On May 1, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that his company wants "to build tools to augment and elevate people, not entities to replace them," a statement meant to calm nerves over AI-related layoffs. However, in a 2017 blog post, Altman argued that humanity's best chance of surviving artificial superintelligence (ASI) is to "merge" with machines, writing that "we will be the first species ever to design our own descendants." He outlined two possible outcomes: the "bad case" of "lights out for all of us," or survival through integration into the digital world. Altman has suggested the merge might start with people becoming "really close friends with a chatbot," but "the full-on-crazy version" involves getting "our brains uploaded into the cloud." He has signed up with a company called Nectome to have his brain "uploaded" to a computer when he dies. The article raises questions about who will own the computers on which digital minds exist and who will have the opportunity to merge, noting that "tech oligarchs" will likely separate themselves from the masses.