Great story. I’d just underscore as you know that one union—UNITE HERE—has in fact had a lot of success in recent years organizing food service workers in the tech industry. High wages, excellent healthcare, pensions. Not enough by itself to save us from the greed of the techno-billionaires, but not nothing.
Hamilton, you are absolutely spot-on that we must avoid the trap of the state becoming defensive shareholders of tech monopolies, desperate to bail out OpenAI to protect its own portfolio. But relying exclusively on traditional corporate taxes and localized unions to regulate AI is bringing a sharpened bone to a bazooka fight.
Here are three structural reasons why standard 20th-century tools fail against advanced automation, and why a Generational Royalty / Worker-Governed Fund is the actual evolution of your argument:
1. The Dead-End of Traditional Striking Leverage
You argue beautifully for unionizing AI companies to act as an internal check. But traditional union leverage relies entirely on the threat of withdrawing human labor from the shop floor. When borderless advanced compute and autonomous systems can out-produce human hours with near-zero variable cost, traditional striking leverage hits a wall of diminishing returns. To have real power in an automated economy, workers cannot just withhold labor; they must hold equity leverage.
2. Standard Taxes Don't Protect the Revenue from Capital Flight
You suggest we simply "tax their money away." But corporate income taxes are structurally gameable, easily dodged via offshore IP routing, and completely dependent on the shifting whims of local legislative jurisdictions. Furthermore, standard tax revenues flow directly into state treasuries, leaving them vulnerable to becoming political slush funds for whichever administration is in power.
3. The Solution: A Gross-Output Royalty Deployed into a Worker-Governed Fund
Instead of the federal government taking a direct 50% stake in Anthropic or OpenAI (which, as you rightly note, creates a toxic state-corporate dependency), the Generational Royalty Act structures a non-tax royalty levied directly on automated corporate gross output; treating compute infrastructure as a collective Social Heritage built on centuries of public infrastructure and shared human data.
Critically, this capital does not go to the state. It flows into an independent, worker-governed Global Labor Fund (GLF). Operating exactly like Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (Statens pensjonsfond) or Singapore’s Temasek, the GLF builds an independent war chest used to execute market-rate equity buybacks across the global capital ecosystem.
This accomplishes exactly what you want: it strips excess capital from the oligarchs, but instead of giving it to politicians, it hands it back to organized labor. It legally secures the vital voting blocks and boardroom representation workers need to dictate how technology is deployed, while bypassing the dependency trap of a state-managed UBI or corporate pacification.
We don't need exotic new tools, but we do need to upgrade the scale of our financial architecture. Capital has evolved past the shop floor; organized labor must evolve to own the machines.
Re point 2: One way to deal with this is to tax profits as reported to the SEC rather than allowing one set of books for investors and another set of books for the tax man. This worked nicely when the Dunkin' Donuts founder was doing an IPO while trying to stiff his wife in the divorce.
Yeah but... there's no political party in the US, that would do this.
Because they are ALL - yes, Dems too - in the pockets of the ultra-rich. The people you want to tax and constrain with legislation, already have that covered.
It's not going to happen until big money is taken out of politics. That comes first.
The prerequisite and implied part is missing - how to obtain adequate regulation? Rely on benevolent billionaires as IL just did? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We need better politicians, and to get that, we need campaign finance reform and rank choice voting.
I'm doubtful that significant regulation will happen unless and until we reverse Citizens United and get the torrent of money out of politics so that regular people can actually run and win on policies and principles. The pushback on data centers has begun at the local level, which is why corporations are turning to the state level to push for preemption. Regardless of a candidate's quality or the organizing structure, winning at any level beyond the local level seems insurmountable. Mamdani is the exception because his was a city race (albeit our biggest city). In IL, you can ask Kat how that works out.
The corrosive impact cascades into fatalism and voter apathy. I just voted absentee in the WI primary, and sadly, most races were uncontested. Of the races with multiple candidates (e.g., Governor), knowing that my chosen candidate (the progressive one!) has no chance makes my action symbolic, but I vote anyway. It frustrates me, but I do understand why so many people don't think voting matters.....Just saying!
There is a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It is my strong opinion that anyone with a passing interest in AI should read it to understand what's truly at stake here.
A I is as likely to be regulated as cryptocurrency and insider trading by politicians. As likely as keeping the weapons industry from raising the military budget. A I already has the War Dept as its main customer. A I is already the handmaid of vast and deep govt/corp surveillance. This essay is written under the illusion that government is about governance.
Our Declaration enjoins “We the People” to banish such a pseudo government. Has that ever been realistic? While we watch every institution get captured by the plutocracy, a plot since the 70’s, we allow ourselves the idle luxury of speculating about how A I will be regulated.
I like your ideas. They seem practical to me, a person who has read Stephanie Kelton, who likes the idea of taxing, regulating, and having strong unions. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that i have lived through 50 years where those 3 things were made to be unpopular and stock ownership to be made popular. How do we turn this around? We definitely need to elect people who are willing to put your 3 suggestions into action.
Also, our government has the ability to dissolve corporate charters and “pierce the corporate veil” meaning assigning personal liability to corporate decision makers. A quick survey of official action to dissolve corporate charters shows that it’s generally reserved for situations in which c-suite or board room malfeasance cost rich white investors money. The only case I read in which a court pierced the corporate veil was in the case of a Black club owner who was allegedly encouraging his employees to over-serve alcohol to patrons to get them to spend more.
I suspect that a meta-study would demonstrate racial animus in cases in which judges saw fit to pierce the corporate veil and assess personal liability. That boards, c-suites, and directors engage in any number of bad faith actions that poison our people, chill competition, target children’s for addictive consumption, and blatantly ignore regulations in order to make more money without being assessed personal liability tells us a lot about who our courts actually work for.
Your analysis of taxation as opposed to partial ownership echoes that in "The Modern Corporation & Private Property" from the 1930s. That book was essentially the report of the Pecora Commission that led to a lot of the New Deal business regulation including the now defunct Glass-Steagall law. Back then, corporations were taxed at 50%, so the report argued that the gave the government an equity position. It's an interesting report since corporations while private property in some sense are unlike most private property in many others.
How about simply enforcing copyright law - which all these LLM chatbots are in gross violation of?
Great story. I’d just underscore as you know that one union—UNITE HERE—has in fact had a lot of success in recent years organizing food service workers in the tech industry. High wages, excellent healthcare, pensions. Not enough by itself to save us from the greed of the techno-billionaires, but not nothing.
Unite Here is great. Unions have had less success organizing the white collar tech workers unfortunately.
Hamilton, you are absolutely spot-on that we must avoid the trap of the state becoming defensive shareholders of tech monopolies, desperate to bail out OpenAI to protect its own portfolio. But relying exclusively on traditional corporate taxes and localized unions to regulate AI is bringing a sharpened bone to a bazooka fight.
Here are three structural reasons why standard 20th-century tools fail against advanced automation, and why a Generational Royalty / Worker-Governed Fund is the actual evolution of your argument:
1. The Dead-End of Traditional Striking Leverage
You argue beautifully for unionizing AI companies to act as an internal check. But traditional union leverage relies entirely on the threat of withdrawing human labor from the shop floor. When borderless advanced compute and autonomous systems can out-produce human hours with near-zero variable cost, traditional striking leverage hits a wall of diminishing returns. To have real power in an automated economy, workers cannot just withhold labor; they must hold equity leverage.
2. Standard Taxes Don't Protect the Revenue from Capital Flight
You suggest we simply "tax their money away." But corporate income taxes are structurally gameable, easily dodged via offshore IP routing, and completely dependent on the shifting whims of local legislative jurisdictions. Furthermore, standard tax revenues flow directly into state treasuries, leaving them vulnerable to becoming political slush funds for whichever administration is in power.
3. The Solution: A Gross-Output Royalty Deployed into a Worker-Governed Fund
Instead of the federal government taking a direct 50% stake in Anthropic or OpenAI (which, as you rightly note, creates a toxic state-corporate dependency), the Generational Royalty Act structures a non-tax royalty levied directly on automated corporate gross output; treating compute infrastructure as a collective Social Heritage built on centuries of public infrastructure and shared human data.
Critically, this capital does not go to the state. It flows into an independent, worker-governed Global Labor Fund (GLF). Operating exactly like Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund (Statens pensjonsfond) or Singapore’s Temasek, the GLF builds an independent war chest used to execute market-rate equity buybacks across the global capital ecosystem.
This accomplishes exactly what you want: it strips excess capital from the oligarchs, but instead of giving it to politicians, it hands it back to organized labor. It legally secures the vital voting blocks and boardroom representation workers need to dictate how technology is deployed, while bypassing the dependency trap of a state-managed UBI or corporate pacification.
We don't need exotic new tools, but we do need to upgrade the scale of our financial architecture. Capital has evolved past the shop floor; organized labor must evolve to own the machines.
Re point 2: One way to deal with this is to tax profits as reported to the SEC rather than allowing one set of books for investors and another set of books for the tax man. This worked nicely when the Dunkin' Donuts founder was doing an IPO while trying to stiff his wife in the divorce.
A new law was just passed and signed by Governor JB Pritzker on Monday - I believe California & NY have established similar boundaries -- is this a model for national legislation? https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pritzker-to-sign-illinois-bill-aimed-at-artificial-intelligence-accountability/ar-AA27klX6?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Three very sensible and feasible proposals. Hoping corporate politicians can be persuaded.
Yeah but... there's no political party in the US, that would do this.
Because they are ALL - yes, Dems too - in the pockets of the ultra-rich. The people you want to tax and constrain with legislation, already have that covered.
It's not going to happen until big money is taken out of politics. That comes first.
The prerequisite and implied part is missing - how to obtain adequate regulation? Rely on benevolent billionaires as IL just did? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ We need better politicians, and to get that, we need campaign finance reform and rank choice voting.
I'm doubtful that significant regulation will happen unless and until we reverse Citizens United and get the torrent of money out of politics so that regular people can actually run and win on policies and principles. The pushback on data centers has begun at the local level, which is why corporations are turning to the state level to push for preemption. Regardless of a candidate's quality or the organizing structure, winning at any level beyond the local level seems insurmountable. Mamdani is the exception because his was a city race (albeit our biggest city). In IL, you can ask Kat how that works out.
The corrosive impact cascades into fatalism and voter apathy. I just voted absentee in the WI primary, and sadly, most races were uncontested. Of the races with multiple candidates (e.g., Governor), knowing that my chosen candidate (the progressive one!) has no chance makes my action symbolic, but I vote anyway. It frustrates me, but I do understand why so many people don't think voting matters.....Just saying!
There's one problem with your thesis: how do we get our representatives to read this post?
I have a bit of hope that at least some of them might see, and act on, the wisdom therein.
There is a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. It is my strong opinion that anyone with a passing interest in AI should read it to understand what's truly at stake here.
A I is as likely to be regulated as cryptocurrency and insider trading by politicians. As likely as keeping the weapons industry from raising the military budget. A I already has the War Dept as its main customer. A I is already the handmaid of vast and deep govt/corp surveillance. This essay is written under the illusion that government is about governance.
Our Declaration enjoins “We the People” to banish such a pseudo government. Has that ever been realistic? While we watch every institution get captured by the plutocracy, a plot since the 70’s, we allow ourselves the idle luxury of speculating about how A I will be regulated.
I like your ideas. They seem practical to me, a person who has read Stephanie Kelton, who likes the idea of taxing, regulating, and having strong unions. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that i have lived through 50 years where those 3 things were made to be unpopular and stock ownership to be made popular. How do we turn this around? We definitely need to elect people who are willing to put your 3 suggestions into action.
I agree but there’s no chance any of that will ever happen.
Why do we Chase them to try to stop them?
Can we not create a HUMAN BILL OF RIGHTS?
This far, and No Further with your abilities.
We stopped a King from hurting us, Now we stop a Science
Also, our government has the ability to dissolve corporate charters and “pierce the corporate veil” meaning assigning personal liability to corporate decision makers. A quick survey of official action to dissolve corporate charters shows that it’s generally reserved for situations in which c-suite or board room malfeasance cost rich white investors money. The only case I read in which a court pierced the corporate veil was in the case of a Black club owner who was allegedly encouraging his employees to over-serve alcohol to patrons to get them to spend more.
I suspect that a meta-study would demonstrate racial animus in cases in which judges saw fit to pierce the corporate veil and assess personal liability. That boards, c-suites, and directors engage in any number of bad faith actions that poison our people, chill competition, target children’s for addictive consumption, and blatantly ignore regulations in order to make more money without being assessed personal liability tells us a lot about who our courts actually work for.
Your analysis of taxation as opposed to partial ownership echoes that in "The Modern Corporation & Private Property" from the 1930s. That book was essentially the report of the Pecora Commission that led to a lot of the New Deal business regulation including the now defunct Glass-Steagall law. Back then, corporations were taxed at 50%, so the report argued that the gave the government an equity position. It's an interesting report since corporations while private property in some sense are unlike most private property in many others.
Meanwhile, over at the Nation, Bhaskar Sunkara beseeches the lot of us to sign a petition *demanding* an AI sovereign wealth fund.