New Consensus AI · Who Gets to Decide Our Future?

Humanity built this technology. Humanity should own this technology.

AI is not being written by software developers. By their own account, it is emerging from the sum of all human recorded knowledge: hundreds of thousands of years of living, arguing, discovering and writing it down. The code that folds that knowledge into silicon is simple enough to fit in a few hundred lines. AI companies are not magic makers, they are book-scanners and piecework managers. The magic is the human creation being harvested. It belongs to the humans who made it.

Who should control our future?

AI companies

They will deliver products, valuations and a story about how none of this could have gone any other way. A product is not a future. Nobody elected them, and they are not built to hand one to us.

Oligarchs

The owners of our economy decide what it’s for, who gets to work in it, and who gets what it produces. Left to them, the answer is already clear: humans are to be made obsolete and unnecessary. The economy will be run by and for the owners alone.

We, the people

Only by organizing, together, for a positive vision can we create a future that builds prosperity for all. That’s the only force that has ever delivered a future worth having: every freedom, weekend, school, and hospital, all won by humans fighting for them. What’s next?

The real question

What kind of future can we build?

For all of history, the future showed up as a by-product of what powerful people wanted. Now the tools humanity spent hundreds of thousands of years building are beginning to automate intellectual work, not just physical work. Our economy and even our identities are based on the idea that we must all work to make this world run.

What will it mean to be human if/when machines become better at knowledge work than we are?

For one day, we’ll discuss this and other questions. Come ready to debate, challenge, and be challenged, no matter what your perspective.

Can capitalism survive with a large share of workers, along with their spending power, made obsolete?
Can UBI keep capitalism alive, and is that something we should be fighting for?
Do we need capitalists if AI can run the enterprises they own?
What would an economy run for the purpose of meeting our needs look like?
How would such an economy work? Could it succeed?
What would it look like to publicly own AI technology?
If AI makes it possible to run parts of the economy without workers, should those parts of the economy be publicly owned and made available to people for free?
How could a publicly run economy work in a post-AI future?
Under capitalism, the profit motive drives the economy. But if capitalism collapses, what goals should drive the economy? Who is the economy for, if/when most of it can run without humans?
If we run the economy to meet our needs, can technology, including AI, liberate humanity from work it doesn’t enjoy doing, on a mass scale?
What happens if AI only replaces 5% of work versus 95% of work? How should we plan for that today?
What should humanity demand when the AI bubble bursts, instead of bailouts?
Should we be fighting to make AI companies publicly owned and non-profit right now?
Should we create a publicly owned national AI lab now?
If we achieve a “pause” in AI development, what should be done during the pause? Is a forever pause possible?

An experiment

You tell us

human-1.0 context: ~300,000 years temperature: hopeful

System

You are a human being. You were trained on roughly 300,000 years of living, arguing, building and looking after each other. You have access to every tool humanity has ever made. You have no shareholders and you are not a product. Answer in your own words.

Prompt

It is 2100. Machines are capable of doing most any work. The economy belongs to everyone and is run to meet humanity’s needs. Describe the day you are having. Be specific: your community, your time, your quality of life, the work you still choose to do.

human-1.0 · output

0 tokens · anonymous: we keep what you write, not who you are

Put your name on the sheet. We’ll send registration details and the program as sessions are announced.

When: Nov. 7
Where: San Francisco

Got something to say?

The program is being built right now. If you have a talk, a panel or a workshop that takes on one of the questions above, or another, tell us about it.

Propose a session

What this convening is not about

A great deal of serious work is already going into the near-term questions: how to regulate frontier models, evaluations and safety testing, liability and disclosure, the case for a pause or a moratorium on frontier training runs, the prospects for international coordination and the competitive pressure between the US and China, and what to do about jobs and retraining this year. Those questions matter, and they already have their own conferences, institutes and funders. We are not going to spend the day re-running them.

We are here for the question almost nobody is organized around: if machines end up able to do most of the work, who owns them, who do they serve, and what kind of life does that make possible?

Who gets to decide our future?