Evan and I were debate partners in high school; in a weird twist of fate, he’s now an alignment lead at Anthropic and I’m a researcher at OpenAI. We should not preserve the status quo. Humanity faces a series of challenges, independent of AI, that compel us to innovate. AI does pose risks to society. These threats are more ill-defined, and more probabilistic, than knowing that 16% of our loved ones will die from cancer, or that 50% of the currently inhabited regions on Earth will become too hot to sustain human life by 2070. While we ought soberly evaluate the risks of super-intelligence – and work extremely hard to mitigate those risks – we hold an equal moral obligation to paint the inspirational and optimistic vision of the world we want to create. As someone who worked on climate tech for 3 years prior to joining OpenAI, I have a different perspective on the role that AI must play in our future. I believe in empowering humanity with super intelligence that can build the world we want to live in: rebuilding polar ice caps, inventing new desalination techniques, electrifying the grid; printing solutions to pathogens in real-time; democratizing education worldwide.