian philosophy of “I am the one who controls AGI.” According to Altman, the solution is simply to share the ring – an AGI hula hoop, as it were. He argues that individual empowerment and democratic systems should be used to distribute responsibility and ownership. People want a voice and want to be stakeholders, he says, but they do not want to hoard all the power themselves. He adds that we need to cool down the rhetoric and tactics and try to cause fewer explosions in fewer homes, both figuratively and literally.
According to the San Francisco Police Department, investigators still do not know why the person who allegedly threw an incendiary device at Altman’s house decided to do so. A 20-year-old man currently believed to be responsible has been arrested, and the investigation is ongoing.
Source: PCGamer, Sam Altman
