AI's big messaging pivot

Something big happened in the world of AI the other day: Sam Altman, founder and CEO of OpenAI, and probably the person who’s most commonly regarded as the face of the industry, declared that the purpose of AI is not to take people’s jobs:And he recently called AI CEOs “tone-deaf” for declaring that AI is going to take people’s jobs:In fact, this shift represents more evolution than revolution. Years ago, Altman did seem to generally agree with the folk consensus that AI’s purpose is to make most or all humans obsolete; in 2014 he warned that we could be faced with “a new idle class”, and explored the idea of Universal Basic Income as a remedy. In 2021 he wrote that “The price of many kinds of labor…will fall toward zero.” But in recent years, Altman has consistently stated that although AI will destroy many occupations, it will create new tasks for humans to do. In 2024 he wrote that “I have no fear that we’ll run out of things to do (even if they don’t look like “real jobs” to us…