What Will Happen When the A.I. Barons Give Back?

By David Wallace-Wells

What do the great fortunes made from artificial intelligence owe the rest of us? Over the last year, as a new class of tech billionaires began to reckon with a growing A.I. backlash, they have floated a number of compensatory proposals, almost like trial balloons for a new social compact: a “universal basic income,” paid in compute; a “New Deal” for A.I.; a commitment to income redistribution; and a “shared A.I. prosperity.” We may be about to get another vision, from what Stripe’s Nan Ransohoff predicted recently would be “the third wave of American philanthropy.” The first wave involved the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, and the second the developmental philanthropy embodied through the Obama years by the Gates foundation and the Giving Pledge. The third, Ransohoff suggests, will be an absolute tidal wave: hundreds of billions of dollars in A.I. wealth, freed up by a........

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