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.

Universal basic income is a basic phrase. It’s only one of several approaches to reattribute wealth after our social contract nullifies.

One alternate idea is universal basic compute (UBC), which is about giving everyone free access to the most powerful AI models. Sam Altman recently said that UBI might not work, and we should try UBC instead. This is even more unlikely to work. Giving someone Claude Mythos, the killer model, doesn’t mean they can turn prompts into dinner. Access doesn’t guarantee results. It faces similar odds as entrepeneurship. But maybe it has enough agency so all you have to do is write “make me $10,000 this week”—in that case, everyone will run it, and then it’ something like a lottery, where some machines happen to beat other machines.

The more likely route is universal basic services (UBS), where a government or company provides you, for free, all the things you used to need money for: healthcare, education, housing, transportation, food. The engineering elite will harness their superintelligence to achieve such radical efficiencies that the cost of everything will crater. Maybe it's cheap enough to become a trivial expense. This is a nice idea, one where I can imagine myself focused completely on my art, with no need to slave away for a wage anymore. It’s also science fiction. I don’t doubt that this can happen in 20 or 30 years, but labor shock is coming a lot faster (in less than 5), meaning there will be a transition generation of turbulence.

Then there’s universal basic dividends (UBD) and universal basic equity (UBE), in which citizens get shares of collectively-owned assets, like shares in a frontier AI lab or robotics company. OpenAI was originally set up for something like this, until it weaseled out of it’s non-profit entity.

All of these have the same critical flaw, the U. Whether it’s a government or company, you can’t meaningfully redistribute to 7 billion people without destroying the parent entity. Instead, we may be looking down the barrel of a new definition of labor, less focused on productive output, and unfortunately, more so on data and attention, what a citizen truly has to offer in the eyes of a state. We'll find something to exchange for the money and services to flow down, but it won’t be unconditional. I suppose a contract, by definition, is never unconditional, and so neither should a social contract.

Revolutionary tax proposal #1: anything above $100m/year is taxed at 90%, but in exchange for political equity in the country (ie: delegation and voting). It formalizes lobbying and makes it transparent. To prevent the rich from steering the country too hard in their favor, there can be provisions where legislators, citizens, and oligarchs have checks and balances. Ie: to put it kidishly simple, each can have a 33% stake in directing that taxation. Another way to think of it is forced investment in pre-approved pro-American funds, companies, etc.

TBF: I have little sense of what I'm talking about in these matters. But the general context behind this is that power dynamics organically took control of the country and defied the spirit of the founding architecture. I assume there are many examples on how the Constitution and it's amendments dit not protect the original vision. And so the principal is to understand how power actually moves and work with it; don't kill it or shun it, but formalize it into legal structures, make it transparent, and then force it to comply with specific standards that muzzle and channel it's wolf power.

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.

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.

Banning social media accounts (in Australia), by age (16), feels heavy-handed.

A better solution is to (1) verify identity and age, (2) implement a standard where features have categories and ratings, and then (3), spin up a custom version of that social media site based on age. For example, 5-year olds shouldn’t be limited from YouTube, but maybe there are content blackouts, no vertical video shortform feed, no comments, etc. As you age (/mature), the platform blooms in functionality