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An AI sovereign wealth fund isn't progressive – it's techno-imperialism

90 points · 64 comments · Anon84

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alephnerd · 1790862126 · focus · HN ↗
Well yeah, hard power is a major impetus behind sovereign wealth funds - be they ADIA, Temasek, Master Trust, QIA, PIF, CIC, etc.
But this is the world we live in.
If you put your head in the sand, you become the EU - squeezed by trade wars against China and the US with two large scale conventional wars within your near abroad.
velcrovan · 1790862426 · focus · HN ↗
I can’t read the article. Do they explain how it’s more imperialist than what we have now?
Using capital ownership to distribute the proceeds of an industry whose raw material was the creative output of everyone everywhere … seems like the neatest and most obvious possible solution to AI displacement and provenance. But I can see how it might make a few dozen people less likely to be billionaires.
1. alephnerd · 1790862665 · focus · HN ↗
  Gift article - <a href="https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/71bd10ba-e5fb-4b6e-9694-777753dc35f8" rel="nofollow">https://giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/actions/redeem/71bd10...
  But basically, the argument is that a government shouldn't accrue and own appreciating assets mixed with AI skepticism.
  1. velcrovan · 1790864482 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks. I'm astonished how poorly written and poorly argued the piece is. No discussion or even mention of existing SWFs. Trying to frame SWFs as something leftists should oppose because of… some vague hand-waving about an Edwardian policy?
    SWFs are a great tool for reducing inequality and influencing corporate governance. see, e.g. <a href="https://peoplespolicyproject.org/project/creating-an-alaska-style-permanent-fund-in-washington-state/" rel="nofollow">https://peoplespolicyproject.org/project/creating-an-alaska-...
    alephnerd · 1790864717 · focus · HN ↗
    He's also been a major ideologue for what became Chat Control [0]
    [0] - <a href="https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/repressing_the_internet_westernstyle_20110816" rel="nofollow">https://fsi.stanford.edu/news/repressing_the_internet_wester...
    ambicapter · 1790865855 · focus · HN ↗
    "Journal of Democracy"
    > The smartest analysis on democracy and authoritarianism around the world—straight to your inbox every week.
    Sounds like a rational and clear-headed individual.
2. StableAlkyne · 1790862918 · focus · HN ↗
  AI;DR* they want to build data centers in other countries that are less able to resist their construction. They highlighted a site in the Philippines
  * The clunky turns of phrase and jarring introduction of analogies reads strongly of Claude to me, at least
3. [deleted] · 1790863051 · focus · HN ↗
  [deleted]
4. MadrasThorn · 1790865980 · focus · HN ↗
  anything that gives US an advantage in any market/competitive arena is basically imperialist.
5. Fricken · 1790866147 · focus · HN ↗
  The purpose of any technology is to expand one's powers, and whatever those powers expand to is conquested. Bronze was imperialist but Iron was more imperialist, and gunpowder was more imperialist than that. Oil was even more imperialist and now chips and AI are having a go at it. Even fire is imperialist, and a necessary step the AI boom, the the latest ring to rule them all.
  1. PAPPPmAc · 1790868407 · focus · HN ↗
    Interestingly to your example, there seems to be a rough consensus that the bronze age collapse (~12th century BC) was related to the fact that iron production was less centralized than bronze, which required multiple long-distance supply chains that could be monopolized by regional powers. Different folks point the causality in different directions.
    Some technologies are inherently more centralizing, some are less so.
    I agree that most technologies can be applied for imperialistic interests, and the tech space is full of things that seemed decentralizing and have since been captured, but it's not quite law.
    IC manufacturing is basically a modern global palace economy full of shipping and single-player choke points and large capital investments, so it leans hard to the centralizing side. It's less clear that AI will work that way, if it turns out that it is relatively practical to do useful work on locally hosted models it might end up being somewhat decentralizing.
    Or, we'll get technological and/or regulatory capture, end up paying rents to technofeudalist douchebags with data centers and proprietary models who bribe governments and peek at user behavior and try to use their already vast resources to preemptively capture any value before anyone else can, until the next major perturbation.
scrlk · 1790862708 · focus · HN ↗
archive.is captured the paywall, here's the article:
> The writer is the author of ‘The Net Delusion’ and ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’
> A growing number of Americans dislike AI so Washington is trying to change their minds the old-fashioned way, with a stick and a carrot. The stick was on full display on Tuesday. President Donald Trump, with tech executives at his back, told voters that if they refuse data centres, companies will “be forced to go overseas” — and, as he put it, “whoever wins superintelligence wins . . . you’re probably not gonna have a second place” implying that detractors would be handing China victory in the AI race.
> The carrot comes in the form of a dividend. In July, Sam Altman proposed that leading US AI labs each hand 5 per cent of their equity to a public fund. And Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill for a national fund with 50 per cent ownership of the AI giants, with citizens entitled to a stake in their profits.
> The stick, on inspection, is flimsy. The two are perfectly compatible: US-aligned data centres can go overseas while AI profits still accrue to Americans. Most of AI’s power goes into training models. This can happen wherever electricity is cheap; only the systems answering users in real time must stay near them. That means data centres can leave US soil and US companies still gain, while citizens with a stake in them are paid no matter where the machines run. For shareholders, it’s the best of both worlds: no data centre next door and a cheque in the mail.
> But the machines still stand somewhere, on someone’s land, guzzling someone’s water, straining someone’s grid. Income at home from land and power abroad has an old name: empire. What’s new is the idea, shared by Altman and Sanders, of enrolling every US citizen. The result would be a new form of social and technological imperialism.
> Pax Silica, the state department’s AI supply-chain club, has barely concealed its aim: to lock members into America’s compute and out of China’s. The Pentagon’s new Economic Defense Unit has even invoked the East India Company — a firm whose shareholders drew dividends from conquest — as its model. Pax Silica’s first outpost is a 4,000-acre “economic security zone” in the Philippines. Washington reportedly sought US jurisdiction and immunity for its personnel there; Manila said no twice and insists the zone will stay under Philippine law (the project is proceeding). Just as Detroit in its heyday ran on Liberian rubber and Chilean copper, San Francisco’s AI glory could run on Philippine land and other people’s megawatts.
> The imperial ambition behind such initiatives has provoked discontent in host nations. In Kenya, a $1bn data centre stalled after Microsoft and its Emirati partner asked the government to guarantee purchases of its computing capacity. Mexico’s president said her country need not become the data centre of the world. What other countries cannot stop is America’s use of sanctions to lock out China by rationing advanced chips. With the US’s chips and open markets, China would crush Silicon Valley’s valuations. Shutting Beijing out allows US AI companies to capture enough profits that a public fund would be able to redistribute them. Such a fund would be no custodian of collective intelligence but a collector of geopolitical rent: the yield on keeping China’s AI down and the world’s AI bills up.
> The US left seems not to have noticed. Gavin Newsom waxes lyrical about “universal basic capital”, Sanders about a Norwegian-style sovereign wealth fund. Yet, there’s a difference. Norway’s wealth comes from its own seabed, while America’s would come from a chokehold on chips and bullying weaker countries for resources. Sanders’s bill lets this slip: it traces AI’s value to humanity’s “collective intelligence”, then pays out only to Americans.
> For Maga, local tribute flowing to the all-powerful centre is a cause for celebration. Not so for the left. When Edwardian social imperialists promised to fund welfare out of Pax Britannica, old socialists, from Engels to Lenin, derided workers who took the money as the labour aristocracy. Their point stands: a public that lives off the rent acquires a stake in whatever protects it.
> For now, AI’s expansion abroad is a freelance affair, as individual companies cut deals that host nations can still refuse. However, once the US state clears the ground and the American public draws a dividend from it, a refusing government will find itself up against not only Washington but every American with a payout to lose.
> Critics from Sanders to Steve Bannon are right about the disease: AI breeds oligarchy. But a dividend funded by flexing American muscle while underdeveloping the rest of the globe would not cure it. It would solve one injustice by hiding another, and give oligarchs what they’ve never had: a public with a stake in looking away.
js73js8 · 1790862875 · focus · HN ↗
> A isn't X – it's Y
1. rtkwe · 1790863004 · focus · HN ↗
  It's common in AI writing because it's common in human writing. Juxtaposition is a useful rhetorical flourish.
  1. axus · 1790863331 · focus · HN ↗
    Fashions change; ideas that look AI-generated are out of fashion right now.
    I've never really cared about fashion.
    pixl97 · 1790867078 · focus · HN ↗
    For HN users yea, for everyone else, more information required.
    margalabargala · 1790867754 · focus · HN ↗
    If something becomes a strong negative symbol, it's intelligent to recognize that because failing to do so can harm your goal, e.g. communication.
    As an extreme example of this, no one calls it a "Charlie Chaplain moustache" and if you wear one people will avoid you, no matter how much you insist it's just because you like Charlie.
  2. add-sub-mul-div · 1790863427 · focus · HN ↗
    If it was used as sparingly, appropriately, and skillfully in AI writing as in human writing then AI writing wouldn't stand out as so mediocre and cringe.
    rtkwe · 1790864749 · focus · HN ↗
    AI definitely over uses it but it's important to not just see one indicator and assume.
    add-sub-mul-div · 1790865863 · focus · HN ↗
    That's true. Distrust of human writing is one of the unavoidable downsides of LLMs that we were warned about.
    rtkwe · 1790870230 · focus · HN ↗
    You can see it too a lot in "debunking" of videos and images. 4 years ago anything unbelievable was CGI now it's all just getting called AI instead.
  3. the_sleaze_ · 1790867897 · focus · HN ↗
    Only sort of true.
    Consider the OpenAI case of "goblins". The models overfit to a specific type of output. Goblins was a specific case of this type and needed to be corrected.
    <a href="https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/" rel="nofollow">https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
    > We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread.
    quxbar · 1790868807 · focus · HN ↗
    The joke's on us, today's highly rewarding LLM language tics are tomorrow's vernacular (ALLMVE?)
    rtkwe · 1790870480 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm not saying all of LLMs writing quirks are naturally derived just this one. It's a bit the same with em-dashes they're not common in general writing but they do show up a fair bit in other types like scientific writing. My wife, who's a chemistry PhD, has bemoaned the association to me that she liked using them in her writing for papers and now it looks like she's using an LLM.
2. dist-epoch · 1790866572 · focus · HN ↗
  In general news paper article writers don't pick the title of their own article.
  Also, FT is too big to not be aware of AI writing, and to not have internal checks (Pangram, ...)
  AI speak infects human language now, people start to talk like LLMs.
  1. jfyi · 1790867269 · focus · HN ↗
    People already talked like LLMs, how else would they have learned to talk like that?
    "It isn't x, its y" was a common device before, AI has just highlighted it's use. Em dashes on the other hand are the devil's work.
    Borealid · 1790871019 · focus · HN ↗
    The specific problem isn't "it's not X, it's Y", it's using that pattern where X and Y are not correctly related categorical items.
    Yes, I know how I structured that sentence.
    "It's not a frying pan, it's a revolution" sounds like AI. "It's not an octopus, it's some type of crustacean" does not. The thing that makes it an AI tell is specifically FALSE analogy.
    jfyi · 1790876793 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. tom_ · 1790868911 · focus · HN ↗
  Yeah, the subject is AI, so you try to get a crashingly obvious AI trope in there somewhere. Those are the rules.
  (Disclaimer: didn't read the article. It's paywalled.)
4. keiferski · 1790870836 · focus · HN ↗
  isn't it usually "it's not just x, it's y"?
  The title has the opposite meaning.
5. ShinyLeftPad · 1790871576 · focus · HN ↗
  > A doesn't belong to category X, it belongs to category Y.
  FTFY.
trilogic · 1790863199 · focus · HN ↗
Can´t read the article, why is this article still here? Is HN doing ads now, pfff?
baron816 · 1790866833 · focus · HN ↗
Summary of why sovereign wealth funds are generally a bad idea: the governments don’t like to do things that could potentially harm their investments. If a government has large stakes in cigarette companies, they’re going to be resistant to regulate them.
There’s also plenty of opportunity for corruption. But even with safeguards, there’s going to be opportunities to steer investment towards favored companies and industries and away from those that oppose the administration or otherwise do things the administration doesn’t like (think of efforts to divest from Israel or fossil fuel companies).
“Just invest in the S&P”. Something like this would give substantial power to the index makers. But it also gives preference to already huge companies. Small, unlisted companies would be indirectly penalized by having to compete against companies with government funding.
1. aeternum · 1790868707 · focus · HN ↗
  In the grand scheme of things, the gov claiming a perpetual 21%+ of all income of AI (all) companies is not all that different from owning a small percent of said AI companies. The financials and even incentives are basically the same.
  It's somewhat entertaining to watch both sides argue about this as if it's some major difference when both are actually aligned on wanting bigger gov and more gov ownership/control of corps (one party via taxes the other wants it direct).
  1. jfyi · 1790869422 · focus · HN ↗
    > gov ownership/control of corps
    Corporations are literally government sponsored entities. Where do you think they get their limited liability and separate legal personhood from?
    We should own a piece of every single one for that service we provide.
    scottyah · 1790870534 · focus · HN ↗
    Who is we and what is ownership? Taxes are nice because it's just straight cash, no meddling (other than the myriad of laws they must follow). "Ownership" meaning you want whatever political party/group in power in the moment to able to directly command businesses on top of adding laws and taking money seems a bit like overreach to me, in addition to being costly resource-wise.
    jfyi · 1790870793 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    skinfaxi · 1790871986 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't that what taxes do already?
    skinfaxi · 1790872083 · focus · HN ↗
    > but I am pretty partial to direct ownership of a percentage.
    What does that look like in practice?
    jfyi · 1790872472 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    skinfaxi · 1790968161 · focus · HN ↗
    Ah so you were just trolling. How pedestrian.
    jfyi · 1791040053 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    franktankbank · 1790874069 · focus · HN ↗
    That becomes a tail wagging the dog ehh? Fed the one giving them money and the corps tell you what to do. Where does democracy fit in?
    baron816 · 1790873514 · focus · HN ↗
    As they say, if you owe a million dollars to the bank, the bank owns you. But if you owe a billion dollars to the bank, you own the bank.
    When an institution becomes financially dependent on something for its revenues, that something gains a lot of power over the institution.
    jfyi · 1790873820 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    baron816 · 1790878465 · focus · HN ↗
    There are countries where the entire government is the pocket of the largest corporations. The US is not one of those countries. It can get much worse if you allow it.
    jfyi · 1790878833 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    idiotsecant · 1790881635 · focus · HN ↗
    Just because you have a bee in your car doesn't mean you should ignore the hive growing in the trunk. It's silly to reject all threats because a less severe version of that threat already exists.
    jfyi · 1790936141 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    aeternum · 1790878821 · focus · HN ↗
    That's my point, the gov already owns a ~21% royalty on the income of every company that operates in the US via the corporate tax. And it's more than that if you consider other taxes.
    jfyi · 1790936383 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    idiotsecant · 1790881529 · focus · HN ↗
    I would make the case that government ownership of the machinery of commerce makes both worse. The money and power inherent to this arrangement is corrosive to both sides. Keep them separate and let each fight the other to the proper tension point. If we want revenue there is already a way to do that - we call it taxes
  2. JumpCrisscross · 1790878996 · focus · HN ↗
    > the gov claiming a perpetual 21%+ of all income of AI (all) companies is not all that different from owning a small percent of said AI companies
    We don’t count reduced taxes as a loss in the same way as losses on equities owned. That changes the electoral incentives.
2. jfyi · 1790868741 · focus · HN ↗
  [delayed]
  1. baron816 · 1790869956 · focus · HN ↗
    I think what we’ve found with the current administration is that people will use every last surface for corruption and power that they can. The more you opportunities you give the government to be corrupt, the more corrupt they’re going to be.
    scottyah · 1790870624 · focus · HN ↗
    Also of note: this is not the first administration to take controversial action. Pretty much every government ever has shown that more power = more corruption.
    klaff · 1790874669 · focus · HN ↗
    Also of note: this administration has taken corruption to levels not seen before.
    jfyi · 1790936918 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
3. redwood · 1790869498 · focus · HN ↗
  Doesn't need to br S&P. Can simply be the entire market float market share weighted
4. redwood · 1790869498 · focus · HN ↗
  Doesn't need to be the S&P. Can simply be the entire market float market share weighted
  1. baron816 · 1790870041 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s still providing an implicit subsidy to listed corporations
5. FrustratedMonky · 1790870786 · focus · HN ↗
  There's a reason every country with a sovereign wealth fund is a dictatorship, its a really handy way to launder money, steal. Which is why Trump wants it.
  1. carefree-bob · 1790870986 · focus · HN ↗
    Norway is a dictatorship?
    Avicebron · 1790873115 · focus · HN ↗
    To play devils advocate, the fact Norway has a coherent society/population makes it dictatorship of the demos. Which of course is evil since people who refuse to integrate into society aren't allowed to dicate terms.
    FrustratedMonky · 1790874130 · focus · HN ↗
    One working model versus a dozen others? Kind of like, I didn't wear a seat belt and lived, so guess we don't need them.
6. geysersam · 1790872508 · focus · HN ↗
  This is theory. If we look at the real world, do sovereign wealth funds typically invest in cigarettes? I don't think so. I think they typically have more stringent ethical guidelines than most regular funds.
  I'm typically not in favor of sovereign wealth funds anyway. Because I don't buy the idea that the free market is always more efficient than the public sector, and if that's the case then investing the funds in the public sector, schools and improving health and social outcomes, is better than buying SpaceX even if they're going to the moon.
  Of course there are exceptions.. if a country has more money than they know what to do with, it makes sense to pile it.
  1. voxic11 · 1790872804 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
inshard · 1790866880 · focus · HN ↗
That paywall is techno imperialism
pickleglitch · 1790874682 · focus · HN ↗
I didn't read because of the paywall, so I don't know how good their argument is, but I'm very skeptical about trusting The Financial Times to determine what is and isn't progressive or techno-imperialism.

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