In Washington’s Hall of Fame, Open Chief Sam Altman warned of how total unemployment from AI and national security is being rewritten. Altman positions Openai not only as participants, but as the essential architect of our destiny.
Altman, who held the court at the Federal Reserve Conference of large banks, clearly stated that he believes AI will affect the way people make a living. He spoke about not only changing certain jobs, but also being completely erased.
“Again, I think some areas will be completely, completely gone,” he said. We pointed out the customer support industry as an example. “That’s the category I’m talking about. I know you’re talking to AI when you call customer support. That’s fine.”
He described this change as a real reality rather than a distant prediction. To Michelle Bowman of the Federal Reserve, he explained about his near-utopian interaction with AI agents.
“You call it one of these things, and AI answers. It’s like a very smart and capable person,” says Altman. “There is no phone tree. There is no forwarding. You can do everything that the customer support agent in that company can do. There is no mistake. It’s very fast.
However, Altman’s belief that AI causes total unemployment in several careers is not the only story spoken in the tech world. Others argue that the future is not about what AI does to us, nor about what we do with it. Manoj Chaudhary, CTO of integrated company Jitterbit, is paying attention.
“AI does not threaten employment, nor does it threaten unplanned developments. The real danger lies in using powerful tools without purpose or human judgment,” Chaudhary warned. He feels risky with a blind rush of technical solutions.
“Companies chasing fast efficiency risk discarding human insights that drive real value. As many people recognize, AI is not all treatments. It’s not enough when empathy and nuance are important. Without human-driven supervision, the consequences of AI misuse become ignorant.”
However, the scale of Altman’s vision for AI is far beyond call centres. According to him, transformation is already knocking on the door of our health care system. He claimed that his own creation was already a world-class physician.
“Today, ChatGpt is almost always like a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he argued. However, after defending AI as a great doctor, in a candid moment, he confessed that he didn’t trust it completely in his health.
“But people still go to doctors. I may not be the dinosaur here, but I don’t want to entrust my medical fate to chat with people who don’t have human doctors in the loop,” he admitted.
This tightrope walk and walk between promotion and precautions is happening at a new political stage. Under the Trump administration, conversations in Washington around AI have focused on the attention and regulations sought under President Biden to minimize the impact of unemployment and other things, and accelerate beyond China.
It is this high-stakes environment that Altman shared his deepest fear. He spoke of a sleepless night plagued by the idea that hostile countries think that AI is being used as a weapon to cripple the US financial system.
Altman also marveled at the power of voice cloning technology, but warned of ways it could be used for unstoppable scams, particularly as “there are still financial institutions accepting VoicePrints for authentication.”
His first major congressional testimony since he exploded on the global stage in 2023 is part of a clear strategy as he plans to open an Open Eye office in Washington next year.
Altman came to Washington with two messages that seemed to pull in opposite directions. The first is that his technology brings to an age of incredible progress. However, the second is that AI retains the potential for total destruction. It causes an increase in total unemployment and national security threats.
The ultimate goal is to convince the world that he and Opena can safely navigate the path between the two.
(Image credit: World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell by-nc-sa 2.0 license. Images are cropped.)
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