The Only Way Out is Together

Shared ownership as the answer to AI's impact on work

In a post about her recent op-ed, Silicon Valley-based author Jasmine Sun describes how AI leaders are talking about the impact of AI on employment:

Most people I know in AI think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it.

Sun’s Silicon Valley peers have begun to worry that a white-collar “underclass” is upon us, one just as precarious as the blue-collar workers left behind by Chinese industrialization. The leaders Sun interviews offer thin hope:

[Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark] sees the default path for A.I. as dire: one where we ‘let technology rip, and don’t think about the social effects until later.’ But he also feels optimistic that sufficiently conscientious A.I. builders and policymakers can steer the ship away from the storm.

“Sufficiently conscientious” is doing a lot of work there. When pressed on dealing with those societal effects, most in Silicon Valley point to universal basic income or jobs guarantees. But both will leave us vulnerable to domination by AI companies and the governments that control them, keeping our fingers crossed they prove wise rulers.

More redistribution won’t fix what ails us

In the language of political scientists, Clark is describing welfare capitalism, one of political-economic regimes found wanting by 20th century theorist John Rawls. Rawls similarly discarded laissez-faire capitalism and the command economy as fundamentally unjust. He considered two systems potentially fair enough to consider: liberal democratic socialism and property-owning democracy.

I recently posted a preprint of a paper on the politics AI (readers, please download and share it with your AI-obsessed friends!). In researching it, I became convinced that property-owning democracy—what we call here the ownership economy—could expand our imaginations about what political and economic realities are possible. I believe the answer lies not in redistribution but predistribution. Yes, we should have a stake in the profits generated from the technology built on all recorded human labor, as OpenAI argues in their recent policy paper. But we should also have a say—we should own them.

As artificial intelligence works its way into our workplaces, we should have a stake and a say in the companies where we work, too. The magic of worker/employee ownership is that it doesn’t just resolve the tensions between people with money (capital) and those of us that have to work to get it (labor). It dissolves that distinction by making employees owners. Investors get equity because they put their capital at risk. Workers should get equity, too, because they put their careers at risk when they dedicate their time and energy to building a company.

One last hopeful thing

In another working paper, my co-authors and I write about employee and worker ownership as a source of hope in the face of AI and other assaults on our students’ career prospects. One argument I have been persuaded by in researching for that paper: hope is a collective, not individual.

Compare the collective hopelessness inspired by generative AI to the collective hope inspired by the moon landing, which came from the (mostly) shared sense that humanity was taking a collective step forward. The attitude of many AI leaders, it seems, is more akin to

One small step toward wealth and power for me; one giant windfall for our shareholders; and…we’ll figure out what to do with the rest of you later.

The alternative is to ask now who should be benefiting from and shaping that future, and how. This is what worker and employee ownership ask about workplaces. It’s past time we start asking that about generative AI at the societal level, too.

“Bandra slums and skyscrapers” by Zoshua Colah