An iPhones of Artificial Intelligence doesn’t make sense
Sam Altman: The Intelligence Age is the Time of Abundance and What We Can Do About It (with a little help from the Playa)
We already knew where OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, stands on artificial intelligence vis-à-vis the human saga: It will be transformative, historic, and overwhelmingly beneficial. He has been consistent in everything he says. He felt it was necessary to share his opinions in a succinct post. He calls it the intelligence age and says it will be a time of abundance. He thinks that in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than they are now, if we share prosperity. It will happen slowly, but amazing triumphs like fixing the climate and establishing a space colony will eventually become commonplace.
Altman is a big fan of universal basic income, which he seems to think will cushion the blow of lost wages. Artificial intelligence might indeed generate the wealth to make such a plan feasible, but there’s little evidence that the people who amass fortunes—or even those who still eke out a modest living—will be inclined to embrace the concept. Some kind souls of the Playa seem to be up in arms about a proposal to tax capital gains only for people worth over $100 million, even though Altman had a great experience at Burning Man. It seems that people who become millionaires at artificial intelligence companies will use their money to fund leisure time for the poor. One of the US’s major political parties can’t stand Medicaid, so one can only imagine how populist demagogues will regard UBI.
We don’t have any idea what life will look like when most of our current jobs are gone. We heard a hint of his vision when he asked celebrities and tech leaders to share their songs on the streaming service. When explaining why he chose the tune “Underwater” by Rüfüs du Sol, Altman said it was a tribute to Burning Man, which he has attended several times. The festival, he says, “is part of what the post-AGI can look like, where people are just focused on doing stuff for each other, caring for each other and making incredible gifts to get each other.”
It has brought luxuries to everyday people that were once available to pharaohs and lords. He didn’t enjoy air-conditioning. Working-class people and even those on public assistance have TVs that are giant, delivery services that bring pumpkin lattes and pet food to their doors, and even dishwashers. But he isn’t acknowledging all of the story. Despite massive wealth, not everyone is thriving, and many are homeless or severely impoverished. To paraphrase William Gibson, paradise is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. That’s not because technology has failed—we have. I suspect the same will be true if AGI arrives, especially since so many jobs will be automated.
Source: No, Sam Altman, AI Won’t Solve All of Humanity’s Problems
The Strawberry Shortcut: Towards a Future Artificial Intelligence Device for Social Media and the Internet, Revisited by Sam Altman
It is clear no matter what you think of Sam Altman, that artificial general intelligence, which matches and surpasses human skills, is going to destroy the problems afflicting humanity and create a golden age. I suggest we name it The strawberry shortcut in honor of Openai’s breakthrough in artificial reasoning. Like the shortcake, the premise looks appetizing but is less substantial in the eating.
Maybe he published this to dispute a thought that suggests that large language models are nothing more than an illusion. Nuh-uh, he says. He said in an interview that Deep learning works, and that Openai’s GPT4o was stupid because it was delivered in a queue. “Once it can start to prove unproven mathematical theorems, do we really still want to debate: ‘Oh, but it’s just predicting the next token?'” he said.
LoveFrom declined to speak to this story about the LoveFrom and OpenAI news. is whether this future device is indeed one thing—to perhaps succeed in focus and execution where the Humane Ai Pin (4/10 from WIRED) and Rabbit R1 (3/10 from WIRED) A system of connected components has failed.
Not everyone thinks this is a good idea. “To me, AI on smartphones, especially in social media, are just a pathetic continuation of the same business model that has been exploitative to consumers for decades,” says industrial designer and Fuseproject founder Yves Béhar. “I find the efforts in using AI for our daily communications and social media just more of the same, as it only serves the attention economy, and isn’t contributing to society.”
The intentions are being revealed, at least by the information thus far. A computing experience using artificial intelligence is less socially disruptive than the iPhone according to LoveFrom. What form the device will take and when it will be released are still to be determined. The language points to a consumer mass-market device to, in theory, access ChatGPT and Dall-E, and rival the likes of just-announced Apple Intelligence features, which include typing requests, prompts to Siri, and pointing the camera for visual queries on the latest-gen iPhone 16.
The former Apple chief design officer is sometimes gently mocked for his obsession with seemingly small details, but when it comes to a potential mainstream human-AI interface, the man who has spent the past five years preoccupied with buttons—going so far as to create a five-volume history of garment fasteners—could be, in a somewhat inevitable way, the exact kind of person required to walk this particular tightrope of ethics and ambition.