I thought this was telling from Keach Hagey’s The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future. On loc 194 she describes how Altman narrates the ‘process’ which he claims most of the OpenAI staff have been through, which he believes most of the human population will go through over the coming years:
“It wasn’t that long ago that almost no one believed in AGI,” he said. “And still, maybe most people don’t. But I think more people are willing to entertain it now. And I think a lot of the world is going through a process that most of the people here have gone through in previous years, which is, like, really grappling with this. And it is hard. It is exciting. It is terrifying. It’s a lot. And so I expect that process to unfold in the world over the next few years, and we’ll try to be a voice of some guidance along the way.”
I think we urgently need a sociology of this process which engages with it as an empirical phenomenon, rather than a front in the culture politics of technology. I’ve found a lot of journalistic coverage (of variable quality) but I need to search to see if there’s qualitative social science which I’ve yet to stumble across.
Mark Carrigan 