AI development and expansion is rocketing across our society, sparkling and bright like a Roman candle, but with its tail on fire. The disruptions are coming so fast, and the concerns are rising so quickly, that no one, not even those running the biggest AI companies, knows what to do. Instead of addressing issues like AI slop, job loss, self-replicating and developing AI running amok, and data centers, these AI bosses have come up with a better solution: cold, hard cash.
On Monday, Elon Musk casually posted on his X platform that he would give one of his SpaceX shares to every child in America, with the promise of more to come. Over at Anthropic, Dario Amodei proposed a public fund built on the value of 5% of his company’s shares when it goes public next month.
Of the two offers, Anthropic has the most obvious value. The company might be worth a trillion dollars when it goes public in November, which means the fund will be close to $50 billion. That’s a lot of money.
Whether it’s $150 (the approximate value of a SpaceX share) or $5 billion, neither offer actually addresses AI’s myriad issues. None of this equals regulation, oversight, a pause, or a concrete global discussion about a technology that may in 12 months’ time be able to do any of our jobs, access most of our systems, and start making decisions on our behalf. None address the real-time, growing cybersecurity threats posed by AI that can crack any encryption and set off Denial of Service attacks at unimaginable scales.
But how?
Let’s leave aside all that for a moment and talk about the nuts and bolts of these proposals.
First of all, there’s the question of how Elon Musk is going to give every one of the 72 million children in America a stock grant (assuming — a big assumption — he follows through). There are ways of doing this (custodial accounts, transfer to a brokerage, even platforms like GiveaShare that support stock gifts for children). Trump Account recently did something similar (sort of tiny Individual Retirement Accounts for pint-sized people). However, when those stocks go in there, they’re not something the children will access now or in the near future.
What would be the value of $150? A couple of toys, a few outfits? More likely, what’s going to happen here is those SpaceX shares will sit and maybe accumulate value (maybe not), and then, when the child is an adult looking for one of the few jobs AI has not taken over, they’ll use it to help support themselves for a little while. Maybe buy a meal.
Those SpaceX shares will sit and maybe accumulate value (maybe not), and then, when the child is an adult looking for one of the few jobs AI has not taken over
As for Amodei’s Anthropic offer, well, it is a lot of money, but once you set up the fund, you’d figure out how to manage it and allocate it. Who is going to control that fund, and how will it be parceled out? Will it, for instance, go to every individual state? Will it go to schools, grade schools, maybe high schools, maybe universities? Will it be used to set up AI curriculum? If so, what curriculum built now will be useful a decade from now? Those billions could be used, but they’ll have to be sort of churned and replenished so that new curriculum could be built (probably by AI).
I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen because it could just be for job training centers, retraining for new jobs that people have never done before, but that AI cannot reasonably do. Maybe Anthropic will be funding trade schools. I have yet to see an AI plumber or electrician, though I guess eventually the robots will be skilled enough to run a pipe or fix a circuit.
Of the two plans, I have far less confidence in Musk to hand over those 72 million shares because he’s made promises like this before and has not carried through. It becomes a bit of a show, a flurry of hands and a digital wink to convince people that he actually cares, but there’s no indication that he really does beyond the growth of his company and personal wealth.
Money for something
Now, these things are not mutually exclusive. I do believe we need money to help retrain vast workforces in this AI age, and that should happen sooner as opposed to later. And sure, you know, giving a child a share is not a terrible gesture, a little something to put aside for later, for a rainy day, or a day when they realize that the AI is in control and the only way they can buy food is directly from another person because the AI is running the grocery store.
I have yet to see an AI plumber or electrician, though I guess eventually the robots will be skilled enough to run a pipe or fix a circuit.
Maybe though, Anthropic’s Fund could be used to figure out a better, more environmentally and community-friendly way to build data centres, perhaps in places where both people and wildlife don’t need to live (space, underground). I don’t know what the answer is to that, but that research needs to happen.
It’s unclear if either one of these monetary plans will actually come through, but one thing I can guarantee is that AI is not slowing down. Yes, there’s probably a coming correction, and there may be more consolidation, but the trajectory is set. It will continue, and if we don’t get people together to actually talk about how we’re managing this revolution, no amount of money is going to solve our AI problems.
