Everybody Should Welcome Nationalizing AI
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Everybody Should Welcome Nationalizing AI<br>ByBen Burgis<br>Bernie Sanders wants to nationalize half the stock of major AI companies and create a sovereign wealth fund for the American people. The case for going even further is stronger than most people realize.
If tech executives are right about the devastating effects their products will have on the livelihoods of massive swaths of the US population, they can hardly turn around and complain that it’s unfair for their companies to be partially nationalized. (Eric Lee / Bloomberg)<br>Our summer issue is out now. Get a discounted subscription to our print magazine today.
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No figure in recent decades has done more to direct public attention and left-wing energy to universalistic left-wing policy proposals than Bernie Sanders. During his two runs for the presidency, he introduced “Medicare for All” into the lexicon of American politics. Now he’s made waves with a proposal to create a sovereign wealth fund by nationalizing half the stock of major AI companies.<br>His rationale is simple and compelling. “Since A.I. is built on the collective knowledge of humanity,” Senator Sanders writes, “the wealth it generates must benefit humanity.”<br>Several prominent tech executives have made apocalyptic predictions about how AI-fueled automation will sweep across the economy, destroying a massive percentage of existing jobs. The industry’s critics argue that most of this is hype. We’ll see.<br>If it turns out that tech executives are telling the truth about the devastating effects their products will have on the livelihoods of massive swaths of the American population, they can hardly turn around and complain that it’s unfair for their industry to be singled out for partial nationalization. If I build a robot that stomps around my neighborhood, destroying my neighbor’s houses and cars and workplaces, and then I sell the robot for hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars, I shouldn’t complain if a judge forces me to put half the profits into a fund to help those neighbors rebuild their lives. I should be grateful that he let me keep the other half.<br>Libertarians may be tempted to argue that no one deserves redress because of suffering incurred by automation and other by-products of letting the chips fall where they may in a free market, and that taking away some of the stock of OpenAI or Anthropic against the will of the current owners is a morally unacceptable transgression against property rights. Even on classical libertarian principles, though, it’s far from clear that this argument would go through in this case.<br>Twentieth-century libertarian thinkers like Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard built on the seventeenth-century theories of John Locke. The Lockean conception of property rights emphasizes origins. If Person A buys something from Person B who was given it as a gift by Person C, the legitimacy of the whole chain depends on C’s claim. Someone who starts a farm by homesteading previously unowned land, for example, is engaged in what Nozick called a “just act of original acquisition.”
Some of the most thoughtful libertarians have realized that, to be consistent, in some cases they have to recognize collective claims to just original acquisition. Libertarian philosopher Roderick Long offers this example:<br>Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time, the way is cleared and a path forms — not through any centrally coordinated effort, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking that way day after day.<br>The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned.
This is exactly what John Locke thought a just act of original acquisition looked like. Person C mixes his labor with the natural world and thus forms a property claim that can ground any subsequent claims made by B and A. In this case, however, Person C is a whole village.<br>If you believe that intellectual property works like property claims on objects in the physical world, then the use of the collective intellectual products of the human race as the foundation of large language models (LLMs) looks a great deal like Long’s village-created path to the lake. Trying to...