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Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.

He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 

His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”

Most of the measurable and qualitative improvements in today’s large language model AIs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini—including their talents for writing and analysis—come down to shoving ever more data into them. 

AI could become a commodity

To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to “synthetic data,” which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models,

College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic.

While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities

They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.

The futurist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.

He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.

He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.

American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence (AI). His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer

no longer seem so wacky.

Your 2029 and 2045 projections haven’t changed…I have stayed consistent. So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – which is a little bit different. Human-level intelligence generally means AI that has reached the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. (There may be a few years of transition beyond 2029 where AI has not surpassed the top humans in a few key skills like writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though it will.) AGI means AI that can do everything that any human can do, but to a superior level. AGI sounds more difficult, but it’s coming at the same time.

while older generations have always looked down on younger kids or talked about things “back in their day,” she and other teens believe older people are actively hurting young people

“Everybody in Gen Z is affected by the choices of the boomers, that they made and are still making,” she said. “Those choices are hurting us and our future. Everyone in my generation can relate to that experience and we’re all really frustrated by it.”

“Essentials are more expensive than ever before, we pay 50 percent of our income to rent, no one has health insurance,”

President Barack Obama put the American people on notice Tuesday night that a dark future awaited U.S. democracy if they didn't begin to come together rather than retreat into ethnic or religious corners.

"I remember thinking it's kind of a dreadful prediction for our future," Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told HuffPost. "He was very optimistic about America, but then he laid out a very almost apocalyptic future."

"Those with money and power will gain greater control over the decisions that could send a young soldier to war, or allow another economic disaster, or roll back the equal rights and voting rights that generations of Americans have fought, even died, to secure," he added. "

When it comes to the future, Elon Musk’s best-case scenario for humanity sounds a lot like Sci-Fi Socialism.

“We will be in an age of abundance,” Musk said this month.

Sunak said he believes the act of work gives meaning, and had some concerns about Musk’s prediction. “I think work is a good thing, it gives people purpose in their lives,” Sunak told Musk. “And if you then remove a large chunk of that, what does that mean?”

these fears can no longer be confined to a fanatical fringe of gun-toting survivalists. The relentless onslaught of earthshaking crises, unfolding against the backdrop of flash floods and forest fires, has steadily pushed apocalyptic sentiment into the mainstream. When even the head of the United Nations warns that rising sea levels could unleash “a mass exodus on a biblical scale,” it is hard to remain sanguine about the state of the world. One survey found that over half of young adults now believe that “humanity is doomed” and “the future is frightening.”

At the same time, recent years have also seen the resurgence of a very different kind of narrative. Exemplified by a slew of best-selling books and viral TED talks, this view tends to downplay the challenges we face and instead insists on the inexorable march of human progress. If doomsday thinkers worry endlessly that things are about to get a lot worse, the prophets of progress maintain that things have only been getting better — and are likely to continue to do so in the future.

liminality originally referred to the sense of disorientation that arises during a rite of passage. In a traditional coming-of-age ritual, for instance, it marks the point at which the adolescent is no longer considered a child but is not yet recognized as an adult — betwixt and between

Fifty-seven percent of first-time voters, for instance, favor the chancellor, compared with 21 percent who prefer her Social Democratic rival, Martin Schulz, according to polling conducted by the Forsa Institute.

It also marks a change within Germany, where young voters typically have chosen the Social Democrats, and increasingly the Greens, in the postwar era. The first time Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union captured the largest share of the youth vote without the help of its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union, was in 2013. 

This generation came to political consciousness in the anxious aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but then watched their own country weather the financial crisis later that decade with relative ease. The European Union is suddenly no longer a given, and the United States, which steered Germany to political normalization, is looking inward under a president who promises “America first.”

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.

But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.

King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.