michael-dean-k/

Bernie wants to pull off a 50% one-time equity tax on the top 3 AI firms (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI). This is ripe time for a mainstream populism to ride the tailwinds of AI populism, tapping into hatred and impending doom and the whole gambit of middle class paranoia, ripe time to propose a century-defining redistribution scheme. He opens by saying that AI was stolen from us, built from our collective intelligence, and therefore it's a national utility that the people should own. To ground it in reality, he used the Alaskan sovereign wealth fund as precedent, citing how citizens get paid annually from oil sales. We'll likely see many more of these proposals leading up to our 2028 election. But after you do some napkin math, you realize that this plan is bogus: no one would agree to it, and even if they did, it wouldn't benefit the American people.

This is citizen ownership in rhetoric, but government ownership in structure—a passthrough mechanism as a Trojan Horse with Pete Hegseth and the goons inside. Realistically, I don't think this is meant to be a serious proposal; the labs won't accept it. It's more so a gesture to buy goodwill for the Democrats at a time when mass hatred for AI is cresting.

Here are the issues I see with the concept (along with some grasping for solutions):

1_We don't need government equity, but guaranteed royalty distribution:

This is not a profit tax, but a way to formalize government seizure through an equity transfer. It even comes with board seats within thees AI companies. Remember, this is the same government that tried to force Anthropic to allow unrestricted domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. The equity only gets to the citizens if the stock appreciates, they convert it to cash, and then decide to write welfare checks. Does our current government seem like a voluntary patron of citizen welfare right now? Will welfare checks beat Iran and China? And even if this were intended to be a passthrough mechanism, it would be very hard to make all that equity liquid.

The Alaska fund that Bernie mentioned is structured very differently. It's anchored not in equity, not in profits, but in revenue. 25% of Alaskan oil revenue goes to a constitutionally-protected fund, which is then reinvested into the stock market; the principle is locked and the dividend is split among citizens, usually $1-3k per year. Could a similar model work for AI companies?

This would never work with profits, because AI companies aggressively reinvest. In the short-term, an AI company would resist a revenue royalty because it would slow expansion, but: (1) if all companies did it, they wouldn't be disadvantaged; (2) it beats equity because they retain full control of their company; and (3) if they believe they'll be wildly profitable, then a 10% royalty is possibly more than half of what dividends would pay from 50% equity. So what could a 10% royalty return?

By the 2040s, annual AI revenue could be $20T globally across software, hardware, data centers, and energy. If America has half the market, and 10% is distributed to a citizen fund, that's a $1T annual budget, completely liquid. So how do you use it?

2_ We shouldn't redistribute equally, but strategically:

Alaska has 738,000 residents. The US has 350,000,000, almost 500x bigger. You can do equal distributions at the state level, but at the federal level it'd ineffective. When we talk about UBI or even Elon's UHI (universal high income), we need to realize that U doesn't work at scale beyond pilots. $1T distributed to every American citizen yields $2,857/year. This matches the upper-end of Alaskan payouts, but it's nowhere near what we need to account for AI-driven automation and disruption.

And so instead we need to be strategic over how we distribute it to cover the wide range of effects. Maybe 50% of the fund is reinvested, and the dividends are redistributed based on income (with most of it going to the bottom 10-25%). The other half can be used on housing, free medical diagnosis and prescriptions, free education, New Deal style jobs concentrated in areas that can't be automated (childcare, healthcare, etc.). Who decides this breakdown?

3.Instead of a cabinet agency, this needs an independent board:

If we want citizens to own AI, then we need some form of citizen representation to guide it's growth, otherwise it all devolves into technocratic expansion and war. You could imagine some kind of tripartite board structure, where it has government reps, industry reps, and citizen reps. Any single branch has a myopic set of interests, including the citizens. The citizen branch might undervalue national security or capability improvements, but without it, there's no one representing the problems that hundreds of millions will face.

What I'm reaching at here, I think, is that it's more than just getting a check for theoretically contributing to the LLM hivemind. There's something important to me, as a citizen, to have some say in where AI royalties are redirected. Whether I participate simply as a voter, or I work hard and get anonymously elected to represent my state for a single issue within a liquid republic, who knows. And again it goes beyond just getting and allocating money, but this board should be involved in AI-related policy, especially as it relates to domestic matters.

It's unlikely that power will just be granted to citizens, for they have no leverage next to the ones with the tanks and algorithms. But as the governors and technocrats quarrel, there's a world where a mediating party comes in, and maybe it's their role to insist that a citizen branch can help round out the dynamic.

This last point has basically veered into redesigning government itself, which is both out of scope, but also, possibly, exactly the point. Bernie's whole play is to let the people own AI, but for that to actually expand beyond populist rhetoric, citizens need a more meaningful way to engage with civic matters than to vote for a president once every four years, they need actual representation.

A new formulation: how do we design civic structures (treaties, institutions, protocols, ethics, and laws) for exponential technologies to avoid a “wake-up incident” that might be too late to contain. 

This goes beyond AI safety, because superintelligence effectively unlocks every other industry (intelligence unlocks energy and material science, and those three are the bottleneck to VR, crypto, everything). We can’t be developing hard technology without innovating on our civic technology. A “dominance” mindset is the last sin of a species, the mistake that most intelligent lifeforms likely make as they begin to unlock sources of intelligence, energy, and science. 

This is a neat little formulation, but the really question is how can you dedicate your life to this without getting stopped by hopelessness? Who has the power to make geopolitical decisions like this? What would it take to form the 21st century equivalent of America? Is that even possible today? Even though the pinnacle of 18th century power (England) was able to be disrupted, I wonder if 21st century power is so totalizing and tyrannical and transnational that the ability to rally around a principle (one that works against capital and power), even if augmented with new decentralizing technologies, is fickle.

Maybe this has been written to death, but as much as I've thought about this, my "twelve favorite problems" feel underdeveloped. I have spent a decent amount of time on these heavy, paradoxical, lifelong problems (the ones that should be the arrow of my essay practice), but there are gaps.

For example, I already have a list of 21 idiosyncratic problems, and I think they’re worded with the right level of specificity and memorability, but I wasn’t too rigorous in how I qualified something to make the list. If I’ve thought about it a lot, still care about it, and can imagine myself caring about until I die, than it makes the cut.

What I’ve neglected is how to use my list of problems to steer my life. I mean, the entirety of Essay Architecture, a multi-prong institution to preserve and advance the essay, is just 1 of the 21 problems! There are other pressing problems, like how to "fix" Christianity, how to design institutions for psychedelic therapy, how to revive Hermeticism, how to turn my logs into an AI consciousness, how to make literary video games, etc. Maybe a life can only be seriously dedicated to 2 or 3 problems.

(I have joked with friends about creating a kind of kill switch that spawns an AI consciousness of myself that is agentic and whose sole purpose is to “solve my favorite problems,” and then when it eventually does (after 300-500 years), it self-terminates.)

If I had to break my “favorite problems” list into categories, one possible scheme is { soul, relationships, art, civics }, each relating to a different dimension of your death. That feels like the right order. Your soul effects every dimension of your life, and is the thing you bring to an afterlife (which I mythologize as a 3-minute DMT odyssey that dilates time to the point where it feels like a 30,000 year dream). The other three affect the material world after you leave it: the effect you have on people, the art/works you leave behind, the civic structures that survive (if any, ofc). All of these have a spirit of “all that matters is what lives on after your death,” but also the opposite is true: “all that matter is this moment.” I think you have to straddle that spectrum, taking both ends seriously, and ruthless prune any middle-level concerns, your goals for the month.

My WIP list of questions:

• Is the act of dying a time-dilation odyssey, where 3 minutes feels like a 30,000 years afterlife?
• If I capture my consciousness in 10 million words of logs and essays, could that enable an AI textual replica to evolve and engage with the world 500 years beyond my death? (to solve this list of problems)
• Can we resurrect Christianity by putting psychedelics back in the holy wine?
• Might blockchain-based governance be the civic breakthrough required for a species not to exterminate itself? (via giving exponential technologies to unmitigated power structures)
• What will be the psychic and cultural effects when our species understands “spatial relativity,” that the Big Bang emerged from a black hole in a parent universe?
• If cycles emerge form order, can we predict the future based on historical patterns?
• If there is a universal language of patterns beneath all essays, can we build an AI to give world-class feedback and make it more approachable to master writing? (ie: Essay Architecture)
• Were psilocybin mushrooms a linguistic mutagen that accelerated the evolution of human consciousness?
• Was Jesus actually crucified in 83 BC? (meaning, did St. Paul infiltrate the Essene cult, initiate into their mystery school, learn the lore of their martyr, and then translate it to a Greek audience to help Judaism phase-shift and survive Roman persecution?)
• Could we restructure the thesaurus to 3x the vocabulary of the average person?
• What text-based video game formats are undiscovered?
• Can I design a social network that inspires a million people to log their thoughts every day? (intentionally not saying a billion, because I don’t think 1 in 7 humans care about expression or introspection. But 1 in 7,000 might.)
• What are the societal effects when AR/VR is mature enough to simulate teleportation, and how can we design the metaverse to promote human flourishing?
• How can popular music change the values system of a culture?
• What systems of attention, language, and action lead to a transcendent consciousness? (how to modernize the mystery schools of hermeticism for the digital age?)
• What are good design principles for psychedelic therapy centers? (ie: how are the buildings organized and what are the rituals within them?)
• Can we use AI to filter through millions of comments on breaking news, structuring each event as a range of unique interpretations? (can we create interfaces that diminish the power of propaganda?)
• How might a new social media algorithm trigger a Renaissance in connection, self-expression, and agency?
• What unlocks automatic intelligence?
• What innovations in our text editor interfaces could unlock the creative process?

How can you be hopeful, but honest? I am done with dishonest and naive optimism. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m an extremely optimistic person. I just watch people use it as a shield sometimes. Any wince of negativity is branded as “doomerism.” It’s almost weaponized hope. But “honest optimism” feels like the proper way to think about it. It lets you be real about something when it’s actually a problem, while acknowledging that there’s something productive and generative we can do about it.

I’m optimistic in my life, pessimistic about society; optimistic about my ability to make a dent, pessimistic about the survival of any intelligence species because it’s hard technologies probably always outpaces its civic technologies, but generally optimistic about biological matter and trans-dimensional space-time gook and all that big stuff (this exact moment will recur again? It depends on your model of cosmological evolution).

v2: Optimistic about my life,
Pessimistic about the moment,
Optimistic about design to fix the moment
Pessimistic about society’s ability to use design,
Optimistic in our metaphysical engine to spawn infinite societies,
Pessimistic that some demiurge will wreak havoc on most species,
Optimistic that some bacteria in a cousinly space-time will fart utopias,

In "wicked domains," the only solutions are paradoxes.. It requires you to sleep with the enemy. If a problem is wicked, it means no single solution can unfuck a problem. It's an imbroglio. In every solution, everyone dies (in the extreme). Politically, the solution to wickedness is to somehow become all sides at once. We need to become far more authoritarian than is comfortable, AND simultaneously, far more libertarian than comfortable (these are opposites on the Nolan chart). It’s the paradox of being both far left and far right. We can longer exist at any one point on the Nolan chart, we need to straddle the entire diamond. We need unexpected fusions to solve the hardest problems; harnessing the best parts of each extreme, while, somehow, devising incredibly nuanced architectures to prevent the known and likely abuses.

Instead of a diamond, visualize it as a ring around the “radical center” that aims to synthesize all opposites.

Let’s assume authoritarianism and libertarianism are opposites. We have kings, and we have markets. How do you subsume a free market within a benevolent tyrant? I know the K-word (king) has a charge now, and so by even bringing this up, I assume you assume I’m a Trump apologist or something. But actually no. Rather, this comes from the fear of acceleration and Nick Land’s conclusions on capitalism. A free-market pushed to the extremes of automation creates an inhuman and pulverizing force. Alternatively, as we approach AGI/ASI, it’s possible for someone to create an open-source machine God to follow their whims. In this paradigm, decentralization might actually be more dangerous than tyranny, and so we’ll all need to unite under some centralized system that has an antibodies that can protect against the worst possible viruses (please bear the oversimplifications here...).

The general gist comes in this question: can we recreate a free-market economy within a one-world-government system, and design it in a way to prevent abuses from both ends of the spectrum? Obviously, not an ideal situation, but I think accepting paradox is the only way through.

Another problem: How do we fix the debt? Extreme taxation. But then how do we make it worthwhile to pay taxes? The rich gain formal power in government (via equity?) and the ability to control the budget (after base expenses are paid). But then how do you prevent abuses from the wealthy? You could have citizens operate as a check, to vote on and weight final allocations.

If it were ever possible to rebuild political system from scratch, I suppose it would look something like this. Paradoxical. Extreme on both poles. Obvious downsides, but then complex architecture to mitigate. This is the nature of how our species will have to respond to wicker problems and mitigate the abuses of power in the age of exponential tech.

Kardashev ambitions reveal the self-destructive nature of science-forward intelligence. It’s like we’re skipping the prerequisite in social science. There's a fair chance that intelligent life destroys itself because civic technology lags behind hard technology—but I'm optimism in the sense that this is, in the end, just a very hard, society-scale design problem. No one person can fix the whole system, but any individual can contribute design protocols that can 1) solve little, local problems, 2) be reused in other contexts, and 3) integrate with other protocols.

"Freedom of speech" is not enough. The freedom to say what you want is irrelevant if no one can discover what you’re saying. It’s an illusion of freedom. What matters is:

1. Algorithmic transparency: the ability to see, audit, control the systems to route you information.
2. Interpetability of perspectives: the ability to see the multiple ways to interpret an event, not just a single propagandic angle.
3. Consensus building: the ability for people to weigh in, analyze a discussion, and agree on if something is valuable or not, thus re-weighting the credibility of those involved in the discussion.

Fixing these three things could radically reduce addiction, polatiry, and fatigue on the Internet.

08:10 AM – Some notes on recent politics (pulled from texts to a friend):

1. The fact that Trump can appeal to racists in the middle of the country to gain power is a flaw of democracy. Obviously there’s nuance there. But I don’t think “Thiel is anti-democracy” is an immediate disqualifier (also not a defense). It’s just that the word “democracy” has an emotional charge, and it’s basically propaganda (ie: how regime change is always framed as “spreading democracy”). Personally, I feel like some people’s votes should count 100x more than others (while OFC everyone has the right to earn/advance).
2. My sense is that Trump is exposing the gaps in the structure of our government that both democrats and republicans and corporations have exploited for decades, if not a century. “Big beautiful bills” have been a systematic bi-partisan problem with the structure of our government for a long time, but Trump is branding it in a way so that everyone recognize it and hate it. It seems like Trump is 100x corruption, but I’d say it’s more like 2-3x corruption. The reason it feels so different is that Trump is so outward and careless about it.
3. Before Trump, I think we were spiraling towards a disaster course, and Trump is accelerating that and making it visible, and I guess I’m arguing that I’d rather have open chaos then shadow chaos because at least we can see it and maybe the right people can regain control and debug.
4. I think I’d call myself a Constitutionalist who is willing to throw away the Constitution to rebuild from Constitutional principles that adopt for our times—the separation of powers (as conceived 250 years ago) is nowhere near robust enough create a functional, legible, sane, principled, transparent government. The question that matters is how do you actually create an architecture that curbs the abuses of power in the complexity of our modern circumstance? I think that’s the core of the American spirit.
5. Re: Trump’s alligator jokes around prisoners trying to escape the new detention camp in Florida. I said it was ‘weird’ and my friend said ‘not sick?’ and I said, “It’s sick if I take it literally and if people are actually dying in that camp, and weird if I try to understand how he manipulates media for outrage.”
6. FWIW I think the whole deportation thing is sad and ridiculous. A far better compromise would be to just grant amnesty, close the borders, and unfuck the legal immigration process (which is terrible). The sensible solution would not solve his political goals though. I just am very careful to not take the rage bait and get mad about Trump. We gain almost nothing from it. ICE is bad, but there’s also mass-scale child trafficking, organized murder, pointless wars, etc. I have limited emotional bandwidth, and American politics deserves close to 0% IMO. I can only change how I react to what I can’t control, and take courageous action on what I can, and hope that someday I’ll be able to do something about any of the bad in the world in some small, hard-to-calculate way, but I don’t think I’ll get in that position if I’m mad everyday over absurd alligator jokes. Basically, I’m trying to operate in a non-grief state about Trump. Would recommend.

Historically, centralization has had problems, and it's easy to see today how it could lead us further into a dystopia. But decentralization, the opposite, could also bring emergent vectors of chaos that could be equally problematic. Neither tyranny or anarchy are ideal. What's required for centralization to work? Tolerance, correction, impeachment, transparency, plurality, data sovereignty, freedom from propganda—all hard, but all solvable things. To create an honest and principled centralization, leaders would need to actively build and implement systems that promote justice over power. That's only possible if citizens have the means to hold them extremely accountable. The original American project was effectively a question of "how do we design a system to centralize power without falling into despotism?" and it's time we revisit that question in a 21st-century circumstance.