Why Sam Should Go to Space
In a recent essay on his personal blog, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, suggests that we might be getting close to superintelligence. The scary stuff, basically. This is an incredibly important issue, but as I was reading through his recap, here’s another sentence that struck me:
“These years have been the most rewarding, fun, best, interesting, exhausting, stressful, and — particularly for the last two — unpleasant years of my life so far.”
Wait — is Sam unhappy? His life certainly looks nice. When I listened to him speak at a conference in the early days of ChatGPT, he was streaming in from an undisclosed location, and although the words coming out of his mouth were interesting, I couldn’t help studying the beautifully landscaped garden in the courtyard behind him. The tall ceilings and tall windows were gorgeous, too. If I had an office like that, I’d launch so, so many amazing fake companies.
What’s wrong with Sam? I think he’s doing too much.
Not just Sam, either. All the AI giants are pushing out too many products and too many updates too quickly. Most of us normal humans haven’t even made sense of ChatGPT. I was still trying to get my head around the sudden appearance of a weirdly intelligent chatbot when it merged with image generation and then started doing something that sure seems like thinking.
This pace feels a little like the Wright Brothers flying their airplane in 1903, then launching a space program in 1904 . . . and succeeding.
Now that we've conquered these gentle hills, Orville, we’re going to Mars!
Many businesses still haven’t figured out how to use these tools — or whether they should — and the news about the latest release of the greatest model and how it outperformed every other tool on benchmark XYZ is mind-numbing. AI people, could you just slow down a little, and let us get used to this whole flying thing, before you send us all to Mars without oxygen?
No. Obviously not. There’s too much money on the table.
So I have another solution. Both to Sam’s apparent unhappiness and the fact that the rest of us everyday working humans need a little time to adjust to this alien technology. We should send Sam, Elon, Jeff, Mark and the rest to space.
There’s already some buzz about building orbiting data centers to train AI, so let’s put the AI leaders up there as well. The guys from Acquired could go and do a live show. Kara Swisher could visit and report a column. Bezos would probably go for it. He’s already turning into Lex Luthor.
And you’d have to send Elon because if you didn't put him up there, he’d send rockets to launch the other technocrats into the sun so he could be the unquestioned leader.
Plus, look at Sam! He seems happier, right?
Why send them to space? Perspective.
We all need a little perspective now and then. We need to get altitude on our lives to make sense of what’s happening and what we’re doing. These technocrats just need more altitude than the rest of us. Given that they’re directing or funding the creation of something that could be really, really bad for humanity, I think a few months in space, looking back at this incredible planet of ours, might convince them to slow down a little, and let the world absorb this new technology.
Plus it would be a great reality show.
On Prime, obviously.
Thanks, as always, for reading! Please share this one if you enjoyed it, so I know how I’m doing.
That was really interesting!