Sam Altman is not incentivised to be a doom-monger.
Maybe that’s why the OpenAI CEO’s recent blog post, The Gentle Singularity, casually noted that “we are past the event horizon” (the point of no return) but, don’t worry: everything’s going to be fine and super-intelligent machines aren’t going to rule the world for at least another 18 months.
“2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights,” he wrote. “2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.”
He did, however, acknowledge that there may be a little turbulence as we hurtle into the unknown. “There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away,” he wrote. “But on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly [UNCLEAR WETHER HE MEANT TO SAY “I”].
If that’s not the consolation you were looking for, you might want to steer clear of the recent speech by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. In his honorary doctorate address at the University of Toronto this week, he said that an unstoppable AI future is all but inevitable. Graduates were no doubt thrilled to be told: “Anything which I can learn, anything which any one of you can learn, the AI could do as well.” And that, “whether you like it or not, your life is going to be affected by AI to a great extent.”
How well you navigate the associated rate of technological progress that will, according to Altman “keep expanding”, may depend on the depth of your pockets (and indeed your underground shelters). “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever told his team in 2023, according to a story in The Atlantic last month.
“Of course,” he added, “it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker.” So, be in no doubt, you’re still very much the master of your own destiny.
The next few years are going to be wild and Altman’s blog post sign-off; “May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence” sounds more hopeful than reassuring.
My advice? Start digging.
No, honestly, embrace the change as much as you can. Adapt and evolve. Or, if you reject it, do it for very good and specific reasons. There will be an anti-AI countermovement, where people embrace carbon-based activity and interaction and there will be business opportunities in low- or no-tech experiences. You may just need to rely on an AI ad platform to get your brand in front of the target audience.
As for me, I’m taking comfort in Altman’s observation that people like me are no longer the lowest of the low in Silicon Valley’s eyes.
“For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of “the idea guys”; people who had an idea and were looking for a team to build it,” he wrote. “It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun.”
Photography Adam Jicha
