Majority Of Workers Thinks Americans Should Get Half Of AI Profits, Since It's Stealing From Us Anyway
We are entitled to proper compensation!
Artificial intelligence is a bit of a reverse Robin Hood situation.
It steals from us, the relative-to-a-billionaire poor, in order to give to the rich. It steals water, it steals jobs, it steals people’s likenesses, it steals art, music, literature, journalism, research from people for the purposes of making a ton of money for already-rich billionaires, and also enhances their finances by making it so they don’t have to pay human beings to work in order to make their money.
Well, some folks are starting to think that may not be the most fair arrangement in the world.
Recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders has been suggesting that, since the way AI works is by stealing from us and possibly rendering us all unemployable, that we ought to get half of the profits. In June, he introduced legislation called American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would require all of the biggest AI companies in the United States to give the American public a 50 percent ownership stake.
The way it would work would be that, first, there would be an immediate, one-time 50 percent tax on the stock of the biggest AI companies to be deposited into a sovereign wealth fund to be used for the benefit of the American people — which, at current valuations would amount to about $7 trillion. After that, every American citizen would get yearly dividends.
According to a press release, Sanders’s bill would do the following:
First, it would create an Independent Commission for Democratic AI to manage the sovereign wealth fund in the public interest. The Independent Commission would use voting shares in these companies to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them. The Independent Commission would consist of seven members nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with nominees selected from a list of bipartisan names provided by Congress. No longer would the future of AI and the transformation of human life that it will bring be dictated by fewer than a dozen Big Tech oligarchs.
Second, it would require large companies that operate both AI and non-AI businesses to break up those businesses, ensuring the public receives an ownership stake in the AI business.
Third, it would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer.
This isn’t an entirely new idea. Alaska residents have a similar fund for oil royalties, and get about $1,000 to $3,000 a year. The idea is that if something is a public resource, the pubic ought to benefit. Crazy idea, huh?
It’s the kind of idea that, frankly, one would expect the American public to bristle at. After all, Americans are usually pretty willing to let oligarchs fuck them over in the name of capitalism. But people are starting to realize that, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we’re going to be pretty screwed if we don’t get a little wealth redistribution going on. If people aren’t going to have jobs in the future, we’ve got to figure something else out.
Perhaps that’s why a staggering 69 percent of workers polled by the nonpartisan polling firm Versight said they would very much support the establishment of such a fund, with the number only dipping to around 64 percent once they were told it was legislation tied to Bernie Sanders. Though I think we could eventually get that five percent to loosen up about that about it if more legislators they weren’t so bitch-eating-crackers about signed on as well. People are weird!
However, as Sanders pointed out in a June New York Times op-ed, even the AI companies themselves are mostly in favor of such a fund being established, probably because they’re afraid that if they put us all out of work with no way to feed ourselves, that we will come after them with pitchforks and guillotines.
As well they should be!
This is not an original idea. It has been proposed by scholars. It has been endorsed by some of the leading A.I. companies in America. OpenAI, for example, recently proposed creating a “public wealth fund that provides every citizen — including those not invested in financial markets — with a stake in A.I.-driven economic growth.” Anthropic, led by Mr. Amodei, similarly proposed the creation of “national sovereign wealth funds with stakes in A.I.” Mr. Musk, who runs xAI, wrote, “Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.”
In addition to supporting a sovereign wealth fund, respondents to the survey did not seem too confident in the ability of AI companies to self-regulate, probably because it doesn’t seem as though they’ve done a great job of it so far. What with Elon Musk’s Grok turning into a “Mechanazi” and what have you.
Via EINPresswire:
An overwhelming 89% of respondents support requiring AI companies to publicly disclose the results of all internal safety testing. At the same time, 81% of Americans support granting the federal government the explicit authority to block the release of any AI system deemed risky, while 49% state that the government, rather than tech companies, should have the final say on safety standards.
Given the fact that we’ve already seen AI chatbots drive kids to suicide, that 81 percent figure actually seems a little on the low side.
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Of course, not everyone is on board. It will shock you to know that the top minds at Goldman Sachs think we should all just chill about the job loss, because sure, we’ll lose a lot of jobs, but eventually there might be other jobs.
Via CNBC:
Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the labor force, or around 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition period, the bank said in a report published last month.
This “would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change,” Briggs said.
“But [Briggs] believes these losses will prove temporary owing to his expectation that AI will create many new jobs over the long term even as it destroys existing ones,” the Goldman Sachs report says.
Oh, is that all? Just nearly one in 10 jobs? Because only about one percent of the labor force lost their jobs as a result of NAFTA and, as someone who lived in Rochester, New York, I can tell you that it was a very unpleasant, precarious and depressing time for everyone involved. The last time that the unemployment rate got up to 10 percent was the Great Recession, and that wasn’t a great time for people either — especially the millennials graduating college around that time.
But hey! If you can’t trust a guy from Goldman Sachs telling you that you don’t need to be worried about the rich fucking you over, who can you trust?
I will say, I don’t think that AI is going to replace human workers to the degree that advocates believe it will — especially as it concerns the creative jobs they seem most excited about being able to replace — but that doesn’t mean that companies aren’t going to try, or that chaos and extreme anxiety won’t ensue as a result of that trying. We’ve already seen them try. Hell, every few weeks I see another “Editor for AI Newsroom” job posting being shared in horror on social media by everyone I know. Regardless of how it shakes out, however, the fact remains that if these companies are going to steal from us, it’s only right that we get compensated.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Harshly penalizing them for their exorbitant water and electricity usage and insane air pollution these data centers are causing (for those who don't know, they are running generators because the power grid can't keep up with demand) would be a nice start.
The CEOs should also be forced to drink the water that's left for the customers downstream from the data centers.
The neat part is that there are no profits!