Robot will replace teachers and doctors, says Sam Altman – 09/03/2023 – Tech

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he believes that artificial general intelligence, capable of surpassing humans in cognitive ability, will revolutionize society. The replacement of men by computers would make it possible to lower the cost of education and health services, which are increasingly expensive in the United States, Brazil and other countries.

Altman leads the startup that developed ChatGPT, a chatbot that answers a variety of questions and already has more than 100 million users. Artificial intelligence would be responsible for the next big development boom, according to this Silicon Valley personality. Such a move would require a drastic political response to distribute wealth.

The executive raises these arguments in the manifesto Moore’s Law for Everything (Moore’s Law for Everything, in free translation), published in 2021, before the fuss of the intelligent robot. This Silicon Valley axiom predicts that technological advancement continually makes products cheaper — the premise is that every two years chips double their power while remaining at the same price.

“Over the past 20 years, prices in the United States for televisions, computers and entertainment have gone down. But other costs for housing, healthcare and higher education have gone up significantly,” writes Altman.

The housing solution would come with construction robots, manufactured by other robots, according to the CEO of OpenAi. For education, teaching artificial intelligences in place of high-paying university professors. In health, automated doctors allowed savings. The secret would be to scale the work done exclusively by humans today.

According to Altman, it is possible to achieve quality of life by acquiring more money or by lowering prices. “Wealth is purchasing power: how much we can buy with the resources we have at hand.”

The executive himself recognizes, however, that the replacement of intellectual labor by machines would be a new source of unemployment. Part of this problem would be overcome with new jobs — “humanity always creates new professions”.

For the CEO of OpenAI, the productivity gained from artificial intelligence systems would reduce the workload and guarantee more creative time for people. The economist John Maynard Keynes had estimated, in 1930, that the man of the 21st century would work 15 hours a week, which is true for very few.

Governments need to help with public policy, as Altman reasoned: they should shift the focus from income taxation to taxes on assets such as stocks and land. This would allow redistributing capital. Thus, any citizen would have the ability to capitalize. The inspiration comes from the success of the land tax, proposed by the American economist Henry George.

The two main sources of wealth would be the shares of companies, especially those in artificial intelligence, and land ownership.

Questioned by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, in a podcast recorded in 2021, about which governance would allow so many changes in the short term, Altman replied that it would be necessary to think about a global democratic system. “We need to figure out how to do this soon. There are many reasons to be pessimistic.”

Altman still agreed with Ezra Klein that it would be a bad idea to have radical leaders like former US President Donald Trump or authoritarians like Chinese dictator Xi Jinping in charge of general artificial intelligence systems. Right before the interview, OpenAI had released access to GPT-3, the language generator behind ChatGPT.

Based on the success of the computer industry, the text also disregards the material resources needed to build communication infrastructure and machine processing.

Transparency and accountability across the AI ​​supply chain, from mining to running the algorithm, is a key step in employing this technology responsibly, according to Oxford researcher Callum Cant. He leads the Fair Work for AI project, which consults for big techs.

Science historian Pedro Silveira, from UFRGS (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul), says that the absence of mentions of the impact of human activity on Earth may be related to faith in geoengineering —technologies to compensate for climate change.

Altman, in fact, spends to live in adverse futures. In 2018, he invested $10,000 to reserve the service of startup Nectome, which promises to scan the brain to preserve it in computers.

Silveira also criticizes the thesis that all social organization develops from an economic niche, such as artificial intelligence. “Decisions would be concentrated in the hands of North Americans, mostly white, residents of California, with passage through Stanford University. Social diversity is very small”.