As the AI boom continues to take over both the tech industry and the news cycle, there’s one thing that’s for sure: it’s scaring a lot of people.
AI is a technically complex topic that can be difficult to explain to the average person, but there’s one sentiment that isn’t hard to explain at all: the concept that AI might take your job.
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So rather than try to understand AI’s capabilities, or why every major tech company from Meta to Google to Nvidia is pouring billions of dollars into developing it, most people are going to zero in on the part that’s personally applicable to them.
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Some voices in the tech space have tried to present an opposite take on the whole “AI making you jobless” rhetoric. Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood said in a recent tweet, “History shows that new technologies create many more jobs than they displace. We do not think that this time will be different.”
OpenAI’s Sam Altman is easily the AI movement’s biggest figurehead, thanks to ChatGPT’s runaway success. The company hit three million paid ChatGPT subscribers as of June.
This proves that people are flocking to it in droves — and away from search engines. Research firm Gartner has even predicted that by 2026, traditional search engine volume will drop 25%.
Now Altman has penned a blog post addressing the topic of AI and how it’s changing our world. It’s a refreshing take that, for once, will give you some hope about the future of your career.
Altman shares his vision of what we can expect in the next decade.
Image source: Getty/TheStreet
The future will be ‘wildly different’
Altman’s post emphasizes that compared to any time that has come before, the 2030s can be described with two powerful words: “wildly different.”
Altman offers a reality check, saying, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far, it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.”
“We do not know how far beyond human-level intelligence we can go, but we are about to find out,” he continued.
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The OpenAI CEO doesn’t hesitate to say that his company has recently built systems that are “smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them.”
Altman also says ChatGPT is “already more powerful than any human who has ever lived,” a phrase that may feel threatening to some, considering that LLMs are not human to begin with.
But Altman sees even more ahead, predicting that AI will significantly mold our future.Â
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“In the 2030s, intelligence and energy — ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen —are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else.”
Altman addresses the jobs issue
Altman also acknowledged that, yes, many jobs will go away as AI continues to evolve, but that won’t be the end of the story.
“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,” he says.
“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.”
Altman also points out a key asset of humanity that AI cannot duplicate, saying, “People have a long-term important and curious advantage over AI: we are hard-wired to care about other people and what they think and do, and we don’t care very much about machines.”
