OpenAI CEO's vision of humanity's AI powered glorious future: "Fixing climate, establishing space colonies, and discovering all of physics"

It's not newsworthy when a tech boss touts the benefits of his products, but when the CEO behind ChatGPT believes that deep learning can lead humanity into a New Age, solve climate changes, and discover the entire physics, then it's worth at least raising an eyebrow.

I am of course referring to Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI. He is the most vocal advocate of artificial intelligence in the world today. His latest musings, via The Verge, read more like science fiction than an in-depth breakdown of the future of deep learning.

Altman goes beyond what one would expect from a CEO who is ebullient and makes lofty, yet ambiguous claims about his product. Altman says, "I think the future will be so bright, that no one could do it justice if they tried to write about it right now." Then he goes on to do exactly that.

Alman's first claim is that AI, thanks to deep-learning, will usher in a new era for humanity. Just as the Industrial Age gave rise to the Information Age and vice versa, Alman believes the Intelligence Age will be here soon.

"Technology took us from the Stone Age into the Agricultural Age, and then on to the Industrial Age." The path to the Intelligence Age begins here with compute, energy and human will," writes he, though he may have forgotten the phrase "obscene amount" somewhere in the final paragraphs.

Altman continues to encourage us into the future, saying: "The dawning of the Intelligence Age presents a momentous event with extremely complex and high-stakes issues." It won't be a positive story, but it will have a lot of upside. We owe ourselves and our future to learn how to navigate these risks.

Wait a second. Is this a story that is not entirely positive? This doesn't sound very encouraging to me. But fear not. OpenAI's CEO believes it will all be worth it.

"Amazing triumphs -- fixing the climate, creating a space colony and discovering all of physics -- will eventually become the norm. We can accomplish a great deal with our nearly limitless intelligence and energy.

I suppose it's good that AI will eventually fix a problem it's actively contributing right now, and I'm absolutely 100% sure that physicists all over the world will be ecstatic to know that discovering it will become a commonplace. Altman is aware of this issue.

"As with other technologies, AI will have its downsides. We need to work now to maximize AI’s benefits while minimising its harms... Many jobs we do today were considered trivial wastes of time a few centuries ago, but no one is looking back and wishing they had been a lamplighter."

I am not an old Luddite who rejects the latest technology and computing. I fully understand the potential of AI.

But I also don't believe that complex neural networks can magically solve all the problems that we face today, such as fixing the climate and having space colonies.

Even though AI is improving at the extremely difficult task of counting alphabet letters, it's not a solution to these problems. I don't doubt that it will get better, but I would prefer to see tech leaders focus on reducing the cost of AI.

Altman's future vision could be prophetic, or just pathetic. I lack enough insight into the inner workings of everything to know for certain. But given how much the tech industry loves AI, we won't hear the last of him on this subject. That's my vision for the future.