Sam Altman thinks the rest of us should learn to live with “bad things”. In a recent interview, the OpenAI chief executive said that hacks, scams and other harms were a price worth paying for the benefits of AI. His remarks come after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for AI companies to slow the development of the technology for the good of humanity. Men like Altman and Amodei have an incentive to talk up the risks of their models, as well as the benefits, because doing so feeds the AI hype machine. They want us to worry about the power of the technology itself so we don’t ask too many questions about the power of the companies that control it.
You don’t have to believe all the hype around AI to recognise that we are witnessing the emergence of a set of technologies that will transform capitalist production.