Sam Altman Admits Humans Lack Clear Edge Over Approaching AI
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman concedes that general purpose cognition feels uniquely close to what makes us human. He suggests our main remaining role is simply making decisions because society forgives human errors more easily than computer mistakes.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman faces a tough question at the World Economic Forum in Davos as CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria asks what humans still excel at as artificial general intelligence approaches. Altman admits that general purpose cognition feels uniquely close to what humanity treasures about itself, and no one on the panel offers a convincing answer about our core competence.
Instead of claiming human superiority, Altman argues that people will simply continue to make decisions about what happens in the world. He points out that society easily forgives mistakes made by humans, such as taxi drivers, but shows zero tolerance for errors made by computers, like autonomous vehicles.
Fellow tech executive Marc Benioff adds to the sobering conversation by predicting that an AI digital moderator will soon run panels at Davos. The Salesforce CEO notes that this shift is entirely plausible since machine learning algorithms already prove better at understanding human preferences than even a person's spouse.