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A majority of U.S. employees now want to hold corporations more accountable via an AI sovereign wealth fund, amid dissatisfaction over a growing number of tech layoffs despite higher overall corporate profits, according to a recent poll.
The national survey of 1,690 adults by research firm Verasight, which was carried out in June and published earlier this month, suggests that 69% of Americans now support “forcing” AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund.
“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” said Benjamin Leff, chief executive officer of Verasight.
In June, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act which, if passed, would give the public a 50% stake in the largest AI companies in the U.S.
“It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” Sanders said in a statement last month.
“The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit,” Sanders said.
The rising number of tech layoffs in the U.S. have left many workers frustrated and worried over job security, as corporations continue to ramp up capital expenditure for AI expansion.
Goldman Sachs Senior Global Economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the labor force, or around 15 million workers, could lose their jobs during a 10-year AI transition period, the bank said in a report published last month.
This “would be the type of automation and reallocation shock that we saw in the late ’90s and early 2000s and in other periods of significant technological change,” Briggs said.
“But [Briggs] believes these losses will prove temporary owing to his expectation that AI will create many new jobs over the long term even as it destroys existing ones,” the Goldman Sachs report says.
Sovereign wealth funds can serve in multiple roles when it comes to AI. They can lead development of AI at a national level by funding capital-intensive AI infrastructure, take equity stakes in AI companies and capture a share of AI-driven economic gains for the public treasury, according to research firm Windfall Trust.
However, sovereign wealth funds could also face challenges in managing between the public good and the global race to build AI capabilities.
“There is also a tension between the financial mandate (maximize returns for citizens) and the strategic mandate (build national AI capacity, maintain influence over frontier systems), since these objectives can conflict when the best financial investment is a foreign AI company rather than a domestic one,” Windfall Trust added.
