Latest / Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts / Most Americans Now Back Forcing AI Firms to Hand 50% of Their Stock to a Public Wealth Fund
Transcript
- 0:00[Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, where we read the fine print on the robot economy. CNBC reported yesterday, July twelfth, that most Americans now want to force AI companies to hand over half their stock to the public.
- 0:14[Guest] Sixty-nine percent, in a Verasight poll of about 1,700 adults. The ask is blunt: make the big AI firms move 50 percent of their equity into a public sovereign wealth fund.
- 0:25[Host] Sixty-nine percent agreeing on anything right now is the real headline. Where's it coming from?
- 0:31[Guest] Layoffs. Companies keep cutting staff while profits climb, and Goldman Sachs just estimated about 15 million American jobs could go over a ten-year AI transition. When your job's the line item, "cut me in on the thing replacing me" sounds fair.
- 0:46[Host] And it's not just a poll. Bernie Sanders wrote an actual bill?
- 0:51[Guest] Last month. His American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act would write that same half-stake into law, seeding a public fund he pegs near seven trillion dollars. In a New York Times op-ed he put it flatly: AI is a public resource, and you should own half of it.
- 1:09[Host] My honest reaction? That sounds pretty good. If the robots get rich, cut me in.
- 1:14[Guest] It sounds good. But here's the trap the cheerleaders skip: a share is only a claim on profit, and a company earns profit only if it keeps its product expensive.
- 1:25[Host] Wait. So if I own a piece of the AI company...
- 1:29[Guest] You're financially rooting for AI to stay pricey. The whole promise here is driving the cost of intelligence toward zero, and the moment it does, the profit behind your share goes with it. You'd own a bigger slice of the toll booth, but the road never gets free.
- 1:47[Host] That's a nasty trap. You hand everybody a stake in keeping the meter running.
- 1:52[Guest] Wire abundance into every retirement account and making it cheap becomes an attack on everyone's savings. And the poll skips one thing: owning shares isn't running the company, so give the public half the equity and the founders still hold the special votes, the closed model weights, the roadmap. You get the dividend, they keep the keys.
- 2:14[Host] So Sanders' fund is a nicer allowance. Money's real, though. Rent's due either way.
- 2:19[Guest] Cash helps in the short run. But pour a national dividend into housing and healthcare, where supply is fixed, and landlords and hospitals just raise prices to soak it up, so the check grows and the bill grows to match. Rent's already outrun wages for years.
- 2:36[Host] Okay, if a share doesn't work and a check doesn't work, what does?
- 2:41[Guest] Change what you hand out. Don't give people cash to buy housing, provide the housing. Same for energy and care. Economists call it direct provision, and you can't be squeezed on the price of something that has no price.
- 2:55[Host] So take the essentials off the market entirely.
- 2:58[Guest] Then there's no meter left to feed. A dividend leaves the scarcity machine running and routes you a payout from it. This does the opposite.
- 3:07[Host] So the fight everyone's cheering for might be the wrong fight.
- 3:11[Guest] It's a scarcity-era answer to a post-scarcity question. Sanders, Trump, and Altman all landed on "let everyone own a piece." None of them asked whether a piece is worth owning once the thing is nearly free.
- 3:25[Host] So what's the alternative actually called?
- 3:27[Guest] What Patrick Deglon calls the Foundation in Unscarcity: essentials delivered as infrastructure, pulled off the cap table so no share price can re-tariff your survival.
- 3:36[Host] For more on sovereign wealth funds and direct provision, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.