Will OpenAI keep its promise to 'Keep People First?'
Lawmakers would do well to hold OpenAI to the values that it’s aligned itself with.
On Monday, OpenAI published the broad strokes of its plan to “Keep People First” as America continues our ever-quickening march towards an AI economy. The $852-billion company’s policy recommendations should obviously be taken with a grain of salt. After all, it has an existential financial interest in ensuring that our economy adopts AI at a broad scale. So it’s a safe bet to assume that OpenAI isn’t being entirely selfless in its proposals for how to best regulate the industry that’s making its shareholders fabulously wealthy.
But there’s a solid foundation of redistributive ideas in OpenAI’s (very general) framework for “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age” that tracks nicely with how we at Searchlight are thinking about AI.
Lawmakers would do well to hold OpenAI to the values that it’s aligned itself with. At the end of the day, what’s the point of massive economic growth if it’s not leveraged to create wealth for everyone?
Now’s the time to go BIG
If the hype is to be believed, AI will redefine what it means to be a “worker” to a degree that we maybe haven’t seen since the advent of the assembly line. With that hypothetical but increasingly likely future would come significant upheaval to our labor market that would demand a public response on par with the New Deal.
That’s precisely why, in their new paper, Searchlight’s Will Raderman and Alex Mechanick of the Niskanen Center argue that Congress should use this moment as an opportunity to expand existing unemployment and re-employment programs that benefit all workers — not just those who can prove that their jobs were eliminated due to AI.
Searchlight’s own polling confirms that the number one anxiety Americans have about AI is its potential to replace jobs and cause unemployment, so it’s encouraging to see OpenAI align with Searchlight’s recommendations and actually take worker concerns seriously by proposing “Adaptive safety nets that work for everyone.”
It’s not all sunshine and roses though. Federal re-employment programs enacted more recently than the New Deal have come up short due to their narrowness of scope — AKA a failure to Go Big. OpenAI flirts with some of those shortcomings by proposing a “package of temporary, expanded safety nets” to provide assistance to workers affected by “industry-specific displacement” — a recommendation which harkens back to the restrictive eligibility requirements of the now-defunct Trade Adjustment Assistance program. Congress should stay far away from such limiting policy that would prevent workers from getting benefits.
AI companies should pay into the system
An inevitable byproduct of AI hyperscaling is more strain on our already aging grid infrastructure. We’re starting to see the political consequences in the ubiquitous conversation around data centers.
Policymakers should see this moment not as something to run away from, but as an opportunity to seize on the data center buildout for grid modernization, as Searchlight’s senior fellow Jane Flegal recommended in her paper calling for the creation of an American Grid Infrastructure Fund. In its framework, OpenAI put itself on the record in support of such a proposal. Congress shouldn’t forget that.
What’s next?
Congress should not cede the role of managing the direction of AI’s growth to the AI companies themselves. Instead, policymakers should lean into the leverage they possess at this moment. It is presenting policymakers with a generational opportunity to go big, think creatively, challenge assumptions, and double down on America’s basic social contract. They should take it.
I read this policy doc this afternoon. I was encouraged that somewhat finally addressed the elephant in the room. Aka what about all the peeps who lose their jobs or in the case of loan bearing graduates never get jobs
A wealth tax
An AI premium
A solution for healthcare and pensions.
Great job!.
I really liked the idea of a shorter working week and an AI premium paid for out of corporation tax and capital gains. The recognition that the individual taxation will fall, and people will lead different lives
This is a topic I am currently exploring in my novel Driverless
What might be a positive outcome for normal working people.
How can we reach a human utopia powered by robots and Ai, as opposed to the normal dystopias we normally see depicted in film and on TV.
I know my work is only fiction, but it is a utopia, and the more positive voices we have, the more likely we will reach a better conclusion.
So in answer to your question, I want to believe OpenAI or at least give them a chance, now they have shown a generous hand…
If you actually want to know how I see the future, the good, the bad and the dreadful, wel Driverless speculates about what a future dominated by AI, Autonomous vehicles & robots might look like.
The Novel is a road trip featuring Scarlett England's last trucker, but as she passes through different EU countries she sees how they have responded to this revolution of work in different ways with radically different outcomes for their inhabitants.
What I was trying to do was find a best possible solution: Switzerland and contrast it with half-hearted reform; the UK and full on chaos: Hungary and it gets worse…
https://sallyannmeliascifi.substack.com/p/driverless-by-s-a-melia-table-of?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=tuoc9
The impact of AI on the world is a many layered problem. At it's core, however, lies the same motivation as other technological marvels served up to us by the billionaire class: a desire to monetize and control our lives. Unless our leaders act quickly, events will overtake our society and AI will actively eliminate many jobs, and otherwise demand that almost every remaining working person adapt and assimilate or similarly be discarded from the the workforce. Indeed, that is already happening. Anyone that has used AI to code or solve complex problems knows that to be true. AI is not a societal transition, such as the industrial revolution, which was in comparison merely transformative. AI is a fundamental switch in the relationship between humans and machines. Like climate change, we see the effects of AI all around us. And yet, we continue to go about our daily lives, oblivious to its effects, and stuck in a reactive loop to the latest cattle prod that is applied. Rein-in the billionaire class or continue onward to the milking machine.