Kissing the ring of Sam Altman

A few months back, Tech Twitter fell over itself lobbying to bring Sam Altman back as Open AI CEO.

Public protestations were everywhere.

“Bring Sam back at once!”

“The Board doesn’t know what it’s doing!”

“We must have AGI quickly!”

To me, all of this seemed nuts.

I’m no luddite, but the risks of AGI are so vast (and so unknowable at the same) that a careful approach seems clearly warranted.

Let’s think about it. There are two bad scenarios for AGI we should worry about:

• AGI is friendly but is massively disruptive because it takes all the jobs too quickly
• AGI is not friendly and it’s Armageddon

No one can honestly assign probabilities for these outcomes with certainty.

I can hear the AGI accelerationists now:

“The history of technology has always been short-term disruption but long-term empowerment for humans.”

Sure.

But one must admit, the scale of innovation promised by AGI is truly unprecedented. The complete automation of human knowledge. Who knows what that even means.

In this way, the argument that “history shows all tech breakthroughs have been good” doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful with AGI.

Patterns repeat … until they don’t. This could be the time a tech breakthrough is bad.

In this way, if AGI truly works, and if it is as disruptive to the knowledge economy as it portends to be …

All the pleadings to bring Sam Altman back will:

AT BEST look like: tech people naively lowering themselves to “kiss the ring”

AT WORST look like: tech people loading the gun for their eventual suicide

This sounds dramatic. But, does it go too far?

I hope so.

PS – I attempted to generate an image for this article using ChatGPT. I'm not sure whether to be heartened or worried by the response. All hail the king!