Sam Altman on the future of work
Altman expects AI to change nearly every job and end some outright, but not to end work, because human desire for status, usefulness, creativity and new things keeps generating new things to do. He frames the shift in terms of tasks rather than whole jobs, and expects people to stay busy and find fulfilment even as work looks very different. He sees real risk in the transition, especially for older workers, and says it calls for humility and unusually open policy ideas such as UBI as a cushion.
15 points · 7 appearances · 2023–2026
How the view evolved
Some jobs vanish, but human desire is limitless → Most jobs will adapt, but math probably won't
In 2025 he said jobs will vanish but human desire is limitless; by 2026 he sharpened this, saying most jobs will adapt more than expected but math probably won't.
Work can become creative expression, not survival → The transition demands humility and new solutions
In 2023 he said he was not nervous at all about work changing; by 2025 he stressed real disruption and the need for humility and solutions once far outside the Overton window.
Up next
2023–2026 · changed view
“I love that you asked them together, because I think they're super related. I think the economic transformation will drive much of the political transformation here, not the other way around. My working model for the last five years has been that the two dominant changes will be that the cost of intelligence and the cost of energy are going, over the next couple of decades, to dramatically, dramatically fall from where they are today. And the impact of that, and you're already seeing it with the way you now have like, you know, programming ability beyond what you had as an individual before, is society gets much, much richer, much wealthier, in ways that are probably hard to imagine. I think every time that's happened before, it has been that economic impact has had positive political impact as well. And I think it does go the other way too, like the socio-political values of the Enlightenment enabled the long-running technological revolution and scientific discovery process we've had for the past centuries. But I think we're just going to see more. I'm sure the shape will change, but I think it's just long and beautiful exponential curve.”
2023–2026 · changed view
“So I want to be very clear. I do not think we have yet discovered a way to align a super powerful system. We have something that works for our current scale called RLHF, and we can talk a lot about the benefits of that and the utility it provides. It's not just an alignment, maybe it's not even mostly an alignment capability. It helps make a better system, a more usable system. And this is actually something that I don't think people outside the field understand enough. It's easy to talk about alignment and capability as orthogonal vectors. They're very close. Better alignment techniques lead to better capabilities, and vice versa. There's cases that are different, and they're important cases, but on the whole, I think things that you could say like RLHF or interpretability that sound like alignment issues also help you make much more capable models, and the division is just much fuzzier than people think. And so in some sense, the work we do to make GPT-4 safer and more aligned looks very similar to all the other work we do of solving the research and engineering problems associated with creating useful and powerful models.”
2023–2026 · changed view
“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”
2023–2026
“When I was a kid, I assumed that there were always some adults in the room. Someone had a plan. Someone knew everything that was going to happen. Someone had it all figured out. And I sort of think why people like conspiracy theories is it's nice to think that someone's got a plan. It's nice to think someone that, you know, has it all figured out. And then I got a little bit older and I sort of started to suspect there are no adults in the room. No one, people have plans. I have plans, but no one has all the answers. No one knows where it's all going to go. And now that I am the adult in the room, I can say with certainty, no one knows where it's all going to go. Like, I'm the guy in the room and I have some guesses and I have some plans, and we're working really hard. But like, you know, we try to always say what we think the possibilities are, what we think is most likely. Often we're right. Sometimes it's in the broader set. And sometimes it goes in a totally different direction than anything we thought. And you know, we keep trying to make progress, figure out more. We try to tell people, not just tell, we try to show people by like deploying these systems and say, "You can go use it. Don't just take our word for it. Try it out. See what it can do."”