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The Long Arc of History Bends Towards Social Democracy
AI capabilities are advancing at a faster rate than our institutional response. Soon, a transformative technology will crash into the capitalist political economy, presenting risks to humanity’s survival, autonomy, and democratic order. Especially concerning is the possibility that vast amounts of power and wealth are concentrated into the class that owns the AI systems, or uses those systems to override democratic control. Silicon Valley talks flippantly of a ‘Permanent Underclass’ - and they intend for you to belong to it.
Upon the automation of most, and then plausibly all, jobs, we will face an unprecedented crisis of technological unemployment, with gains from a technology trained on the corpus of humanity’s data concentrated into the hands of a small class of shareholders. Large language models are not conjured from nothing. They are trained on vast quantities of text, images, and code scraped from the internet and digitized archives. The models are, in a meaningful sense, derivative works of collective human effort. They are also built on publicly-funded infrastructure: the internet itself, the universities that educated AI researchers, the government grants that supported foundational research, the public datasets that enabled early breakthroughs. DARPA funding seeded neural network research. Public universities trained the PhDs. The data came from all of us. This is a commons being enclosed.
Given their lack of interest in the welfare of humanity as a whole, the AI companies have resisted pressure from civil society and government to abide by safety standards , even as they recognize potential for catastrophic risks. Clearly, the most transformative technology since agriculture should not be left in private hands. The default trajectory is extreme concentration of benefits but socialized risks.
Thus, the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global ought to purchase OpenAI and manage it for the benefit of the international community.
GPF-G is valued at over $2 Trillion, and OpenAI’s valuation hovers around $800 billion. Formerly, OpenAI was a non-profit , with capped profits and a windfall clause guaranteeing an intelligence explosion would benefit all of humanity. With the approval of the California Attorney General, this commitment has been scrapped, expropriating the non-profit and allowing OpenAI’s transformation into a for-profit corporation. This is an impossibly deep loss for the human community. With the capital of Norwegian Social-Democracy, we can return the lab to public hands. Though Norges Bank Investment Management would have to liquid 40% of its portfolio and violate the GPF-G’s mandate , accelerating AI capabilities in private hands is an emergency that all actors must approach with increasing flexibility towards existing rules and norms.