Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya says the technology industry is facing a growing perception crisis around artificial intelligence and wealth concentration, warning that failure to respond could fuel political backlash and calls to halt technological progress.
Speaking on a new episode of the All-In Podcast, Palihapitiya says the core problem is not the data around AI’s impact, but how the industry is perceived by the public.
“We have a big perception problem. So the question at hand is, how do we fix it?”
He says opposition to AI and technological progress is gaining momentum because many Americans feel excluded from the benefits, even as a small group of founders and executives accumulate enormous wealth.
“We have a handful of companies. All the PR that you see from those handful of companies is a bunch of circular dealmaking, a bunch of capital that flows from one to the other, which causes these stocks to go up, of which a small percentage of people benefit. And at the tail end of it, it’s accompanied by a completely different set of articles that everybody also reads about this Sword of Damocles that’s about to fall on their head, whether it’s electricity prices, or whether it’s their jobs, or whether it’s the jobs of their children, or the quality of their education.”
Palihapitiya says the solution is to look at the Gilded Age, pointing to figures like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford as examples of industrial leaders who paired technological disruption with visible public benefits.
“Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. The idea was, as he built the railroads, you’re going to scale GDP you’re going to scale education and knowledge. Those libraries are artifacts that allowed people to feel a dividend from the Industrial Revolution. John D. Rockefeller took all of his wealth and invested it in institutions and universities. Henry Ford specifically focused on wages.”
Palihapitiya calls on billionaires and firms to proactively deploy portions of their balance sheets to, at a minimum, deliver measurable benefits that tens of millions of Americans can feel directly.
“We need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit as many Americans as possible… We need to self-organize better… We need to start doing things that are practically measurable by tens of millions of American citizens.”
Palihapitiya’s call for billionaires to reinvest their fortunes into society comes as Senator Bernie Sanders posted a video, asking for a freeze on the data center buildout. The Vermont senator argued that AI is making the rich richer, while everyone else faces the risks of job loss and societal breakdown.
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