OpenAI CEO Tells Federal Reserve Confab That Entire Job Categories Will Disappear Due To AI

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: During his latest trip to Washington, OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, painted a sweeping vision of an AI-dominated future in which entire job categories disappear, presidents follow ChatGPT's recommendations and hostile nations wield artificial intelligence as a weapon of mass destruction, all while positioning his company as the indispensable architect of humanity's technological destiny. Speaking at the Capital Framework for Large Banks conference at the Federal Reserve board of governors, Altman told the crowd that certain job categories would be completely eliminated by AI advancement. 'Some areas, again, I think just like totally, totally gone,' he said, singling out customer support roles. 'That's a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you're on target and AI, and that's fine.' The OpenAI founder described the transformation of customer service as already complete, telling the Federal Reserve vice-chair for supervision, Michelle Bowman: 'Now you call one of these things and AI answers. It's like a super-smart, capable person. There's no phone tree, there's no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It's very quick. You call once, the thing just happens, it's done.'

The OpenAI founder then turned to healthcare, making the suggestion that AI's diagnostic capabilities had surpassed human doctors, but wouldn't go so far as to accept the superior performer as the sole purveyor of healthcare. 'ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, can give you better -- it's like, a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,' he said. 'Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I'm a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop.' At the fireside chat, he said one of his biggest worries was over AI's rapidly advancing destructive capabilities, with one scenario that kept him up at night being a hostile nation using these weapons to attack the US financial system. And despite being in awe of advances in voice cloning, Altman warned the crowd about how that same benefit could enable sophisticated fraud and identity theft, considering that 'there are still some financial institutions that will accept the voiceprint as authentication'.

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