Let the public share in the rewards of artificial intelligence

The AI layoffs are coming. The Information just reported that the world’s largest private equity firm, Blackstone, is partnering with AI company Anthropic to push a top-down AI overhaul of private equity-owned sectors. Why? To slash jobs across their portfolio of over 250 companies, including healthcare, financial services, and hospitality.

Unfortunately, mass unemployment is only one of the potential harms of the AI revolution underway. AI poses a wide array of public harms that appear set to grow, exponentially, over time. These concerns range from systematic theft to widespread algorithmic discrimination to consolidation of economic and political power in a handful of companies.

While those are huge problems for the public, private shareholders feel little obligation to address them.

How, then, to manage the rising harms of AI? Publicly share the rewards of AI with partial public ownership.

Under our proposal, recently published in the Columbia Journal of Tax Law, systemically important AI firms would pay a new tax with stock, not cash. This stock would not only convey financial value to a publicly managed trust, but it would also grant limited governance powers to the public.

At its core, our AI tax would give the public fractional ownership, alongside private investors, in large AI firms.

There are many appealing features to an AI tax paid with stock. The public would at last be paid back for all the data that was rightfully theirs to begin with, before it was scraped from the internet. The public would also have a........

© The Hill