#2044 - Sam Altman

**Joe Rogan** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience. What's happening?

**Sam Altman** (0:14)
Not much, how are you?

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
Thanks for coming in here, appreciate it. So, what have you done?

**Sam Altman** (0:20)
Like ever?

**Joe Rogan** (0:21)
No, I mean, what have you done with AI? I mean, it's, one of the things about this is, I mean, I think everyone is fascinated by it. I mean, everyone is absolutely blown away at the current capability and wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing.

**Sam Altman** (0:45)
I think it's going to be a great thing, but I think it's not going to be all a great thing. And that is where, I think, that's where all of the complexity comes in for people. It's not this like clean story of we're going to do this and it's all going to be great. It's we're going to do this, it's going to be net great, but it's going to be like a technological revolution. It's going to be a societal revolution.
And those always come with change. And even if it's like net wonderful, there's things we're going to lose along the way. Some kinds of jobs, some kinds of parts of our way of life, some parts of the way we live are going to change or go away. And no matter how tremendous the upside is there, and I believe it will be tremendously good. There's a lot of stuff we got to navigate through to make sure.
That's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around, and there's deep and super understandable emotions around that.

**Joe Rogan** (1:39)
That's a very honest answer, that it's not all going to be good. But it seems inevitable at this point.

**Sam Altman** (1:48)
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely inevitable. My view of the world, you know, when you're like a kid in school, you learn about this technological revolution, and then that one, and then that one. And my view of the world now sort of looking backwards and forwards is that this is like one long technological revolution.
And we had, sure, like, first we had to figure out agriculture so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines. Then we got this industrial revolution, and that made us learn about a lot of stuff, a lot of other scientific discovery, too. Let us do the computer revolution, and that's now letting us, as we scale up to these massive systems, do the AI revolution. But it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it.
And I think it's the most exciting story of all time. I think it's how we get to this world of abundance. And although, you know, although we do have these things to navigate, there will be these downsides. If you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives, if we can get to a world where the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that, the cost dramatically falls, the abundance goes way up, I think we'll do the same thing with energy. And I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want. So if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence, that will transform people's lives largely for the better. And I think it's going to, in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life, we'd say, well, there's some great things, but they didn't have this, they didn't have that. Can you believe they didn't have modern medicine?
That's what people are going to look back at us like, but in 50 years.

**Joe Rogan** (3:26)
When you think about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace, when you think about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers, people that are working in factory assembly lines, what, if anything, what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides of those jobs being eliminated by AI?

**Sam Altman** (3:52)
So, I'll talk about some general thoughts, but I find making very specific predictions difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even my own intuitions, or certainly my own intuitions.

**Joe Rogan** (4:09)
Maybe we should stop there and back up a little. What were your initial thoughts?

**Sam Altman** (4:15)
If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said, first, AI is going to come for blue-collar labor, basically. It's going to drive trucks and do factory work, and it will handle heavy machinery.
Then, maybe after that, it will do some kinds of cognitive labor, but it won't be off doing what I think of personally as the really hard stuff. It won't be off proving new mathematical theorems. It won't be off discovering new science. It won't be off writing code. And then, eventually, maybe, but maybe last of all, maybe never, because human creativity is this magic special thing, last of all, it will come for the creative jobs.