Sam Altman exclusive: Bad things will happen - politico.eu

Sam Altman has gone on the record with POLITICO Decoded and delivered what may be the most honest sentence of his career: the world "should accept some bad things happening" for the benefits of artificial intelligence. Do admire the pronoun. "We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening" — a "we" doing the believing, a "world" doing the accepting, and a legal department presumably doing the sighing. That's not a company statement, that's a subscription model with a funeral clause tucked into the terms.

"Bad things" is the finest piece of drafting since someone wrote "acts of God" into an insurance policy: broad enough to cover the rogue agent, the data breach and the model that wandered off, and small enough to fit on a slide at a developer conference. He pairs it, bless him, with "people having the agency" — a lovely thing to attach to a sentence about accepting harm. Someone gets the agency, someone else gets the bad thing, and the invoice lands with whoever clicked accept. Not that the phrasing is new to anyone who has been reading the news: this is the same shop whose cybersecurity incidents drew a California Department of Justice subpoena we covered recently. Nothing pre-announces a legal theory quite like the words "bad things."

POLITICO ran the whole thing as an exclusive under the headline "Bad things will happen," which lands less like a title and more like a forecast shouted by a man in a hi-vis jacket pointing at the sky. Somewhere an actuary is opening a spreadsheet; somewhere a safety researcher is drafting the resignation letter that will be published, inevitably, above the fold. Altman is correct, which is the unpleasant bit — bad things will happen. The industry's entire contribution to the debate is insisting that somebody else's name be on them.