CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman was recently interviewed by comedian Theo Von. Early in the interview, Theo asks Altman about the future of History and historians.
Here is what they said:
(11:14 – 13:40)
Theo: Um so say there’s somebody just for example like that’s learning history right now. They’re in their second year of college. They’re taking history. Is that. . . are there some subjects in like. . . they’re going to be a Historian. Is that still a viable space of work? Uh as AI moves forward, do you think? Honestly.
Altman: I assume there will be some version of it that is uh. . . [pause]. . . I I think it’s very hard to predict exactly how something evolves. Um I or predict exactly the jobs of the future going to be like. The. . . [pause]. . . you know not that long ago it would have been very hard to predict either of our jobs, if you go back a hundred years the idea of like this CEO of an AI company or a podcaster like you know probably would have been things that didn’t seem to be the most obvious evolutions of the things people were doing at the time.
Theo: Yeah. Hey, you just seemed almost probably crazy even in trying to explain those to someone.
Altman: You would. And now, in fact, two of the job I heard that the job that young people most want is some version of your job. The job that young people most want is to be uh, you know, podcast influencer, uh, YouTube, they want a YouTube channel, like whatever it is, they they like six, seven year olds, they don’t know how to describe it, but that’s what they want.
And a lot of people also want my job. They want to do like a startup or they want to work on AI. And these just didn’t exist. Yeah. So like the rate with which the new things come along is is fast and also trying to predict what they are. I don’t know. The thing I say all the time is no one knows what happens next. It’s like we’re going to figure this out. It’s this weird emergent thing.
Does the current job of a historian exist in the same way? I would bet not quite. But another thing I believe is that humans are obsessed with other people. Like we are so deeply wired to care about other people, to care about stories and history, our own history is extremely interesting to us. So I would say somehow or other we’re still going to care about that. There’s going to be some kind of job doing that.
Theo: Man, that’s cool. G I guess I I if when I take that avenue of thought like okay there will still be this historian or somebody it’ll be some evolution of that. Right. That does seem kind of cool to me because there’s a level of creativity in there. There’s a level of like faith and spontaneity in there that I think is kind of exciting. So yeah, I guess I hadn’t really thought about that. Sometimes I get stuck in this doomsday thing like I just see like you know like the history book closes and they’re like “we have enough we have all the history over here.”
It’s worth watching the video to see Altman’s body language.
Translated into normal human language, what Altman is ultimately saying is that he does not think that there is a future for History or historians as we now know them.
It looks like he thinks that there might be space for a few History podcasts and YouTube channels though.
Altman also says right before that, starting at 9:18, that “I actually think the kids will be fine. I’m worried about the parents. Ah if you look at the history of the world here when there’s new technology like people that grow up with it they’re always fluent. They always figure out what to do. They always learn the new kind of jobs. But if you’re like a 50-year-old and you have to like kind of learn to do things in a very different way, that doesn’t always work. Yeah. So, I think the kids are going to be fine.”
Good to know, Sam.
And thank you, Theo, for asking that question.
Greetings professor 😉 You need to consider the context. Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. He probably believes in AI a lot, and says things, in his interests, a lot consciously or not 🤔 and, none of his models or any AI models can replace a real historians work 😴 can chatGPT find the real location of Sanfoqi? I think he is just overconfident.
Also, for a post you made 10 years ago called “ A FOX CORPSE, WEST LAKE, AND THE DIVIDED POPULATION OF MEDIEVAL VIETNAM” the Vietnamese Wikipedia page for West Lake mentions Già La Động, Nha Lâm Động, and Bình Sa Động which used to exist around West Lake 😧 under “history”. And that the people there were very sparse and people hunted wild animals, shrimp, fish, and crab and farmed for a living 🤔 the page and chatGPT thinks they are literal động, but they could b supporting evidence West Lake was a centre for “barbarian” settlement. I can’t investigate too much now, and I couldnt find the source sorry 😣