“There are two ways in which the public can benefit from any technology: They can own it, or the technology goes in a direction that then generates high wages and high employment,” Acemoglu, the economist, told me. He stressed that the public owning the whole AI sector—turning it into a state-owned enterprise like one you might see in China—isn’t his first choice, though it may be for some on the left.
In any case, Acemoglu said, the key questions should be the same no matter how far to the left someone is: “Can we use this technology to empower people? Because if you do that, it pushes up wages for diverse skills, and that’s the best way of serving the public.”
The theoretical possibilities that kicked off this essay may have creeped you out, or sounded more thorny than they did utopian. I proposed a rudimentary concept along those lines to Chiang, and shared similar ideas with another sci-fi author, Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, since they’re much better storytellers than I, and the fictional scenarios were ultimately shaped by what they said. Chiang, for instance, told me he “certainly wondered about the possibility of a personal AI agent which works on your behalf rather than on a company’s behalf, and whether there’s a viable business model for such a thing.”
I have my own ideas about how or even whether an AI agent that purports to advocate for older people seeking medical care—which, to be clear, does not yet exist—should be a profit-making enterprise. That’s just one of the subjects that ought to be active topics for discussion among people who don’t work in Big Tech. Currently, these questions are being mulled over in the corridors of power, well before the rest of us have the chance to form our own answers.