Tech Leaders Debate Timeline and Impact of AI Superintelligence

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s Monday (Sept. 23) prediction that the world could be “a few thousand days” away from creating artificial superintelligence is sparking discussions among industry experts about the technology’s effects on global commerce and society.

Experts say if AI superintelligence is possible to achieve, it could transform commerce by enabling hyper-efficient optimization of business operations and unprecedented personalization of customer experiences. The technological leap may also alter labor markets and economic structures, presenting opportunities and challenges for businesses, workers and policymakers.

“I’m pretty certain superintelligence will displace most jobs, and not just white-collar but blue-collar jobs as well,” Brandon Da Silva, CEO of ArenaX Labs, a platform for developing AI-driven online gaming experiences, told PYMNTS.

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) refers to AI systems that surpass human cognitive abilities across all domains. This represents a leap beyond current AI capabilities and even hypothetical artificial general intelligence (AGI), which aims to match human-level intelligence.

In a blog post titled “The Intelligence Age,” Altman, the AI pioneer whose company created ChatGPT, expressed optimism about artificial intelligence’s potential to revolutionize human capabilities. He said he envisions a future where AI assists in accomplishing previously unimaginable feats.

“[W]e’ll soon be able to work with AI that helps us accomplish much more than we ever could without AI; eventually we can each have a personal AI team, full of virtual experts in different areas, working together to create almost anything we can imagine,” Altman said. “Our children will have virtual tutors who can provide personalized instruction in any subject, in any language, and at whatever pace they need. We can imagine similar ideas for better healthcare, the ability to create any kind of software someone can imagine, and much more.”

The blog post also addressed the future of superintelligence.

“It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!); it may take longer, but I’m confident we’ll get there,” he said.

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick authored the book “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.”

“If AGI is achievable, the very first people who will know it will be traders who will suddenly find all of their good strategies & trades don’t work anymore, and that an unknown firm is on the winning side of all of them,” he posted on social platform X Tuesday (Sept. 24).

If AGI is achievable, the very first people who will know it will be traders who will suddenly find all of their good strategies & trades don’t work anymore, and that an unknown firm is on the winning side of all of them.

— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) September 24, 2024

However, Meta Vice President and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun said superintelligent AI is still decades away, CNBC reported last year. He said current language models lack basic understanding despite massive training data.

To superintelligence boosters, AI could inevitably perform even highly skilled and creative jobs traditionally reserved for humans.

“To have super intelligence, you’ll have solved robotics, and you’ll be able to do a lot of the things, like, for example, create artificial firefighters,” Da Silva said.

Matt McMullen, chief operating officer of Realbotix, a company specializing in AI-driven robotics, offered a different perspective.

“It will likely do both,” McMullen told PYMNTS, referring to job automation and creation. He pointed to historical precedents of technological revolutions creating new opportunities alongside disruption.

Novel career paths are expected to emerge from ASI development.

“From the hardware to the software systems needed to advance the tech, there will be new places for people to be part of these advances,” McMullen said.

Specific examples include “new roles in AI maintenance, ethics oversight and human-AI collaboration,” he said.

Both executives agreed that access to superintelligence could be an advantage to some businesses.

“If there’s any one company hoarding it, then they will just dominate the industry because they’re going to be able just to deploy many instances of this thing and have almost infinite resources to build and deploy whatever they want,” Da Silva said.

McMullen compared past technological shifts to the digital revolution.

“Consider when digital music began to eclipse analog music,” he said. “Inevitably, the digital revolution was one that couldn’t be avoided in the world of music.”

He predicted that “businesses that quickly adopt superintelligence may gain significant advantages in efficiency and innovation, potentially disrupting entire industries.”

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