“Nobody has a better idea for AI than it can help you book trips. And everybody has ideas about how it might kill us all. And like, boy, is that a bad trade. If you can give me the trade that is good enough that I will accept a 10% chance that we're all going to die, that's actually a really fun conversation to have.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
The Vergecast hosts were discussing Sam Altman's remark that society should accept some bad things in exchange for AI's benefits. Pierce's complaint was that the industry is fluent about the risks but can't articulate the upside: "It's going to put everybody out of jobs. It might kill all of us. What's the good part?"
Transcript
your email for class
action. It's going to like
do sick math. And that's cool. I like math. But yeah, it's going to monitor your email for class action settlements. I just, I don't know. Again, just as a watcher of this over the last couple of months, I just kept looking out and it's like, nobody has a better idea for AI than it can help you book trips. And everybody has ideas about how it might kill us all. And like, boy, is that a bad trade. If you can give me the trade that is good enough that I will accept a 10% chance that we're all going to die, that's actually a really fun conversation to have. I would really, really like someone to make that argument once. And no one can do it, including Sam Altman. And it tries to be.
They're going to cure all diseases, but they also might kill you. Even
say that. Jemisisabis is out here being like, we're going to cure all diseases. Sam Altman doesn't, he's like, I don't know, war, weapons, maybe. I don't know. And I think that to me was just like this, this thing that like, yes, there are negative consequences to technological innovation is just…
famous memo from Boz at Meta called The Ugly. And he's like, here are all of the bad things that will happen if we connect everyone in the world and we're going to do it anyway. And there's a lot of lore around this letter. You should Google it and read it. But the sort of most important part of…
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