This is the Fox News headline that triggered my thinking:
This is socialism.
But let's not call it that. Let's call it tax reduction. Or a dividend.
North Dakota claims an ownership interest in the income from the oil and gas found in that state. The result is lower taxes for residents. Fox cheers.
Andrew Yang ran for U.S president in 2019 and 2020 with an idea that seemed fantastical. He said that the U.S. should pay an annual income of $1,000 per month to each and every American citizen. It would replace most public assistance programs, he said. It wasn't welfare. It was our dividend from an ownership interest in the data that Americans have given to our technology companies. That information is valuable -- perhaps as valuable as the revenue businesses get on the margin between what they sell and what it costs them to make what they sell. Businesses, especially tech companies, scraped the data from our libraries with information accumulated over centuries. They gather our universities' research. They collect data from our phone calls, our grocery purchases, the movement of our cars, our electric usage, our traffic cameras, our emails, our TV shows -- the entire wealth of American commerce and culture.
Andrew Yang drew curious crowds trying to absorb the idea that there was value in that data and that it belonged to the people who created it.
A lot has changed in the past six years. Artificial intelligence has become a central issue in our lives and it is creating fortunes that are distorting the economy and our democracy. Companies that are involved in the industry have multitrillion-dollar valuations. The idea that there is value in the information that informs AI doesn't seem crazy at all. It seems obvious. AI is creating value, but it isn't creating information; it is organizing it and giving it back to us. We taught AI what it knows, and are doing so constantly. The raw material that AI processes comes from us.
The political insight to absorb is that the original data is ours, and like the oil beneath the surface of North Dakota and Alaska, and the trees in the forests of O&C counties, the public has a right to a dividend from its extraction and use. We don't deserve all the income from AI, but we deserve some of it.
I don't know the fair amount of income we deserve from the AI Permanent Fund. Let's debate that. It may not be $1,000 per American. Not yet, anyway. But it should be something, and my purpose here is to assert its justice and fairness, and to put Andrew Yang's proposal back on the table.
I start this post with North Dakota and Alaska to make the point that even red-state legislators and Fox News think a certain amount of socialism is a good idea. They aren't calling it socialism, of course; they are calling it tax reduction. That's OK. Alaskans call it a dividend. That's OK, too. Its foundation is a premise that is moral and political: The public has a legitimate claim on raw material resources extracted from within its jurisdiction.
This is an idea with bipartisan potential, so long as Democrats have the sense not to insist it be called "socialism."
The future has caught up with Yang's insight. We aren't supplicants. We are owners. If AI wants our data, and it does, then it needs to pay us for it.
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1 comment:
When the money first started pouring in from the Alaska pipeline, Republicans wanted to spend it on big projects such as bridges and other big ideas instead of a permanent fund. Once the dividend was paid out to the people, the permanent fund became non touchable by politicians as it was too popular. Several Republicans resisted forming the permanent fund as they had big ideas on how to spend it with their friends. After that first payout, they acted like the permanent fund was their idea.
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