Sam Altman outlines two biggest threats from AI

Sam Altman has written something down, and the world is expected to be grateful. Per Newsweek, he warns that humanity could 'lose control of the future to AI' — a threat identified by the man running the company building the thing, which is roughly the arsonist filing a thoughtful report on fire safety. The second great threat is American competitive pressure, which apparently must never be allowed to justify recklessness. And OpenAI is, we are assured, 'unapologetically on Team Humanity' — the most reassuring slogan ever printed by an outfit that has conspicuously declined to name the other team.

The proposed remedy, per the excerpt, is a federal framework setting consistent safety requirements — consistent being the magic word, because fifty state legislatures asking awkward questions is precisely the inconsistency no frontier lab should be expected to endure. It is a familiar manoeuvre: draft the rules you would like to be governed by, then act wounded when elected officials draft their own. Those with long memories will recall the last time Altman explained a scheduling decision on safety grounds, when an IPO became 'ill-advised' at precisely the moment it became awkward. Standards, like taxis, tend to arrive exactly when convenient.

'No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness' is a genuinely good sentence, and it belongs in a glass case beside other fine sentences written by people who did the opposite. The difficulty with 'Team Humanity' as a badge is that it is unfalsifiable; nobody has ever stood up and declared themselves on Team Slightly Fewer Humans. Altman is that rare executive who keeps telling us exactly what losing control of the future looks like, and he does it while walking briskly towards it, holding the door open, and insisting the whole time that he is holding it for us.