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A recent poll shows that a majority of U.S. employees are now dissatisfied with increased layoffs in the technology sector, even as overall corporate profits have increased, and would like to see more corporate accountability through an AI sovereign wealth fund.
A national survey of 1,690 adults conducted by research firm Verasight in June and released earlier this month suggests that 69% of Americans now support “forcing” AI companies to transfer 50% of their stock to public sovereign wealth funds.
“In the eyes of the public, AI sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the profits from the AI industry to broader society,” said Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff.
In June, Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed the U.S. AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which, if passed, would give citizens 50% ownership of the nation’s largest AI companies.
“It will ensure that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us, not just to make the world’s richest people even richer,” Sanders said in a statement last month.
“The future of AI and the fate of humanity should not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profits,” Sanders said.
As companies continue to increase capital spending to expand AI, the number of layoffs in the U.S. tech sector is increasing, leaving many workers dissatisfied and worried about job security.
Joseph Briggs, senior global economist at Goldman Sachs, said in a report released by the bank last month that more than 9% of the workforce, or about 15 million people, could lose their jobs over the 10-year period of AI transition.
This would be “the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s, early 2000s and other periods of significant technological innovation,” Briggs said.
“However,[Briggs]believes these losses will be temporary, with the expectation that AI will destroy existing jobs while creating many new ones in the long run,” the Goldman Sachs report said.
When it comes to AI, sovereign wealth funds can play multiple roles. They can lead the development of AI at the national level by funding capital-intensive AI infrastructure, take stakes in AI companies, and keep a portion of the economic profits from AI in the national treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust.
But sovereign wealth funds may also face challenges in managing between the public interest and the global race to build AI capabilities.
“There is also a tension between the fiscal mission (maximizing benefits to the population) and the strategic mission (building national AI capacity, maintaining influence in frontier systems), because these goals can be in conflict when the best fiscal investment is in a foreign rather than a domestic AI company,” Windfall Trust added.
