Soon enough, the major artificial intelligence companies will take their soaring valuations and go public. When they do, a great many very smart, very eccentric people will suddenly possess enormous liquid wealth \u2014 and many have committed to giving great sums of it away.<\/p>\n
The future of American philanthropy isn\u2019t the central drama of the A.I. age, but it isn\u2019t a sideshow, either. As Nan Ransohoff wrote<\/a> this week on Substack, A.I. wealth could soon add as much as $100 billion to American charitable giving every year. She describes this as a potential \u201cthird wave\u201d of philanthropy, after the now-distant Carnegie and Rockefeller era and the recent Bill Gates and Warren Buffett wave. And she expects it to be focused on the \u201cA.I. transition\u201d and what lies beyond, especially questions of \u201cflourishing, meaning and what makes a life good\u201d in the shadow of increasingly capable machines.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s suppose she\u2019s right about the philanthropic rush and about the quest for meaning as an organizing impulse. I want to make a personal appeal to the A.I. philanthropists: Take a lesson from your Gilded Age predecessors, and treat beauty as a central charitable pursuit. Build monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens \u2014 and yes, even mansions for yourselves. Leave a physical legacy to future generations, not just a record of programs and disbursements. Recognize that meaning inheres in architecture, art and landscape as much as in more measurable goods.<\/p>\n This was a great failure of the most recent philanthropic era. At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads. But there was no real legacy when it came to physical infrastructure \u2014 no great beautification campaigns, no beloved architectural landmarks, no equivalent of the Gilded Age\u2019s expansions of museums and libraries and concert halls, and few personal expressions of extravagance (like the Newport mansions or Hearst Castle) for future tourists to admire.<\/p>\n At the beginning of the 20th century, philanthropic dollars had already helped build the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall, the campuses of Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago, a network of urban parks, various impressive churches and an array of private homes that would themselves become public spaces within a few generations. Tastes vary, but I do not think that the monuments raised by today\u2019s superrich are in any way comparable.<\/p>\n In part this reflects the challenges of building in a more regulated and sclerotic America, in part it reflects the failings of contemporary architecture. (Where new money builds new buildings, they often look like the Obama Star Destroyer in Chicago.)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s also a problem with Silicon Valley culture specifically, where the idea that the rich person is supposed to be too busy to worry about taste has been folded into the entire tech enterprise, like a gray T-shirt, from the start.<\/p>\n