Quite apart from the legal and fiscal issues associated with it, nationalizing AI companies comes with plenty of risk. Do you feel comfortable giving Donald Trump a stake in tech companies? What would he do with it? And what happens if AI, in the short and medium term, is a bubble? The American taxpayers would lose, bigly, under those circumstances.
But leaving AI unregulated is dangerous, too. That will result in a wide range of dangers to American workers and vastly increased inequality. Tech barons could effectively be more powerful than the president, because they could use their model to shut down the country. They could even threaten to sell it to the Chinese. In this scenario, regardless of what the public wants, Elon Musk could wind up as the true ruler of the country.
The obvious answer is to control AI through taxation and regulation. But the AI companies will invest many millions of dollars in the political process to see that doesn’t happen. And even if their efforts fail, they have the Supreme Court and the filibuster on their side. The tech industry runs at 100 miles an hour; the government crawls, and it doesn’t even know how to regulate AI at this point. By the time the answers become clear, it will be too late; the techno-aristocrats will already be in charge, and we will be their subjects.
Sounds great, doesn’t it?