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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
I'm going to bring this up just because its in the back of my mind and I'm going to reserve some small amount of probability for it.
But I can imagine the scenario where Sam himself arranges for these (pretty ineffective, obviously) attacks against his home as a counter to the bad press and to make sure he keeps his grasp on power, as he's already been ousted once.
Yes, it's implausible that he'd pull a Jussie Smollet, it is VASTLY more likely to be actual random violence. But I have enough distrust for Altman that I think he'd be willing to do something like this, especially if it carried minimal risk of personal harm.
Holy cow.
I guess the high achievers are technically the MOST likely to feel this anxiety, because they can directly perceive their competition is no longer just other high achievers... but this machine that can outperform them on every single metric that matters for success.
And as a former High School Valedictorian myself... I don't have a good answer here.
Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.
But to continue in academics would be a doomed play.
Uhhh get him in a gym and possibly doing some martial arts STAT, if only for the mental health benefits.
I think that would be a bad strategy for Altman, since I think that the majority of the population's reaction to hearing about the assassination attempts against Altman is either "who's that?" or "I wish they had managed to kill him". Even among the economic movers and shakers, I doubt that many people would actually be sad if Altman was killed.
Yeahhhh the amount of support for the attempts coming out should be a wake up call of some kind.
I'm not sure he's going to heed it in any way other than boosting his personal security presence.
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