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OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are speaking out in a new documentary about the impacts of artificial intelligence on parenthood
“I’m not scared for kids to grow up in a world with AI,” Altman says in The AI Doc
Amodei counters: “There’s so much uncertainty. I would almost just do what you’re going to do anyway”
A new documentary about artificial intelligence sees major figures in the industry weighing in on whether or not the increasingly pervasive and popular — if controversial — technology should affect plans to have children.
In The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, in theaters now, filmmakers Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell pose the question (with Rother preparing to become a father himself) as the film explores what is at stake if humanity gets AI “wrong.”
He asks Tristan Harris, a former Google employee and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology who speaks out regularly about the need for limitations on technology, if the public is “doomed.”
In response, Harris says, “It’s not good news, the world that we’re heading into.”
He insists, “I know people who work on AI risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — no stranger to his own apocalyptic warnings about the technology that has made him famous and fabulously wealthy — offers a different view in the film. He had a son last year.
He says that having a child is a “momentous thing” and that he stays “up every night” reading books about “how to raise a kid.”
“I hope I’m going to do a good job,” the 40-year-old billionaire continues. “But I’m not scared for kids to grow up in a world with AI.”
Last May, Altman told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang that he felt a “neurochemical change” months after the birth of his son and shared that he thinks he will “make better decisions” regarding OpenAI and its signature product, ChatGPT, when it comes to “humanity as a whole.”
Still, Altman boasts in The AI Doc that he believes “our kids will never be smarter than an AI” from a “raw IQ perspective.”
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Dario Amodei, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, which makes another popular AI program, Claude, also appears in The AI Doc.
When asked by Roher if the “private discussions” with other AI industry leaders “whose fingers are on the trigger” fill him with “confidence” or anxiety, Amodei says it’s nuanced.
“You know, all I can do is push for the government to get involved. But ultimately, I’m just one person there, too,” he says. “It’s up to all of us to push for the government to get involved. That’s the No. 1 thing that I think we need to do to set things in the right direction.”
More broadly, data shows that more and more Americans are using AI even as most of them feel they can’t reliably trust the technology, according to a March Quinnipiac University poll.
An Ipsos poll that same month found that 63% of Americans support the federal government ensuring “AI outputs don’t cause harm,” though concerns over “the social and environmental impacts of tech” depend on political ideology.
In The AI Doc, when asked about his thoughts on parenthood, Amodei, who used to work at OpenAI and appears to have an icy relationship with Altman, was ambivalent.
“There’s so much uncertainty. I would almost just do what you’re going to do anyway,” he says. “I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but it’s the only one I can come up with.”
The AI Doc is in theaters now.
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