AI on track to be smarter than your kids.
- Calista Pretorius
- May 16
- 3 min read
Updated: May 27
“Hopefully, my kids will never be smarter than AI.” - Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI, ChatGPT)
An interesting aspiration presented by Sam in a rather unsettling TED interview released last month. Throughout the talk, Sam frames AI as an inevitable miracle - something we should welcome, not question. And while that might sound forward-thinking, most of what he says skims over the messy results that could manifest when robots are given human abilities.
Sam touches on safety and oversight with a vague nonchalance that is teeming with forced composure. The fact of the matter is AI & AGI are being deployed rapidly without any real public input, transparency, or regulation. AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is AI designed to learn, think, and make decisions like a person.
It seems a handful of elites are making decisions behind closed doors, while the rest of the world is left adapting to a future we weren’t prepared for. It's important to note that Altman was fired from OpenAI in 2023 over disputes with a few board members regarding the pace and direction of AI. He was rehired 5 days later and the board members who were proposing caution and safety were ousted.
Let me be clear, I’m not anti-AI. I use it in my own business, and I can vouch for its creative and productive benefits. But the problem isn’t the tech - it’s who’s driving it, how fast it’s moving, and how little say the public has in the rollout. We’re being treated purely as consumers when we should be participants in shaping the hypothetical future realities we are toying with.
Here's the thing that really stuck with me: Sam never once mentions VR (virtual reality) during the interview. Despite predictions that by 2030, over half the global population will be active in virtual reality spaces. Trajectories that tech giants like OpenAI determine. Sam’s silence on this seems calculated because without the context of VR, the future he refers to is very blurry for his audience. He has more than enough knowledge, and I'm sure he could muster up enough creativity to paint a picture for the crowd that sharpens their imagination.
My left eyebrow was raised for a large portion of the interview, but Altman's last answer is the one that dropped my jaw. The question was, “What kind of world do you believe, all things considered, your son will grow up into?”
Sam said:
"It'll be a world of incredible material abundance. It'll be a world where the rate of change is incredibly fast and amazing new things are happening. And it’ll be a world where individual ability, impact, is just so far beyond what a person can do today. I hope that my kids and all of your kids will look back at us with some pity and nostalgia and be like, "They lived such horrible lives. They were so limited. The world sucked so much." I think that's great.”
Of course, Altman is biased toward advancement - why wouldn’t he be? He is heading up one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. The faster this all moves, the more power and profit OpenAI stands to gain. And apparently, the quicker he can get out of his monotonous, dull life and into one where kids are dumber than robots.
Techno-optimism? It's a thing.
Love, Calista
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