Altman: Human obsession with humans is AI's blind spot

In his essay The Gentle Singularity, Sam Altman makes a case that cuts against his own industry's hype: humans are hardwired to care about other humans, not machines. "We don't care very much about machines," he writes — and that asymmetry is structural, not sentimental.

The implication is sharp. You'll use AI to find a restaurant, but you want a human critic to tell you why it matters. You'll read AI summaries, but you want to know the soul behind the novel. That preference isn't taste — it's evolutionary biology running deeper than any fine-tune can reach.

Altman's framing is notable precisely because it comes from the man building the replacement. He's not worried about AI killing creative fields — he's betting that human authorship gains value as AI floods the zone with competent-but-soulless content.

Why it matters: if Altman is right, the winners in an AI-saturated media world won't be the best prompt engineers — they'll be the most distinctly human voices.