New Orleans There are some not so subtle signs that our billionaire tech overlords are starting to come to grips with their overreach and loose lips in speculating about the good and bad of artificial intelligence. Communities across the country – and the world – have marshalled to pushback on such purpose-built data centers, whether effective or not, stretching from urban centers to farmlands. Big mouths like OpenAI’s Sam Altman who have prophesized huge job losses to AI that might require living wage subsidies for the disappearance of work are now quickly stepping back from such predictions, as they see the skepticism growing among the public about these AI claims. Politicians who listen to their constituents are beginning to moderate their boosterism in state legislatures and Congress. This too may pass, but it’s a sign that the gazillion dollar race among private big tech companies along with the global competition between nation states as large as the US and China, has turned opinion dark on AI.
Another sign of the water rising in this area comes from an odd source, another billionaire, Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. He joined with a member of his family wealth office, Selina Xu, who does research into China and AI on an op-ed. He’s walking a fine line as he tries to call for balancing the promise of AI with its potential downsides in terms of social unrest and vast labor unemployment. He reports on conversations with policymakers in China somewhat positively about their relative restraint compared to the US, mentioning that new licenses for autonomous vehicles have been stopped and Chinese courts have ruled that workers cannot be dismissed “just to replace them with AI systems,” as well as a ban on AI companions for minors that has now been implemented. No surprise that this op-ed was in the Times, rather than the Journal.
None of that outs Schmidt as a traitor in Silicon Valley. On the other hand, his call for artificial intelligence to be treated as a public project, rather than privatized by corporate conglomerates definitely goes past the pale in the midst of all of their gung-ho and trillion dollar investments. In his own words he argues for a “populist AI agenda that treats the technology as a public project. Just as NASA made space a national mission rather than a private one, the government should do the same for AI to ensure that its benefits reach the public not just the companies building it.” Saying so, he sounds more like Beth Novick and Audrey Tang than Musk, Zuckerberg, and the like.
More specifically, he joins the unwashed socialist masses and radically suggests that some AI profits being hoarded by big tech companies should be distributed to citizens, perhaps via a sovereign wealth fund to endow future generations. Of course, they will cry like stuck pigs, and, if they didn’t, we would have to worry what Trump with do with such a fund. The US isn’t Norway, and Trump is treating the treasury like his personal piggy bank. Maybe one could segregate this, though recent Supreme Court decisions make me wonder. Still let’s join Schmidt at the barricades to redistribute some of these profits.
On a more neoliberalist bent, he suggests that the government subsidize these private companies or others to create AI tools that benefit the public rather than profit. One suggestion would be making it easier “navigate government services.” Schmidt and his team may have been in China and missed the fact that Trump’s budget bill to get the poor and working families to subsidize tax breaks for the rich, like himself, are partially based on making it harder for citizens to access benefits to which they are eligible and have a right.
Nonetheless, Schmidt is right on both counts, even if there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that either the government or the companies are going to adopt either of these suggestions. He may not get invited to the same parties for a couple of weeks, but that doesn’t mean we’ll see any of these ideas implemented, and that’s a shame. We need more tech traitors!