Senator Bernie Sanders proposes a 50% government equity stake in US AI companies to offset job losses

There is a very good point in here halfway through about the dangers of corporate-government fusion.

In fact, I would go further than Sacks does and say it applies regardless of whether you are a conservative or a liberal.

The traditional liberal (as in the American use of the term) consensus is built around the idea of government taming corporate power and influence for the benefit of the mass public.

But the government has its own incentive to grow and spread its authority, and as the societal actor with a monopoly on violence, it has far greater means to do so than any particular private firm.

If you are on the left, this may very well be your goal, but even still, I would urge you to consider that one of largest factors that pushes policy in the direction you envision is that the government is economically reliant on its productive output of its citizenry for tax revenue, which guides it towards equalizing outcomes supported by by large swathes of society.

If we end up in a world where government’s reliance on labor for tax revenue and executive functioning decreases substantially, its responsiveness to democratic desires is likely to decrease at the same time as its ability to enforce its whims increases.

Personally, I admit I’m relatively sanguine about AI replacing such labor rapidly, but I know individuals who are either supportive of the Sanders proposal or more generally supportive of this corpo-governmental fusion who fully believe in the labor replacing potential of the technology. To them I would simply say I hope you are careful.

To be clear, this is not a defense of a fully hands off or adversarial approach towards AI regulation, more of a recognition that there many more bad outcomes here than simply the concentration of power in a single lab; and an appeal to those considering such policies to do so in light of the potential incentives of EVERY party, not just the AI companies.

As a coda, I have to say, even as the space has heated up dramatically, I remain impressed with the quality and decency of discourse on here and around the subject generally. For those who contribute, thank you, and I hope y’all continue to do so. My suspicion is that we will need a whole lot of such goodwill in the near future.

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

But they will and already are causing massive job loss, against massive job gains with the buildout of the hyperscaler tech stack underway.

Once these facilities are built and operating, literally the business model is to use AI to replace expensive or less productive human capital.

Sure, there will be some new gains (robot repairman?), but as in the Tesla Robotaxi model, literally the objective is to remove the drivers and monetise their avoided salary (and perhaps petrol costs) into the Robotaxi provider revenue win.

It is probably reasonable that the Us government imposes a royalty rate on AI platforms, if only to fund provider of last resort claims on the health care system from potentially larger unemployment.