Sam Altman says we need another Renaissance. But we really need another Industrial Revolution

Sam Altman doesn’t understand history.

His mistake is going to punish the world.

That’s the depressing takeaway from the OpenAI’s CEO’s September 23 rd speech to the United Nations.

He came out swinging, saying that “we,” as in humanity, “have a choice in front of us.” AI, he said, “can either be more like a new Renaissance of creativity and discovery, or more like a new Industrial Revolution of upheaval and disarray.” He ended by calling for international “cooperation” and “standards.” In short, an AI regulatory regime that brings us to the promised land of another Renaissance instead of the chaos of another Industrial Revolution.

But that’s backward.

The Renaissance, for all its artistic beauty, was not a time of meaningful economic, social, and political progress.

Humanity’s material condition did not meaningfully improve, nor did democracy advance apace.

When Thomas Hobbes described life in the state of nature “as poor, nasty, brutish and short,” he may as well have been talking about post-Renaissance existence, as well.

An English builder’s day wage bought less food in 1600 than it had in 1475.

The magnificent art didn’t do much material good for those who mixed the plaster.

Don’t get me wrong: The Renaissance wasn’t a failure.

Michelangelo’s David and the Sistine Chapel ceiling are treasures that all of humanity should appreciate.

So are Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, filled with flying machines, batlike wings worked by a pilot pumping pedals.

But frescos don’t put shoes on a poor child’s cold feet and sketches of flying machines didn’t put Orville Wright in the sky.