Elon & Sam on Abundance

Why are the world’s top AI leaders suddenly talking about abundance? 

“This means a future of abundance. A future where there is no poverty, where people can have whatever they want in terms of goods and services.” – Elon Musk

“I think we see a path now where the world gets much more abundant and much better every year.” – Sam Altman

While many are fearful of AI, there are some (including myself) who believe that beyond the AI Singularity lies an incredible world of abundance.

As detailed in Abundance: The Future is Better Than you Think (2012), exponential technologies have the potential to uplift every many, women, and child—to create a world of possibility. 

In today’s blog, I want to share what some of these leaders are saying about the potential upside of AI. 

By the way, this topic will be the central theme of this year’s Abundance Summit (“The Great AI Debate”), gathering together the top entrepreneurs, leaders, and investors who are driving this revolution. 

Let’s dive in…

Sam Altman on Abundance...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was recently named TIME’s 2023 “CEO of the Year.” In an interview with the magazine last week, he described how our lives will be changed with the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI):  

“If we can make abundant intelligence for the world, and if we can create abundant energy, then our ability to have amazing ideas for our children to teach themselves more than ever before, for people to be more productive, to offer better healthcare, to uplift the economy, and to actually put those things into action with energy, I think those are to two massive, massive things.

“Now they come with downsides. And so it's on us to figure out how to make this safe and how to responsibly put this in the hands of people. But I think we see a path now where the world gets much more abundant and much better every year, and people have the ability to do way, way more than we can possibly imagine today…

“…And by the time the end of this decade rolls around, I think the world is going to be in an unbelievably better place. It sounds sort of like silly and sci-fi optimism to say this, but if you think about how different the world can be, not only when every person has, today they have ChatGPT, it's not very good, but next they have the world's best chief of staff. And then after that, every person has a company of 20 or 50 experts that can work super well together. And then after that, everybody has a company of 10,000 experts in every field that can work super well together. And if someone wants to go focus on curing disease, they can do that. And if someone wants to focus on making great art, they can do that. But if you think about the cost of intelligence and the quality of intelligence, the cost falling, the quality increasing by a lot and what people can do with that, it's like a very different world. It's the world that sci-fi has promised us for a long time and for the first time, I think we get to start to see what that's going to look like.”

Elon Musk on Abundance...

Elon has of course previously voiced his concerns about super-intelligent AI posing a significant risk to humanity: “It’s actually important for us to worry about a Terminator future in order to avoid a Terminator future.”

Musk states that such a future isn’t inevitable, and in fact he sees a positive future as more likely:  

“I think if I were to assign probabilities, I think it is more likely to be a positive scenario than a bad scenario. It's just that the bad scenario is not 0% and we want to do everything we can to minimize the probability of a bad outcome with AI.

“But I should clarify that I think, it's 70% or 80% likely to be a good future and maybe even a great future. So yeah, I think of the future as probabilities. Nothing's for sure... the future is a set of branching probability streams… AI really has the potential to make the future amazing if it’s done right.”

In a conversation last month with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the 2023 AI Safety Summit, Elon painted a picture of what advanced AI could mean for education: 

“It'll certainly be good for education. It'll be the best tutor you could [have] and the most patient tutor [will] sit there all day and there will be no shortage of goods and services. There will be an age of abundance.”

But this positive future isn’t limited to education. In the optimistic scenario of AI’s development, Musk envisions the technology ushering in “an age of abundance where you can have any goods or services that you want.”

Marc Andreessen on Abundance...

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, in his June 2023 blog about the promise and risks of AI, discussed what our AI-enabled future might look like. Here are a few of the hopeful (and IMHO likely) scenarios that he describes for the coming age of AI-enabled abundance:  

“Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love.

“Every person will have an AI assistant, coach, mentor, trainer, advisor and therapist that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.

“Every scientist will have an AI assistant, collaborator and partner that will greatly expand their scope of scientific research and achievement. Every artist, every engineer, every businessperson, every doctor, every caregiver will have the same in their worlds.

“Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet.

“Scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and medicines will dramatically expand, as AI helps us further decode the laws of nature and harvest them for our benefit...”

Join Discussions About AI & Abundance at My March Summit

Do you agree with Elon, Sam Altman, and Marc Andreessen that AI will create a future of abundance? 

Or do you have your doubts? 

Should humanity accelerate or slow down its development of AGI? 

Whatever side of this debate you fall on, there is no question that we all need to invest the time to fully understand AI, how to use it, and how to guide it.

And as an entrepreneur, CEO, or investor, NOW is the time to engage.

If you want to participate in these discussions and get the insights and tools you need to go big, create wealth, and increase your own impact on the world… then consider joining me at my upcoming Abundance Summit on March 18-21, 2024.

The speed of AI is accelerating at an exponential rate... 

The future is indeed faster than you think!