The American people are turning to previously discredited ideas like socialism, ostensibly driven by fear of change and resentment over the gap between a wealthy few and an anxious many. In this environment, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg recently published a sweeping new manifesto on artificial intelligence, promising that superintelligence will bring “personal empowerment” to the world.
He's directionally correct: The essay contains real commitment to direct AI for the public good, especially in the case of rising existential fear of the technology. But it isn't nearly enough to calm the AI backlash and curb the rising popularity of statism.
He and the rest of the AI elite are in luck, however. America has faced such social instability before, and beaten
it. We can do it again if today's tech titans are willing to learn from the old-school robber barons.
In the Gilded Age, railroads, steel and oil created monumental fortunes, while critics warned that America was becoming an oligarchy of millionaire tycoons.
Men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt are remembered as villains, men who built vast fortunes on the backs of workers in dangerous factories. This one-sided caricature obscures the quintessential role these great men played in our nation’s successful transition to social stability in the industrial age.
Unlike today’s tech titans, the Gilded Age millionaires understood their success could only be ensured if they visibly served the country that gave them the opportunity to achieve.
Industrial titans of old did good while doing well
Carnegie gave away roughly $350 million over his lifetime, nearly 90% of his fortune, and used it to build nearly 1,700 libraries in the United States. In his words, he wanted to build "ladders provided upon which the aspiring may climb."
These libraries were more than centers of self-improvement. They had specific, often neoclassical architectural standards and were designed to stand as civic institutions in town centers. Carnegie desired buildings that ennobled the citizens who stepped into them.
Rockefeller gave away more than $530 million, including $35 million to build the University of Chicago from nothing into one of the great research universities on earth, a gift so consequential that biographer Ron Chernow ranked him "the greatest philanthropist in American history."
Even Vanderbilt, notoriously tight-fisted compared with his peers, gave $1 million in 1873 to found a university in Nashville, explicitly meant to "contribute to strengthening the ties which should exist between all sections of our common country,” an act of national healing less than a decade after the Civil War.
Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s partner, donated his mansion and art collection as a public museum. Andrew Mellon, a prominent banker, donated his art collection for the National Gallery of Art.
In some cases, giving became a family affair, as the Vanderbilt family financed New York’s Grand Central Station and John D. Rockefeller Jr. personally funded land acquisitions that became part of our national parks, including nearly half of Grand Teton National Park.
Philanthropy could ease sting of AI's impact
The point was not the money spent, but the message it sent. The so-called robber barons erected public monuments, provided for public libraries and galleries, protected America’s natural heritage, and built public spaces so that the American people could be culturally enriched and inspired.
That instinct mattered especially because these men's fortunes often came from industries with enormous physical footprints – steel mills, oil fields and rail lines that visibly reshaped the American landscape. Precisely because their operations transformed the land, they felt a visible obligation to restore and beautify it in return.
The contrast today is palpable. The AI industry now faces a similar choice as data centers consume enormous quantities of natural resources and infrastructure, reshaping rural and exurban communities.
That kind of physical footprint carries the same obligation it always has – to address the environmental toll honestly and to fund the parks, institutions and civic spaces of the towns the data centers transform.
Yet the tech industry seems uninterested in strengthening American public life.
Zuckerberg devoted a significant portion of his manifesto to how AI helps individuals.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions artificial intelligence helping people “pursue their own goals” and “do more of what they choose.”
That’s well and good, but voters aren't embracing aggressive political movements like populism and socialism because they lack tools for self-optimization. Rather, they are worried that the wealthiest people in our society no longer care about the well-being of our society as a whole.
That lack of trust has created a climate of fear where tens of millions of people are primed to believe the scaremongering of a former Anthropic researcher who resigned claiming AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade” – a claim promptly amplified by Anthropic’s chief safety researcher competing to sound the most alarm and draw the most attention and investment to his firm.
Focus on greater good, not selfish gains
People wouldn’t take such unfalsifiable sensationalism seriously if tech leaders had given more reason to trust them in the first place. Silicon Valley’s response has centered on what technology can offer individuals, from powerful new tools to proposals for universal basic income.
That leaves a civic question unanswered: What will this transformation mean for the places people call home?
A monthly payment can support a household. Building confidence in a shared future also requires institutions where people learn, gather and contribute. Tech leaders have the resources to help build them.
The titans of the Gilded Age weren't saints, but they understood that the wealth they generated in America created a duty toward America, to lift the nation up not only with the invention of steel or with rising wages, but also with natural spaces and civic centers of learning, culture, art and beauty.
When socialism infiltrated our society over a century ago, men like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Frick and Mellon helped persuade their countrymen to reject the politics of envy and embrace the changing future by using their fortunes to serve the common good.
Today’s 21st century tech titans have even more wealth and power than the robber barons. They can turn the tide against radical politics – if they have the wisdom and the will.
Chris Johnson is a cofounder and president of the American Energy Leadership Institute.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: To beat AI backlash, billionaires need to start giving back | Opinion
