It’s grifting, pure and simple. All those things may be possible but Sam Altman is spewing this line of bullshit to keep the venture capital flowing into his company.
Abundance is already here, tons of food are destroyed and thrown out when they accidentally make too much while people are starving, there's no money in abundance, it's the artificial lack of supply that keeps prices high and profits soaring.
An issue with this tweet is that we already have the capacity to do a lot. We have the technology to provide healthy and diverse diets for the entire planet and fit a cities worth of farming inside a few city blocks (vertical hydroponics/aeroponics). We have the ability to create electricity in a dozen different renewable ways. We have the ability to desalinate water creating nearly infinite fresh water, we have enough square footage in the world to easily house everyone. We have stellar education systems that we could hand out to the entire world.
Why don't we do it? Well, all these things cost money. But the issue is, there also exists staggering amounts of money across the world. The panama papers revealed just a fraction of the wealth being hoarded by just a fraction of the wealthiest people in the world (and most implicated in the panema papers weren't even too crazy, like soccer stars and business owners). There's exists tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars of wealth created by the world just floating around in billionaires bank accounts and in the coffers of world powers.
So it's not an issue of abundance coming in the near future, we have it here on earth right now.
I think he believes what he's saying. From his perspective AGI will be great, and a lot of people think that AI and quantum computing will have a feedback loop where AI will help us create a better quantum computer which will make a better AI and so on...
Down here in the filth though, we're going to go through mass unemployment, rapid shifts in markets, loss of privacy due to increasingly sophisticated AI powered surveillance, and complete loss of our freedom of speech.
So, all that stuff probably will happen to people like him. Just not us.
I believe the first paragraph except colonizing space, at least not without hundreds of years of new technology at the human pace of invention.
We humans cannot even minimally adequately care for one another or this habitat, the one we evolved from, the most accommodating, self-correcting(to a point), resilient habitat that humanity will EVER know by far, and we've been fucking this easy situation up like breathing. Earth isn't even the "enter your name" part of the interstellar civilization test, that would be colonizing our local moon. No, failing the Earth test is basically taking the test to the bathroom assuming it to be toilet paper.
Everything else in non-multigenerational reach will be completely and totally unforgiving. Even in the best circumstances, one person going stir crazy if we're talking about sending real people can literally get everyone else killed, one major failure everybody dead, one major accident everybody dead.
Sorry, I know most of us are deluded into believing salvation comes from reckless attempts at ready fire aim growth, but if we don't get this world fully squared away from the consequences of our reckless actions, find homeostasis and successfully meet the needs of the humans here on easy mode Earth, the idea that we can make colonies of hundreds or thousands on our Moon/Titan/Mars is a bad joke.
We can send 5-20 HIGHLY TRAINED perfect specimens to Mars or Titan to plant a flag and grow potatoes for a few years, and I'm all for that as a human rallying achievement, we really need one of those, but that isn't the same thing as developing a true, sustainable presence on another world. We'll have either long since decimated this habitat or pulled out a miracle of finding equilibrium with it long before we're ready for that.
It's very rational, it's always been mocked and looked down upon to be optimistic. But through the ages it has been proven to be true that we achieve much more than we imagine.
However the pessimism built in to most people probably helps this drive and is actually a good thing.
If it weren't for the thieving class and the people who fall for their bullshit, I'm convinced we'd be having serious discussions about what it means to live in a post-scarcity society by now.
We could have all the things he mentions and people will still want a cashier who stands eight hours a day, a barista who makes their flat whites, or a babysitter for their kids. And despite the abundance, they're going to want those people to suffer in poverty.
How do I know? Because we have abundance and poverty right now.
Hopium. There's far too much "evil" force in this world for there to ever be an edan or unity. Overall chaos is what got us to our current state of humanity. Chaos will always be.
Don't read that as me saying humans are shit though. It's more like humans don't want to take their lack of "power" seriously. Which is natural or whatever... I know it all sounds negative, but I don't mean for it to sound negative. Chaos is the only constant, order comes from it, but chaos is always dominant from the present moment to the future. You can't stop the universe, including human society from changing and growing. You can learn about it and create from it but it always owns you. No matter who you are.
I don't disagree with any of these things, we just don't know when they will come to be and its going to be a rough ride. Old and new systems fighting, the history and the future all happening at once. We are experiencing something that has never happened to any species on earth, or maybe in the entire universe ever, so we're flying blind, ready or not.
It's a character flaw called "wishful belief" - that is, failure to distinguish between what you predict that'll happen and what you hope that'll happen.
Ugh. So many places in the world already have abundance that is hard to imagine; but that's only the case because of extreme hoarding of resources and wealth.