Sam Altman makes prediction about technological shifts, future of traditional jobs

In his blog, Altman wrote: "The rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything."

"There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away, but on the other hand the world will be getting so much richer so quickly that we’ll be able to seriously entertain new policy ideas we never could before," he said.

He said: "A subsistence farmer from a thousand years ago would look at what many of us do and say we have fake jobs, and think that we are just playing games to entertain ourselves since we have plenty of food and unimaginable luxuries."

"I hope we will look at the jobs a thousand years in the future and think they are very fake jobs, and I have no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them," he said.

He explained the way ChatGPT has transformed the world in 2025.

He said: "In some big sense, ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who has ever lived. Hundreds of millions of people rely on it every day and for increasingly important tasks; a small new capability can create a hugely positive impact; a small misalignment multiplied by hundreds of millions of people can cause a great deal of negative impact."

Predicting the change the world is expected to see in the next two years, he said: "2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world."

Altman said the rate of technological progress will keep accelerating, and it will continue to be the case that people are capable of adapting to almost anything.

Altman said: "The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035; maybe we will go from solving high-energy physics one year to beginning space colonization the next year; or from a major materials science breakthrough one year to true high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces the next year."

He said many people will choose to live their lives in much the same way.

However, Altman said at least some people will probably decide to “plug in”.