Top Tech CEO Gives Anything But Straight Answer When Asked Why You Should Trust Him

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did not give a straight answer when directly asked why people should trust him to spearhead artificial intelligence (AI) development during a Monday interview.

Axios co-founder Mike Allen posed the question to Altman amid OpenAI’s Monday release of a blueprint for how the government should handle AI, titled, “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First.” Allen characterized the blueprint and Altman’s comments during the interview as indicating “AI will transform every aspect of our lives,” asking him, “Why should people trust you to be at the forefront of it?”

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Altman opted to spend most of his answer refuting that AI would be completely transformational to human life.

“First of all, not literally ‘every.’ I think there will be many things, and I think this is wonderful, where we only care about other people. We will spend more time with other people,” Altman said. “People will remain the most important part of our lives. We’ll have these incredibly smart machines doing stuff around us. And the most fundamental part of what it means to be human, that’s not going to transform at all.”

“The society may change in a lot of ways. What it means to be a person, what it means to have a fulfilling life, how we choose to spend our time, what we really want, we’ll have more flexibility and more ability to achieve,” he added. “But for hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, we’ve been driven by a lot of the same things. We want more of those. We want higher quality connections with people. We want more time to spend in nature, do what makes us happy. And I think we’ll have that.”