Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…We now have some time for questions at the two mics. Please keep in mind, these are not speeches from you. We are here to hear Sam. A speech or a long-winded statement, I will simply cut off. We will start with the microphone over here. Please, first question. In terms of narratives in the country, I think we’re seeing a lot of fear and a lot of people going to simpler narratives because it makes them feel more safe. I think you talked, maybe last year or the year before, at a Disrupt, and you talked about a startup that was looking to take over the role of a church in the community. I was going to ask you if you had thought more about that kind of interaction between simpler narratives, and maybe what they were trying to do, and maybe where that might go in the future. I think the thing that has gone wrong in the tech industry, and maybe the country as a whole, is we — this area of the world — has failed to present a vision of the future where everyone gets to win and that everyone is excited about. We’re unlikely to get good at that fast enough, so I’m actually excited for the tech industry to figure out how to collaborate with Hollywood or other industries that are good at narrative and paint a vision of the future that is optimistic because pessimism is always easier than optimism. Demagogues always have an easier time winning elections with pessimism than optimism. I think people can kind of sense, whether they like it or not, tech is going to have a lot of influence over their lives, and it’s up to us to paint that positive narrative. In fact, a lot of what I hope OpenAI does in the next couple of years is figure out how to tell the positive AI story, not the negative one.…

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