{"id":5894,"date":"2025-10-12T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/sam-altman-real-work-ai\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T14:30:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T14:30:00","slug":"sam-altman-real-work-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/sam-altman-real-work-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren\u2019t Even \u201cReal Work\u201d to Start With"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

You know it\u2019s going to be good when an AI executive goes off on a tangent about \u201chey, what\u2019s a job anyway<\/a>!\u201d while addressing \u2014 or failing to address \u2014 the topic of how their tech just might wipe out entire categories of human professions.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s offending party, you\u2019ll be shocked to hear, is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who talks about job destruction an awful lot<\/a>, and usually in a pretty mealy-mouthed way.<\/p>\n

His latest spiel is no exception. In an interview with Rowan Cheung<\/a> at OpenAI\u2019s DevDay conference on Wednesday, Altman floated the idea that the work you do today, which might imminently be transformed or eliminated by AI, isn\u2019t \u201creal work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea was brought up after Cheung invoked his favorite thought experiment of considering how a farmer half a century ago might view our current reality. \u201cIf you told a farmer fifty years ago that this magical thing called the internet is going to create a billion new jobs,\u201d Cheung said, \u201che probably wouldn\u2019t believe you.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the \u201cintelligence\u201d era, Cheung said, a billion knowledge workers\u2019 jobs will be threatened before new ones are created. Seemingly, Cheung\u2019s point is that it\u2019s not clear what jobs AI will create several decades down the line, just like how a farmer in the past wouldn\u2019t be able to envision how the internet spawned an entire economy.<\/p>\n

You could probably poke a few holes in this, like why we\u2019re comparing the future of AI\u2019s impact to asking a farmer about the implications of another emerging technology, in a conversation with the CEO of a half-trillion dollar company that\u2019s building the AI and who would presumably know better than most people \u2014 but point taken.<\/p>\n

We bring it up because Altman returns to the \u201cfarmer\u201d analogy when he\u2019s asked about how a billion jobs might be destroyed before new ones are realized.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe thing about that farmer,\u201d Altman said, is not only that they wouldn\u2019t believe you, but \u201cthey very likely would look at what you do and I do and say, \u2018that\u2019s not real work.’\u201d<\/p>\n

This, Altman said, makes him feel \u201ca little less worried\u201d but \u201cmore worried in some other ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re, like, farming, you\u2019re doing something people really need,\u201d Altman explained. \u201cYou\u2019re making them food, you\u2019re keeping them alive. This is real work.\u201d But the farmer would see our modern jobs as \u201cplaying a game to fill your time,\u201d and therefore not a \u201creal job.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very possible that if we could see those jobs of the future,\u201d Altman said, we\u2019d think \u201cmaybe our jobs were not as real as a farmer\u2019s job, but it\u2019s a lot more real than this game you\u2019re playing to entertain yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Altman has a salient case he\u2019s trying to make here, it\u2019s that jobs change. And so ye of little faith and even littler paycheck should stop worrying about your job disappearing as AI takes over the economy, because some hypothetical farmer communicating with us through a rift in spacetime would think your job is fake anyway. But actually, it\u2019s not that fake, because a hypothetical future you will think the post-AI jobs will be even faker than the ones we\u2019re doing now. Have we got that right?<\/p>\n

Anyway, Altman seems to think that this will all just sort itself out somehow.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so willing to bet on human drives being what they are,\u201d Altman said. \u201cAnd I think we\u2019ll find plenty of things to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Sam Altman Says Copyright Holders Are Begging for Their Characters to Be Included in Sora<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

The post Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren\u2019t Even \u201cReal Work\u201d to Start With<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You know it\u2019s going to be good when an AI executive goes off on a tangent about \u201chey, what\u2019s a job anyway!\u201d while addressing \u2014 or failing to address \u2014…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[177,179],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","category-openai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5894\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}