As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to transform economies, an old argument from the industrial age is returning in a new form. A Pope, a socialist senator, a populist president, and a Silicon Valley mogul are all grappling with the same question: Who should own the wealth that AI is generating?

The issue has come into sharp policy focus as President Donald Trump prepares to meet America’s leading AI firms at the White House to discuss an idea that would once have seemed unthinkable — giving the American public a financial stake in the companies that are profiting most from the AI revolution.

Last week, Bernie Sanders, the lone socialist in the US Senate, proposed an American AI sovereign wealth fund financed by a one-time transfer of 50 per cent of shares from the largest AI companies. Late last month, Pope Leo XIV devoted the first encyclical of his pontificate to the ethical and social challenges posed by the unfolding AI revolution.

These are different men with contradictory ideologies shaping their worldviews. But they are revisiting one of the oldest questions of modern politics: Who benefits from technological change — capital or labour? How do we balance the creation of massive wealth by new technologies with the imperatives of economic and social equity?

It is fitting that a Pope named Leo should raise this old question about the new technological revolution. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum Novarum, in an important religious response to the rise of modern capitalism. Europe........

© Indian Express