OpenAI CEO on Artificial Intelligence Changing Society

the jogan experience and wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing I think it's going to be a great thing but I think it's not going to be all a great thing and that that is where I think that's where all of the complexity comes in for people it's not this like clean story of we're going to do this and it's all going to be great it's we're going to do this it's going to be net great but it's going to be like a technological Revolution it's going

to be a societal Revolution and those always come with change and even if it's like net wonderful you know there's things we're going to lose along the way some kinds of jobs some kind parts of our way of life some parts of the way we live are going to change or go away and no matter how tremendous the upside is there and and I believe it will be tremendously good you know there's a lot of stuff we got to navigate through to make sure um that's that's a complicated thing for for anyone to wrap their

heads around and there's you know deep and super understandable emotions around that that's a very honest answer that it's not all going to be good but it seems inevitable at this point it's yeah I mean it's definitely inevitable my my view of the world you know when you're like a kid in school you learn about this technological Revolution and then that one and then that one and my view of the world now sort of looking backwards and forwards is that this is like one long technological Revolution and we had sure like first we had to

figure out agriculture so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines then we got this Industrial Revolution and that made us learn about a lot of stuff a lot of other scientific discovery too let us do the computer Revolution and that's now letting us as we scale up to these massive systems do the AI Revolution but it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it and I think it's the most exciting story of all time I think it's how we get to

this world of abundance and although you know although we do have these things to navigate and there there will be these downsides if if you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives if we can get to a world uh where the the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that uh the cost dramatically Falls the abundance goes ways up goes way up I think we'll do the same thing with energy and I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want so

if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence that will transform people's lives largely for the better and I think it's going to in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life we'd say well there there's some great things but they didn't have this they didn't have that can you believe they didn't have modern medicine that's what people are going to look back at us like but in 50 years when you think about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace when you

think about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers people that work in Factory assembly lines what if anything what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides of those jobs being eliminated by AI so I'll talk about some general thoughts but I I find making very specific predictions difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even my own intuitions or certainly my own intuitions can we maybe we should stop there and back up a little what we what were your initial thoughts if you had asked me 10 years ago I

would have said first AI is going to come for bluecollar labor basically it's going to drive trucks and do factory work and you know it'll handle heavy machinery then maybe after that it'll do like some kinds of cognitive Labor uh kind of you know but not it won't be off doing what I think of personally as the really hard stuff it won't be off proving new mathematical theorems won't be off you know discovering new science um won't be offw writing code and then eventually maybe but maybe last of all maybe never because human creativity is

this magic special special thing last of all it'll come for the creative jobs that's what I would have said now a it looks to me like and for a while AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs it can do these little pieces super well but sometimes it goes off the rails uh it can't keep like very long coherence so people are instead just able to do their existing jobs way more productively um but you really still need the human there today and then B it's going the exactly the other direction could do

the Creative work first stuff like coding second they can do things like other kinds of cognitive labor third and we're the furthest away from like humanoid robots H so back to the initial question if we do have something that completely eliminates uh Factory workers completely eliminates truck drivers delivery drivers things on those lines that creates this massive vacuum in our society so I think there's things that we're going to do that are good to do but not sufficient so I think at some point we will do something like a Ubi or some other kind of

like very long-term unemployment insurance something but we'll have some way of giving people like redistributing money in society a as a cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs but and I maybe I should touch on that I I'm not a Believer at all that there won't be lots of new jobs I I think human creativity desire for status wanting different ways to compete invent new things feel part of a community feel valued uh that's not going to go anywhere people have worried about that forever what happens is we get better tools and

we just invent new things and more amazing things to do and there's a big universe out there and and I think I mean that like literally uh in that there's like Space is really big but also there's just so much stuff we can all do if we do get to this world of abundant intelligence where you can sort of just think of a new idea and it it gets created but but again that doesn't to the point we started with that that that doesn't provide like great soless to people who are losing their jobs today

so saying there's going to be this great indefinite stuff in the future people are like what are we doing today so you know we I think we will as a society do things like Ubi and other ways of redistribution but I don't think that gets at the core of what people want I think what people want is like agency self determination the ability to play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society the ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them and also I think a lot of people work

jobs they hate and I think there's we as a society are always a little bit confused about whether we want to work more or work less but but somehow that we all get to do something something meaningful and we all get to play our role in driving the future forward that's really important and what I hope is as those truck driving Long Haul truck driving jobs go away which you know people have been wrong about predicting how fast that's going to happen but it's going to happen um we figure out not just a way to

solve the economic problem by like giving people the equivalent of money every month but that there's a way that and and we have a lot of ideas about this there's a way that we like share ownership and decision- making over the future um I thing I say a lot about AGI is that everyone everyone realizes we're going to have to share the benefits of that but we also have to share like the decision making over it and access to the system itself like I'd be more excited about a world where we say rather than give

everybody on earth like one eight billionth of the AGI money which we should do that too we say you get like eight billionth of a 1 18 billionth slice of the system you can sell it to somebody else you can sell it to a company you can pull it with other people you can use it for whatever creative Pursuit you want you can use it to figure out how to start some new business um and with that you get sort of like a voting right over how this is all going to be used and so

the better the AGI gets the more your little one 18 billionth ownership is is worth to you we were joking around the other day on the podcast where I was saying that what we need is an AI government that we we should have ai president and have ai run make all the decisions yeah have something that's completely unbiased absolutely rational has the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history at its disposal including all knowledge of psychology and psychological study including Ubi because that comes with a host of you know pitfalls and and and issues that

people have with it so I'll say something there um I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and reliable enough that you that any of us would want that but I'll tell you something I love about that someday let's say that thing gets built the fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth understand their exact preferences at a very deep level you know how they think about this issue and that one and how they balance the trade-offs and what they want and then understand all

of that and and like collect itively optimize optimized for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the US that's awesome as long as it's not co-opted right our government currently is co-opted that's for sure we we know for sure that our government is heavily influenced by special interests if we could have an artificial intelligence government that has no influence nothing has influence on it what a fascinating idea it's possible and I think it might be the only way where you're going to get completely objective the absolute most intelligent decision for virtually every problem

every dilemma that we Face currently in society would you truly be comfortable handing over like final decision making and say all right AI you got it from here no but I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody you know I mean I don't I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act I'm uncomfortable with you know many decisions that that are being made it's just there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made are not being made in the best interest of the overall well of the people it's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic

corporations that have donated to what whatever the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical industrial complex and and then so just the money it's that's really what we know today that money has a massive influence on on our society and the choices that get made and the overall good or bad for the population yeah I I have no disagreement at all that the current system is super broken not working for people super corrup corrupt and for sure like unbelievably run by money yeah a and I think there is a way to do a better job than that with

AI to in some way but and this might just be like a factor of sitting with the systems all day and watching all of the ways they fail we got a long way to go a long way to go I'm sure but when you think of AGI when you think of the possible future like where it goes to do you ever extrapolate do you do you ever like sit and pause and say well if this if this becomes sensient and it has the ability to make better versions of itself how long before we're literally dealing

with a God so the way that I think about this is it used to be that like AGI was this very binary moment it was before and after and I think I totally wrong about that and the right way to think about it is this Contin Continuum of intelligence this smooth exponential curve back all the way to that sort of smooth curve curve of technological Revolution the the amount of compute power we can put into the system the scientific ideas about how to make it more efficient and smarter to give it the ability to do

reasoning to think about how to improve itself that will all come but my my model for a long time I I think if you look at the world of AGI thinkers there's uh there's sort of two particularly around the safety issues you're talking about there's two axes that matter there's the short what called short timelines or long timelines you know to the first Milestone of AGI whatever that's going to be is that going to happen in a few years a few decades maybe even longer although at this point I think most people are a few

years or few decades and then there's takeoff speed once we get there from there to that point you were talking about where it's capable of the rapid self-improvement um is that a slow or a fast process the the world that I think we're heading that we're in and also the world that I think is the most controllable and the safest is the short timelines and slow takeoff quadrant and I think we're going to have you know there were a lot of very smart people for a while who were like the thing you were just talking

about happens in a day or three days and I don't that doesn't seem likely to me given the shape of the technology as we understand it now now even if that happens in a decade or three decades it's still like the blink of an eye from a historical perspective and there are going to be some real challenges to getting that right and the decisions we make the the sort of safety system and the and the checks that the world puts in place how we think about global regulation or rules of the road from a safety

perspective for those projects it's super important because you can imagine many things going horribly wrong but I've been I feel cheerful about the progress the world is making towards taking this seriously and uh you know it reminds me of what I've read about the conversations that the world had right around the development of nuclear weapons