In their day jobs, his parents continually wrestled with the tension, in American law, between individual freedoms and the collective good. Both identified, broadly speaking, as utilitarians: any law should seek not to maximize some abstract notion of freedom but rather the greatest good for the greatest number. They never pushed their views on Sam

He has distanced himself from the faction known as “e/acc” or “effective accelerationism,” a term used by Beff Jezos, Marc Andreessen, and others as a winking dig at effective altruism. (Altman has tipped his hat to e/acc too, once replying “you cannot out accelerate me” to one of Jezos’s tweets—another sign that he serves at the pleasure of the ph

Sam was trying to buy a seat in Congress so that Congress might finally begin to address an existential risk to humanity.