“We”
by Matt May
Happy belated Mother’s Day, whether or not you’re on America’s schedule for that.
Over the weekend I listened to an interesting interview on BBC radio, about the recent gene therapy treatment that restored a toddler’s hearing. What was remarkable about it to me was that the interviewee wasn’t some doctor or researcher who developed the project. It was a Deaf disability inclusion lead, who identified himself as a cochlear implant user and, importantly, highlighted that many culturally Deaf people don’t care about gaining or regaining their hearing, and don’t like the perception that such an intervention “fixes” deafness.
It certainly shouldn’t be remarkable that a Deaf person would be asked to weigh in on an issue like this therapy, but a cursory scan of this kind of coverage would show you that it is. More often than not, it’s someone other than the group most directly affected who get the press, whether it’s a representative of the company that made it, or a family member or caregiver of the first recipient. (Indeed, the Beeb has also interviewed the child’s parent.) That’s often by design: these kinds of stories first reach journalists’ inboxes via press release, where the most grandiose of claims are frequently taken at face value.
I once interned in a local TV newsroom, where we regularly received (and broadcast) premade stories, complete with videos, doctor interviews, and a script for our reporters to read, courtesy of a host of health care and pharmaceutical companies. They all had a cheerful promise, like: “With these innovations, we may be five to ten years away from eliminating gout.” Funded, naturally, by a company in its first round of human testing on a pill that would make them millions.
I hear the echoes of these kinds of stories in a lot of the media surrounding tech, and of course, artificial intelligence. There’s a particular voice in these stories intended to soften the message they’re sending, and you should listen for it every time you hear or read a news article touting some kind of advance. It goes like this:
“In (period of time), we should be able to (achieve/eradicate) (goal/affliction).”
The keyword is “we.”
Who is “we” when this framing is evoked? Sometimes it takes some teasing out. But most often, “we” refers to the inventor or producer of a product when it comes to assigning credit or justifying resources; otherwise, “we” refers to the government or society when it comes time to pick up the check.
Let’s apply this to universal basic income (UBI), a topic I’ve advocated dating back to this newsletter’s very first issue. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has studied the idea (see The dancing bear, part 2), and according to Business Insider, he claimed on a recent podcast that a) he’s publishing findings soon, and b) maybe “we” don’t give out cash, per se.
This is where you can start rolling your eyes.
Here’s Altman’s idea, in his own words:
"Everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute. They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research. (…) You own like part of the productivity."
Like, wow.
Verbal tics aside, let’s restate the proposition. “We” (OpenAI) give “everybody” (presumably American citizens) a periodic ration of a service “we” (OpenAI) provide, which “we” (Americans) can sell on the open market to make up for the jobs that “we” took from “us.” I’m sure it’s coincidental that the resulting collective dependence on the value of that compute institutionalizes OpenAI as a kind of utility-qua-commodity—this thing that apparently everyone needs and will need forever, without a viable equivalent, which putative beneficiaries must all find materially valuable to the extent that we can trade in it for our wealth. Or our survival.
Sure, it’s just some podcast babble at this point. But I don’t think you’d find many people in his eight years studying UBI who would tell a researcher: “You know what, I don’t really want the cash. What I really want is a steady supply of compute credits that I’d need an engineering degree to understand, so that I could sell it with a heart full of hope into some marketplace to be created by I don’t know who, which will offer me fair value and totally wouldn’t be constructed to screw me six ways from Sunday.”
I don’t know if Altman hears it himself: the fact that the cure for the poison he’s selling is to make everyone drink and/or sell a little of the poison. Did the podcasters hear it, at least? I don’t really want to invest in a 1-hour, 44-minute podcast to find out, to be honest. (And, fair play, I have made a few very long podcast episodes. But, an hour and three quarters? Who is listening to all these diatribes and jeremiads these tech bros are recording? Oh, right. Other tech bros.)
This is just one of the shell games tech companies play with their stories. Most of the time, you won’t hear any of them say a word about governments, except as annoying busybodies getting in the way of their commerce. But on the way down (and often, also on the way up), see how they demand a handout. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King said this in February of 1968:
Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem.
“We” (everyone) need to watch out for the shapeshifting “we.” It’s a consistently useful sign that someone is trying to get away with something, and make the rest of us pay for it. A supposedly world-changing idea is usually the first step. Vilifying any form of outside control, particularly government intervention, usually soon follows. The old ways we are clinging to, they tell us, don’t work. We have a better way, but you have to let us do what we want. It all reminds me of this Brigid Antonia Brophy quote I heard a long time ago, which still rings in my ears:
Whenever people say, "We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, "We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it.
Companies are not going to solve issues of welfare, much less equity. They do not know how to do it, and if they did, they wouldn’t want to, because sooner or later government spending would have to go somewhere other than to them in the form of sales and tax breaks. I mean, hell, just last week Joe Biden flew to Wisconsin to celebrate a project that gives Microsoft a $50-150 million tax break, to make up for a failed, Trump-backed project that gave Foxconn a $3 billion tax break. Not pictured: the 25.1% of non high school graduates living in poverty in Racine, who won’t see the inside of a Microsoft AI center unless they’re cleaning or guarding it.
We cannot expect companies to provide a social safety net without some form of self-dealing. And that, my friends, is why we have all these government regulations they’re always complaining about. These regulations keep arsenic out of our soil and benzene out of our water. They keep some of the most shameless grifts in the financial world from happening, or at least make the actors liable later on. And, when functioning properly, they ensure that a large amount of resources are collected and distributed in line with the common values of the population. That’s called taxation and spending.
Corporations are not the “we” we are looking for. A lot of these proposals are really just attempts to bypass or subsume representative government, so that the corporations don’t need to bother to ask permission anymore. As Grover Norquist said in 2001, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” We don’t need a government that’s any less powerful than it is presently. We need one that is actually representative in word and deed, not one where the companies make the promises and the individuals end up paying the price.
Equity in society includes a representative share in the decision making about how we move forward. That includes how assets are collected and distributed. Our current political climate seems to have forgotten that completely. And springing into that leadership void are CEOs, some with self-funded studies, others with weird tweets, to say that “we” (the CEO and his PR team) are here to solve everything.
There is only one thing that large companies can do that might contribute meaningfully to the common welfare.
They can pay their taxes, in full.
That’s it.
Office hours
I make time on Thursdays to talk with people about their careers and what they’re going through. I have limited availability, but it’s free. You can book a 30-minute slot today. If it’s empty, there will be more next Monday. (One of you found out exactly when the new slots actually open up and grabbed one early. Clever!)
Have a great week.