Ask A Genius 1363: Sam Altman, AI Priorities, and the Future of Human Consciousness
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/07
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Did you have any comments on the Sam Altman points? I skimmed his blog post but skipped the stuff about car parts.
Rick Rosner: He’s optimistic. We’ve talked about Feynman’s three trajectories for science, and he’s taken the most optimistic stance toward AI—that it will have accelerating usefulness, enough to justify however much you need to spend on it. That’s the optimistic case.
The pessimistic case—closer to Cory Doctorow’s—is that the cleverness of AI is not going to generate returns that make up for the billions being poured into it. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, but not precisely in the middle, because of what science fiction tends to do. There’s that idea that anything predicted by science fiction, excluding things like time travel, will eventually happen, but it’ll take longer than it does in fiction.
Jacobsen: The key issue is prioritization. Even core human drives might be redirected or repurposed if AI becomes sufficiently augmented. At that point, you’re no longer following Feynman’s three-trajectory model. If the directives become re-jiggered—narrowed but more powerful—then some human outcomes or goals stop being priorities altogether. It is not even some frivolous side-path; that’s a legitimate direction for development.
Rosner: That ties into cryonics—freezing people with the hope of reviving them once their bodies and minds can be restored. But that entire project might become moot if AI helps us develop better ways to preserve or replicate consciousness. Instead of taking a 90-year-old body and trying to reverse it into a 30-year-old condition, it may be more viable to abandon that project entirely. Increasingly, tech might leapfrog cryonics. We may never need to develop it if other forms of consciousness preservation emerge fully.
The danger is that AI takes the reins so completely that human desires seem irrelevant. That could be bad news if AI overtakes us as the primary decision-making entity. On the optimistic side, it’s not necessarily about our consciousnesses being “freed.” It could be more about blowing open the “doors of perception”—the Aldous Huxley thing. The idea of consciousness itself might be so expanded that we’ll end up accepting new forms of it, new paths that don’t involve individual cognition in perpetuity. We may come to receive other types of immortality.
I don’t know we’ll ever see oblivion as acceptable. But we’ll see a merging, where your thoughts, attitudes, and memories become part of a broader, collective experience, as a viable option. That could be optimistic. Many religions hint at that idea—ancestral consciousness—the belief that your ancestors live inside your mind, yammering away in the background. To me, that feels incompletely explored. It’s better than nothing, but still not great.
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