Sam Altman shared what he called a "cool ChatGPT" use case this week...
Connect it to your family calendars, tell it what your kids are interested in, then get it to make a podcast about those things for them to listen to while you drive them to school.
My first thought, probably like yours, was... "Sam, your kids are in the car with you. You could just yarn with them."
And since then, it's had me thinking all week about how much stock we should really put in these AI CEOs when they start telling us what these tools will do to jobs, education, business, family life, and our lives in general.
Yes, they're genius level intellect, and have an unusually close view of what AI can do technically. We should listen to them on that.
But I think their expertise gets shakier when the question becomes what friendship, grief, family life or meaningful work ought to look like for those of us in "the real world".
So I spent some time in this week's video essay cycling through several examples from the past few years to give you some insight into how these AI billionaires seem to see the world in a very different way then "we" do.
From that, I extrapolate about how/when/where we should listen to them. And conversely, when the right time might be to just ignore their words, jump in the car, and yarn to our kids instead...
Sources & citations
- Now, Thanks to Sam Altman, You Never Have to Speak With Your Kids Again, The Atlantic, 4 August 2026.
- Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s AGI Plan, Dwarkesh Podcast, 29 April 2025.
- Posting Posthumously: Analyzing Meta’s User-Simulation Patent, American Bar Association, 2026.
- Built to benefit everyone: our plan, OpenAI, 8 June 2026.
- VivaTech interview with Elon Musk, 23 May 2024.
