cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47387000
Sam Altman says OpenAI wants to sell intelligence like a utility
During a recent appearance at BlackRock in Washington, D.C., OpenAI’s Sam Altman, shared his vision for the future of AI. At one point saying, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.”
Altman was describing a world where AI becomes a foundational infrastructure, something woven into everyday life so deeply that consumers and businesses simply “plug into” it the same way they rely on electricity, Wi-Fi or running water.
It’s dystopian, but he’s not entirely wrong.
My teacher friends are trying to sound the alarm: Kids who can’t even process information written on the board in front of them, being passed through the grades without being able to read, or can’t focus on anything for more than 60 seconds.
And the common refrain is: “If AI can do this for me why do I need to learn it at all?”
These modern tech products are designed to damage cognitive ability and replace it.
Not only replace it. They make it so that people are dependent on it. So much that they can’t form any original thought, because doing so would allow them some degree of individuality, the power to separate themselves from the system. The AI Nazi techbros can’t have independent thought, individuality, or anything that would get in the way of their neverending quest to conform all thought and will to their own.
I think this is one of those cases where what seems like an overarching strategy is just an emerging result of a series of ad-hoc decisions.
I don’t think Altman and his ilk explicitly want to submit people to the system. I believe he genuinely just wants to extort profits with reckless disregard for side effects. The dependency would be intentional, but his motive would be money.
He probably isn’t fundamentally opposed to individual thought either. It’s just that he can’t profit from it. He’d be happy to have you rent freedom from him if he found a way to control it. Individuality Deluxe - now available as family bundle for the low price of two median child salaries!
Of course, he’d also sell the reigns of his machine to governments, again for money. An authoritarian government is more likely to buy it and help expand his market reach (because they also want that dependency on something they control), so he will back any political movement that aligns with his ambition to make more money.
I don’t think he’s a Nazi because of any political convictions or ambitions. He’s a Nazi because the profit estimates look good.