When I was 22, I sat across from a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg as he convinced me to join Facebook with his vision for connecting people. I helped him build it, then watched it become a machine for addicting them instead. Because addiction was more profitable.<\/p>\n
Every social media company ran on the same logic:\u00a0If we don\u2019t do it, someone else will.\u00a0Now, that logic is driving artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
AI could create unprecedented abundance \u2014 or a future we can\u2019t take back. How we get to the good outcome is the defining question of our time. Last week\u2019s White House framework proposed a familiar answer: shield the AI industry from liability and let the companies sort it out.<\/p>\n
But to make AI serve the public interest, we have to put the public in charge of AI.<\/p>\n
If something is going to reshape our lives, we should have a say in how. That\u2019s the definition of democracy.<\/p>\n
AI Already Governs You<\/p>\n
AI is already shaping what you see, what jobs you\u2019re offered, what loans you qualify for, even who becomes a military target. And you have no say in it. Companies are locked in a race to deploy AI as fast as possible, even as experts raise grave safety concerns. Their CEOs \u2014 Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg \u2014 all face the same trap: If I don\u2019t do it, someone else will. And they\u2019re right. Which is why we need to change the rules of the game.<\/p>\n
The public is already ahead of Washington on this. Polling from Blue Rose Research shows that 66% of Americans support citizen panels helping set AI rules. That number holds across Trump voters, Biden voters, and swing voters. 79% worry the government has no plan for AI-driven job loss. People aren\u2019t apathetic \u2014 they\u2019re locked out.<\/p>\n
What \u201cPublic Control\u201d Actually Looks Like<\/p>\n
\u201cThe public in charge\u201d doesn\u2019t mean elections dominated by money and lobbyists. It means citizens\u2019 assemblies: representative cross-sections of everyday people \u2014 think voluntary juries \u2014 given extensive expert briefing and structured deliberation, then granted real authority to set binding goals and constraints.<\/p>\n
Citizens don\u2019t write the code. They decide what the code should be for, with technical experts accountable to them for implementation.<\/p>\n
This model has worked for thousands of years. It\u2019s how Ireland broke political deadlocks on marriage equality and abortion that had paralyzed politicians for generations. Assemblies are already shaping AI policy in\u00a0Taiwan, the UK, and Belgium, producing recommendations on everything from facial recognition to disinformation to the future of work. Unlike elected officials, ordinary citizens have no donors to please, no reelection to chase, and no incentive to serve anyone but the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Public governance changes outcomes. Left to the market, AI will optimize for engagement. For pharmaceutical profits. For replacing workers. For learning, patient health, and empowered workers, democratic governance is the\u00a0only\u00a0lever that points in the right direction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Infrastructure Already Exists<\/p>\n
People around the world \u2014 including at One Project, the non-profit I founded \u2014 are already building the infrastructure to make this work: participatory platforms for democratic governance at scale.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s precedent for this kind of public ownership. We already treat the resources that affect everyone \u2014 airwaves, waterways, and beaches \u2014 as public trusts. That\u2019s not nationalization. It\u2019s democracy.<\/p>\n
AI is poised to generate trillions of dollars in new wealth. But the future where everyone benefits requires the public \u2014 not shareholders \u2014 to control it: democratically allocating resources toward child care and elder care, retraining programs for AI-related job displacement, and new models of education.<\/p>\n
AI is poised to generate trillions of dollars in new wealth. But the future where everyone benefits requires the public\u2014 not shareholders \u2014 to control it: democratically allocating resources toward child care and elder care, retraining programs for AI-related job displacement, and new models of education.<\/p>\n
The Window Is Closing<\/p>\n
Washington is moving in the opposite direction. Pundits say the public is too divided, the issues too technical, and the competition with China too urgent for democracy. But democratic oversight is the only way to stop the dangerous AI race and make AI serve humanity.<\/p>\n
The cross-partisan demand is already there. The infrastructure is already being built. The question is whether we demand democratic governance before AI goes the way of social media.<\/p>\n
If AI is going to reshape all our lives, we the people should decide how. That\u2019s not radical. That\u2019s not even a policy proposal. That\u2019s self-governance. And we\u2019ve never needed it more.<\/p>\n
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of\u00a0Fortune.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I was 22, I sat across from a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg as he convinced me to join…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":354129,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,640,1414,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-354128","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-regulation","15":"tag-social-media","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=354128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354128\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/354129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=354128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=354128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=354128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}