I will accept the "bad things" if and only when Sam Altman exposes himself to those bad things first e.g., living next door to an AI data center, being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately.
Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.
I don’t think he needs or wants any more money. These guys already have so much moolah that it is virtually meaningless to them. They want power. Remember when Zuck tried to run for president?
It is described in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book. According to it, Zuck even battled to change the stock structure in order to take 2-year hiatus from CEO duties:
…without losing control of the company if his absence is “in connection with his serving in a government position or office.” I assume the two years would cover the period Mark would be taking on the—presumably time-consuming—endeavor of campaigning to be president of the United States.
Especially in a world that's been programmed to believe wholeheartedly that money is literally the most important thing in the entire universe, and these people who worship it as a god will never be satisfied with any amount of money; even when the last human alive owns all of it, they'll still want more. It's a form of mass-insanity. The Cult of Money.
The data center thing is a complete red herring. Of course you wouldn't want a data center literally next to your house. Neither would you want to live next to a manufacturing plant making automobiles or batteries or solar panels. This doesn't mean we should want to outlaw manufacturing plants.
The complaints about water consumption are even worse. Nationally, the amount of water consumed by golf courses is orders of magnitude larger than the water consumed by data centers.
I say this not to defend OpenAI or Sam Altman. I say this because I want the focus to be on the real dangers posed by AI:
* Power consumption (mitigated by building more power generation capacity, but this is a real impact, and there are legitimate environmental concerns)
* The disruption AI will have on people's careers and livelihoods
* The concentration of political power in the hands of a small cadre of billionaires
* The potential for truly dangerous destructive power if used by malicious groups - eg. bio-terrorism.
We should be concerned about the "bad things" posed by AI. A data center next to your house is very much a local issue, not a national issue.
> being subjected to 24/7 surveillance, and having everything he says and does scrutinized for illegal activity, ticketing and jailing him appropriately
That thing has been rising for decades - why should Sam Altman now become the culprit and scapegoat?
That of surveillance and the use of pattern matching is a legislative matter (not e.g. a matter of regulating RnD, which I understand as more relevant to this submission).
I think that there is something to what you are saying, but I don't think it is that simple. A new technology could change things by making previous abuses much more common. To give an extreme example, mass murder has always been possible; however, we restrict nuclear weapons because they make it so much more easy and therefore so much more ripe for abuse.
Similarly, there is a big difference between the police keeping a physical record book of mugshots, the police employing experts to maintain a database, and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth surveilance.
> and AI allowing nearly anyone to perform in depth survei[l]lance
Which, as I have said:
-- is a field that has been developed for many decades - automated processing is classical AI. Why should it be now attributed to Sam Altman, whose company mainly does LLMs. If Sam Altman shouts "little risks much reaps", I would not think as surveillance as the first relevant rebuttal.
-- if the peoples do not want surveillance (what awakened them, a large number of places that were supposed to be civilized are cashless societies now), that would be a political matter, from which consequential legislation should be the goal.
Until that happens, no. Sam Altman is here telling us to accept the cruelty of his actions and his company so that he can be more wealthy.