A quick response to Altman’s “The Intelligence Age”
Ok, where do we even begin? Sam Altman’s blog post “The Intelligence Age” reads like a utopian fairy tale, with a sprinkle of techno-optimism so thick it’s drowning in its own naivety. Here are some thoughts on this piece of magical thinking, point by point:
“In the next couple of decades, we will be able to do things that would have seemed like magic to our grandparents.”
Yep, you mean like flying cars, moon colonies, and curing every disease? We’ve been hearing this song since at least the 1950s, yet we’re getting stuck in the same traffic on pretty much the same roads, and hospitals are still overflowing with patients. Sure, technology progresses, but it’s never the magic wand this kind of pie-in-the-sky rhetoric makes it out to be.
“People have become dramatically more capable over time…”
Dramatically more capable at what, exactly? Staring at screens for 12 hours a day and having shorter attention spans? We’re also “dramatically more capable” of screwing up the planet faster than any previous generation. Technology may have made our lives easier in some ways, but it’s also made us more complacent and dependent on it. If society’s smarter, it’s hiding it well.
“In an important sense, society itself is a form of advanced intelligence.”
Sure, if you define “advanced intelligence” as a chaotic mess of conflicting interests, greed, and systemic inequalities. And the idea that society’s infrastructure is inherently “smarter” than any one of us? Tell that to the politicians who can’t even pass basic climate legislation. Society’s collective “intelligence” is more like an overcooked bowl of spaghetti — tangled, and impossible to follow.
“AI will give people tools to solve hard problems…”
Ah yes, technology as the magic cure for everything. Let’s conveniently forget about AI’s track record so far: amplifying biases, producing gibberish answers, and threatening job security. AI doesn’t “solve” problems; it complicates them in new, more opaque ways. And let’s not get started on “solving hard problems” when most of the “solutions” today boil down to more efficient advertising algorithms. “Give people tools” is often short for “allowing tech giants to use people’s data to get rich”.
“Eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas…”
Yeah, because what everyone needs is a bunch of glorified chatbots telling us what we should already know or giving us another 300 recipes for avocado toast. And the notion that AI will provide personalized instruction or healthcare? We can’t even get past insurance companies refusing claims for basic procedures. This rosy picture of ubiquitous AI helpers conveniently skips over the massive infrastructure, privacy, and ethical challenges in making any of that a reality.
“With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity…”
Shared prosperity? Please return to the universe where most of us (i.e. the non-billionaires) live. This sounds like the same old trickle-down rhetoric dressed up in tech jargon. So far, “prosperity” from tech advancements has meant more wealth for the top 1%, more gig work for everyone else, and more mental health issues for all. The notion that AI is going to miraculously lift everyone into some idyllic state of prosperity ignores basic economics and human nature.
“Humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data…”
Sure, deep learning is great — if you’re a tech company trying to sell more ads. But let’s not pretend it’s some kind of universal panacea. It’s heavily dependent on data, and surprise, surprise — not all data is created equal. If you’re feeding your “universal” algorithm biased, garbage data, guess what you’re going to get? Biased, garbage outcomes. Furthermore, where does the data come from? Human creators (more often than not, without consent nor compensation). That’s not a sound foundation to build distributed wealth for all on. And how is the data curated and moderated? Human labor (often in underpaid click farms in the Global South).
“It’s a mistake to get distracted by any particular challenge…”
Wow, let’s just hand-wave away every single real-world problem! Bias? Misinformation? Surveillance? Labor disruptions? Let’s not get “distracted” by such trivialities. Deep learning will fix it all if we just pour enough compute and energy into it. This kind of techno-deterministic thinking is precisely what lands us in messes like unchecked social media influence and runaway misinformation.
“AI will soon serve as autonomous personal assistants who carry out specific tasks…”
Great, so instead of being controlled by clueless middle managers, we’ll be bossed around by machines. And AI coordinating medical care? Sure, let’s hand over our healthcare to algorithms that’ll no doubt be owned by the same profit-driven companies that give us price-gouging pharmaceuticals.
“AI systems are going to get so good that they help us make better next-generation systems…”
The AI will build the next AI. And the AI after that. Until we get this ever-looping chain of AI’s creating AI’s while humans become even more irrelevant and bewildered. Sam Altman knows about model collapse. Feeding more AI-generated content to the next round of model training is not without risks.
“We can do quite a lot…”
Talk about setting the bar low. We can do a lot, but will we do the right things? History tells us that we won’t. Instead of “fixing the climate,” we’ll be too busy building yet another tech solution that conveniently skirts around the root causes — like overconsumption and an unsustainable economic model. But you’re in good company, Sam: Eric Schmidt just proposed to abandon climate targets and “let AI figure it out” instead.
“If a lamplighter could see the world today, he would think the prosperity all around him was unimaginable.”
This is the old “look how far we’ve come” argument. Newsflash: prosperity is relative. If all you’re doing is replacing lamplighters with software engineers and call center employees with chatbots, you’re not solving the fundamental problem — you’re just shifting misery around. If we keep glorifying technological advancements without scrutinizing their societal impacts, future generations will look back at us as the ones who laid the foundation for a dystopian nightmare.
No, Sam, I’m not buying this at all. This kind of starry-eyed, borderline delusional optimism ignores countless practical, ethical, and societal concerns. We’d be far better served addressing real issues instead of daydreaming about AI utopias that sound more like tech marketing hype than a genuine blueprint for a better future.
