Bernie Sanders wants to wreck AI
It’s often said that “politics makes strange bedfellows.” Even a partial agreement on anything between Bernie Sanders and President Trump is peculiar. Yet, to a certain extent, they both want A.I. companies to share their wealth with everyday Americans (though Sanders’s proposal to seize 50 percent of stock in A.I. companies, diverting it to a sovereign wealth fund, is much more extreme). Oh, dear — I thought we wanted to lead the A.I. race.
Advertisement
Sanders insists that A.I.-generated wealth must benefit humanity. He says it belongs to people, not billionaires; entrapped by his socialist dogma, he myopically views A.I. as a public resource. Though he doesn’t go as far as Sanders (who also wants to tax the lifeblood out of A.I. companies), Trump is open to the U.S. taking ownership stakes in large A.I. companies so that everyday Americans can “share in the upside.”
They already do! Although precise returns are debated, the average 401(k) balance is up substantially over the past couple of years. More generally, stocks market indices are rocketing to all-time highs, and the inexorable trajectory is largely fueled by A.I. companies and their derivatives. Not only do millions of Americans benefit from that wealth creation via various retirement accounts, but participation is democratizing thanks to Trump Accounts.
Advertisement
Clearly, what Sanders is dogmatically demanding is already happening, but much more efficiently than the overseers of public resources could ever implement: A.I.-generated wealth is cascading to the masses. (Even job growth remains perky despite dire warnings of A.I.’s impact.) But will the wealth creation shrivel to a drivel if treated as a “public resource” under socialist government auspices?
That question leads to a consideration of “the tragedy of the commons.” One interpretation of the tragedy is that public resources are overused (and misused) by individuals at the expense of the common good. Here are some examples that predate A.I. (which, remember, Sanders categorizes as a “public resource”).
Advertisement
One of the great philosophers of antiquity contemplated the productivity ramifications of communal ownership. Here's Aristotle:
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few.
Advertisement
Before returning to the socialistic ramifications of sharing (a euphemistic word if ever there was one) A.I.’s wealth, let’s review a few of the many events that corroborate Aristotle’s insights:
As is well documented, A.I. data centers consume vast amounts of electricity (a public utility), sometimes raising rates for local residents. To alleviate this, leading A.I. companies have signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, promising to “build, bring, or buy new generation resources and cover the cost of all power delivery infrastructure upgrades required for their data centers, ensuring such expenses are not passed to American households.” Better them than the public resource planners in their socialist bureaus.
Advertisement
In advancing his plan for a 50-percent stake in A.I. companies, Sanders proposed that “since AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.” That’s simplistic even for a socialist. Contrasted to the original reactive assistants, Agentic A.I. plans and executes complex, multi-step tasks. It is capable of creating new content and new data — data that, if residing in the commons, would remain underutilized, even undetected.
If Sanders and his socialist ilk were in charge, it’s likely the internet itself would not have developed so robustly. Consider DARPA, the government-sponsored precursor to the internet: Socialists tout it as an industrial policy success. Indeed, the underlying infrastructure and protocols of the internet are based on the work of DARPA. However, the DARPA network lay mostly dormant for decades until private innovation transformed the underutilized “public resource” of the commons into the vast networking conduit for information-sharing, commerce, data, meeting, entertainment, socializing, messaging, etc., etc.
Advertisement
Once again, Aristotle’s wisdom proves timeless: Publicly designated resources are prone to the tragedy of the commons. Implementing Sanders’s plan to redistribute A.I. wealth would be tragic for us, but a windfall for the Chinese. No doubt, he’ll be salivating over quantum computing next.
