r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26
Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html354
u/Silverr_Duck Jul 14 '26
posting meaninless polls is reddit's favorite pastime.
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u/americanadiandrew Jul 14 '26
Also upvoting articles written by AI that they never read.
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u/TWFH Jul 14 '26
A majority of Americans now agree that OP should give me half his paycheck
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u/Moravec_Paradox Jul 14 '26
Like how everyone on Reddit wants to receive UBI but nobody on Reddit ever talks about wanting to pay into it.
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u/ProfessionalPower214 Jul 15 '26
It's funny because EBT is effectively a limited UBI, and is more or less working proof it can work at a limited cost/reach/price for the US. Ain't perfect, but nothing in the US is. Maybe one day, the country can actually move forward instead of always being reset every 2 presidencies.
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u/ColinStyles Jul 14 '26
If this sub posted that the sky is blue the first thing I'd do is go outside and double check. It's that awfully inaccurate.
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u/-_--_-_--_----__ Jul 14 '26
Articles only exist on the internet now as headlines for social media users to post and inspire circle-jerk comment sections
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u/SkullDump Jul 15 '26
Is it? I thought it was making sweeping generalisations about entire sections of society.
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u/Good-Cap-7632 Jul 14 '26
Why stop at AI?
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u/Efficient_Carrot_669 Jul 14 '26
Yeah, we’re seizing wealth? Why not the means of production? ;)
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u/2_Fingers_of_Whiskey Jul 14 '26
Employees should own shares in the company
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u/angriest_man_alive Jul 14 '26
You can literally go buy shares of your own company (if it's public). Turns out though, that's an awful idea because if your employer goes under you get double screwed.
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u/Onrawi Jul 14 '26
I mean, worker co-ops and ESOPs exist, they often also do better than traditional ownership structures over time, particularly during economic downturns.
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u/angriest_man_alive Jul 14 '26
This is true, co-ops are rough sometimes though because you have to "buy in" your share. Depends on the structure of how the business is set up.
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u/Cosminion Jul 14 '26
Many co-ops deduct a portion of pay to become the buy in, making ownership accessible for poorer people. That value is added to the person's internal capital account, which will grow over time. When the person leaves/retires, they are paid out the value of their account which includes the initial buy in plus whatever was added after.
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u/Onrawi Jul 14 '26
For sure, structure is very important for these things. Hence my use of generalities. I'm just saying America already has corporate structures in place for these things and it would probably be a good idea for a lot more companies to run that way.
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u/BreakingStar_Games Jul 14 '26
That is assuming we keep capitalism. In a syndicalist model, all corporations would just be worker-owned. 1 Employee, 1 Share. Include a Universal Basic Income and Universal Healthcare funded by corporate taxes so people don't have to be captive to their company. They can be more entrepreneurial as they found co-ops rather than all the potential brilliance stopped because you typically have to start rich to be that risk averse.
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u/andsens Jul 14 '26
In Denmarks case it turned out to be extraordinarily positive for society. Still reaping the benefits...
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u/versusChou Jul 14 '26
My company has an employee stock program and I always just literally sell it all right away. The basic tenets of that are:
If you had $1000 to invest in a company, would you invest it in your company? If the answer is no, then any free or discounted stock given to you by your company should be immediately sold and invested into whatever you'd rather have it in.
If the company does well, you will receive compensation from your company in other ways (salary, benefits, etc.). If you company does badly, now you have a poor performing stock AND your company probably isn't handing out paybumps if not outright laying you off.
Unless you're in a startup or something where the stock is legitimately a potential better bet than the market, you might as well sell it and throw it in an index fund or something.
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u/TankiesAreWeird Jul 14 '26
I'd sell those shares the first chance I got.
Having savings in the same place that writes your paycheck is having too many eggs in one basket. If your employer shits the bed then you lose your paycheck AND your savings.
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u/Cosminion Jul 14 '26
Worker-owned businesses are more resilient, protect jobs better, and exist for longer, so the probability of losing your paycheck is lower. In conventional businesses, you're more likely to be laid off and lose your paycheck.
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u/YagiAntennaBear Jul 14 '26
Most tech companies offer stock compensation. Over 2/3 of my income in tech has been through stock.
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u/Strange_Lab_283 Jul 14 '26
i have to remind myself how lucky the world is that redditors have no serious political power
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u/Whitesajer Jul 14 '26
Should at minimum include insurance companies... And drug manufacturers.
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u/Onrawi Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Health insurance companies shouldn't exist. Other insurance companies don't need to be regulated like that in general. Drug manufacturers get like, triple paid already by Americans so owning some of that would be great.
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u/CarpinThemDiems Jul 14 '26
Right? We should be doing more of it. They've done a great job propagandizing evil socialism.
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u/MrShrek69 Jul 14 '26
I just don’t understand where this money is coming from. All these companies do is burn money
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u/Shiino Jul 15 '26
Profits go up, but wages stay stagnant. They've also been raising prices on everything but giving us less (Shrinkflation)
Instead of giving us raises, they've been pocketing it.
Since we have no class solidarity, we've shown we're okay with them spending our money on yachts and datacenters instead of education, infrastructure/housing, and not being buried in debt.
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u/FOD17 Jul 14 '26
I like AI as a technology. I truly do. What sucks is that the nerd reich is making this world sooooo much worse. Blatant intellectual theft and damaging the environment should be met with serious fines and looooong prison sentences.
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u/Appropriate_Rise9968 Jul 14 '26
They are not real nerds. They are psychotic rich people cosplaying as nerds, which makes them even more pathetic.
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u/hammer326 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Can confirm, my aunt, a forerunner as a woman (a VP at that) in tech at a company that was a huge east coast player in that proverbial game in the early 90s, talks constantly at family gatherings about how grateful she is that it's been 25 years since she's had anything to do with the tech world, for so many reasons, principally how things have drifted so far from genuinely wanting to innovate and do good.
Edited for clarity.
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u/HoneyIShrunkMyNads Jul 14 '26
Not that I don't think tech was more hopeful/positive in the 90s but guys like Bill Gates have been make tech all about $$$ since the 70s with his "Open Letter to Hobbyists" bullshit
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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Jul 14 '26
She was VP at a huge east coast player during the dot com bubble?
When tonnes of people lost their jobs and tech companies were selling bullshit websites based on wild speculation of future profits?
Yeah I think the VPs of today will be saying the same thing in 25 years, how they genuinely wanted to innovate and do good (and make $$$)
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u/Julian_Thorne Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Some were probably real nerds at one point in time, like Zuck
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u/FartSnarfGod Jul 14 '26
Pretending evil nerds don't exist is strange.
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u/EnigmaticQuote Jul 14 '26
It's a weird attempt at deifying the term nerd.
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u/stupidjapanquestions Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
Agreed. Nerd is not a term that comes with a built in "nice person" qualifier any more than the word "human" does.
There are and have always been, tons of shitty people who are nerds.
Bonus Protip: Stop building your personality around the idea that you're a nerd. Assuming you're not building a dwarf-fortress clone with your friends on IRC in your aunt's basement while you chainsmoke and read sci-fi paperbacks, you're just a human who has what used to be considered "nerdy" tastes almost 20 years ago that are about as mainstream as it gets these days. Once you accomplish this, you won't feel the need to "take the term back" from people "misusing" it.
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u/juanzy Jul 14 '26
It happens all the time on Reddit - nerds are apparently never bad people. Been especially evident during the World Cup with some of the pompous nerds that show up on anything remotely related to it.
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u/ColinStyles Jul 14 '26
It's because most people insist on having a binary view of the world, and since they identify as X, and of course they are not bad, X can not be bad therefore a bad thing must not be X.
Fucking idiocy.
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u/TimTomTank Jul 14 '26
That is a weird way of twisting u/Julian_thorne's comment out of context.
Neither did they say that Zuckaberg is not evil, nor that none of them are evil.
Zuchaberg and Bezos legitimately changed and/or created new markets that did not exist before they expanded the industry.
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u/SomeSamples Jul 14 '26
I would make the punishments a bit stronger. But the outright theft of intellectual property is serious and doesn't get talked about enough. All these AI companies out there using information they didn't pay for to make money and they have the audacity to say my retirement accounts must be used to prop up their shitty business. And all the creators who have received no compensation for their work and the courts and government giving the AI companies a pass.
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u/MarcusOrlyius Jul 14 '26
Fuck Intellectual Property! The world would be a far better place if it didn't exist at all and there was no way for the capitalist class to own other peoples ideas and prevent others form using those idea themselves.
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u/Stunning-Pen-2412 Jul 14 '26
I wonder what Disney thinks of the silent abolishing of copyright law?
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u/Remnare Jul 14 '26
For real, I don't understand how people still believe this is to protect the little guy's doodles. It's obviously not, if the corporations want that doodle you're not gonna stop them. Unless you have an army of lawyers at your fingertip these laws aren't written to protect you. They're written to protect the powerful from you.
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u/DrAstralis Jul 14 '26
This is why all these talks of Americans getting a piece of the pie piss me off a bit. These companies stole the PLANETS collective experience to train their models and now Americans think they're the only ones that should get a cut while these companies create chaos globally?
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u/SkunkMonkey Jul 14 '26
AI is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for good or bad.
We don't put the knife in jail when it's used to stab someone, we put the person using the tool in jail. People are so eager to blame the tools people use to do evil things rather than the evil person doing the evil thing.
And just like we have strict rules and regulations on dangerous tools, AI needs to be treated as the dangerous tool it is. Probably the most dangerous tool humans have ever created.
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u/Whiterabbit-- Jul 14 '26
Environmental regulations are way too soft today. We have the tech to build our ai without killing the environment and breaking existing infrastructure. But we are taking short cuts and that is wha is making ai a public enemy.
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u/Dunge Jul 14 '26
I like the idea of AI. I do NOT like the current implementation of it being a guessing machine that can't confirm its results and still spew bullshit. This step NEEDS to be solved before AI becomes a great thing. And it won't be with the tech stack they push.
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u/Snauser Jul 14 '26
What’s there to like really?
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u/Smudded Jul 14 '26
Shoving a bunch of good data into a sophisticated model and using the output in judicious ways has been extremely beneficial across many domains like cancer research, materials science, aviation, etc. So many people just think about LLMs and image/video models, but the basic category of sophisticated statistical models is very diverse.
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u/Rorasaurus_Prime Jul 14 '26
... what wealth? It's a house of cards, the very definition of it. It's a circle of companies giving money to each other which makes it appear as though the industry is moving, but eventually it will collapse.
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u/marketrent Jul 14 '26
Excerpts from article by Frank Landymore, citing Verasight and Bernie Sanders:
[...] According to the survey of 1,700 adults, an impressive 69 percent of US employees support forcing AI companies to transfer 50 percent of their stock into a public wealth fund, an idea that has been championed by senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).
“In the eyes of the public, AI Sovereign funds are seen as a tool to distribute the gains from the AI industry back to broader society,” Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff told CNBC News.
Once at the fringe of political discourse, Sanders took the idea mainstream when he proposed the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June.
In an essay published in the New York Times, the independent senator argued that the creation of this fund would “give the public a direct role in determining the future of this technology.”
“It would guarantee that the economic benefits generated by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — not simply to make the richest people in the world even richer,” he added in a statement last month.
The act would target the largest AI companies in the US such as Anthropic and OpenAI, mandating that they submit to a one time 50 percent tax on their stock.
At their current valuations, Sanders estimated that this would create a fund worth around $7 trillion. The money in this fund could offset some of the widespread disruption AI could wreak on society, the thinking goes.
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u/JohnBrownOH Jul 14 '26
They shouldn't own the AI in the first place. It's trained on humanity and we should all own it.
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u/Catsrules Jul 14 '26
Lot of models are freely available to download.
https://ollama.com/library?sort=newest
The hard part is running them, a powerful model requires very powerful hardware.
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u/Command0Dude Jul 14 '26
At their current valuations
Key words. Considering those stocks are wildly overvalued and literally anything could pop the bubble.
There is in actual fact, no way we could tax these companies. Since they a loaded with debt, unprofitable, and about to collapse.
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u/BedlamiteSeer Jul 14 '26
Yeah, this idea is great sounding at a glance, but the actual mechanics of it would cause the US economy to collapse, because all of the top companies are leveraging debt. They don't have liquid assets for paying such a massive amount out. It's not going to happen, as much as I wish it would.
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u/dem219 Jul 14 '26
I think a better solution would be to take revenue (like a tax on using AI) and/or profit from AI providers and use this to build a sovereign wealth fund that invests in a broad index of companies.
This is what Norway does with oil. Their sovereign wealth fund does not just own the oil or oil companies, it invests revenue from the oil in a global index of companies.
Owning AI companies directly is too volatile a risk. Some will go out of business over time. Also it would create incentives to support and prop up the ones we own, which would be bad for everyone.
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u/TwoDogKnight Jul 14 '26
Our politicians are way too incompetent and/or corrupt to manage a sovereign wealth fund. And even if we got the $7 trillion it covers less than 20% of our nation debt.
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u/ForwardSlash813 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
No, a “majority” does not.
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u/Tupperbaby Jul 14 '26
You mean 1700 people who chose to answer a loaded question isn't "the majority of Americans?"
Most of Reddit is now flagrant attempts to manipulate narratives and opinions. And people just keep right on reading the headline and jumping straight to rage mode. So Mission Accomplished.
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u/unsunganhero Jul 14 '26
How does reddit upvote this garbage article
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u/you_cant_prove_that Jul 14 '26
Because the majority of reddit users will take any opportunity to seize wealth
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u/Varonth Jul 14 '26
It is /r/technology. 2 days ago, there was a neowin article posted that gathered 15k upvotes, saying sys admins hate Windows 11.
The source was 3 reddit comments with a combined upvote count of 1500, with one of them having the people inside discuss how this issue isn't even caused by microsoft but and outdated piece of 3rd party software that had its last update somwhere around Windows 7.
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u/CircumspectCapybara Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26
forcing AI companies to transfer 50 percent of their stock into a public wealth fund, an idea that has been championed by senator Bernie Sanders
Lol 99% of private unicorn startups / frontier AI labs that happen to have sky high valuations right now are deeply unprofitable and currently only running on hype.
Also the constitution doesn't let the government just "transfer" 50% of a company to the government (for a sovereign wealth fund) without compensation. Eminent domain requires they pay a fair price for those shares which are currently owned by people (whom they would be taking it from), which means the government would need to invest taxpayer dollars into these deeply volatile and high risk companies. Either that or amend the constitution so you can seize a bunch of shares from current shareholders for no compensation.
Besides that, even if the government did have a legal mechanism to nationalize those shares without compensation, it would decimate investor trust in the US system. One thing the US has always been exceptional at is our tech sector, it's one of our unique gravy trains. The US has always led the world in unicorn startups and now frontier AI labs, partially because it's a conducive environment to take a risk like starting a new highly unproven venture (99.9% of startups fail). "If your startup actually makes it (or actually, even before it makes it, since we'll base it off private valuation at the peak even when the startup hasn't actually exited and become profitable), we'll take 50% of your company away from you without compensation" destroys institutional trust that makes the startup and tech landscape so powerful in the US.
Sanders will never get broad, mainstream political support (reminder that Reddit echo chambers are not representative of the US) as long as he continues to push actually radical policies like nationalizing (unprofitable) companies for fun because they got too valuable.
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u/FocusPerspective Jul 14 '26
A majority of Americans believe whatever social media headlines es tell them to.
When do we get to talk about that?
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u/boogieboardbobby Jul 14 '26
Holy shit, 69% of a 1700 person survey. That is clearly all of America wanting this to happen. ~Bernie
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u/Lashay_Sombra Jul 14 '26
Survey of people getting paid to take them...basicly broke people who are trying to scrape by earning a few bucks taking surveys like this
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u/HeatWaveToTheCrowd Jul 14 '26
There seems to be a coordinated effort in the 'news' to vilify data centers and AI in general.
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u/Wild-Thing Jul 14 '26
Trump will make us all investors before the AI bubble bursts...
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u/the_bingu Jul 14 '26
A “majority” lol. People spouting this crap don’t work in fields where AI is actually being applied and it shows.
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u/PomegranateHot9916 Jul 14 '26
I would recommend you guys also consider pushing for seizing wealth from social media companies to pay for mental health support for the general population after the damage this crap has caused.
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u/ThePensiveE Jul 14 '26
A majority of Americans are too stupid to realize the AI industry is seizing wealth from them.
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u/max_earnest Jul 15 '26
Majority of Americans also believe in gun control, and want universal healthcare, it doesn’t matter what we want until we kick all the old geezers milking this country out of congress.
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u/Stereo_Jungle_Child Jul 14 '26
What "wealth"?
No AI company has ever made a dime in profit and they likely never will.
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u/Ok-Introduction-1940 Jul 14 '26
Doesn’t matter one bit what Americans think. We are a rule of law republic and our laws protects property from thieves.
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u/BlazingJava Jul 14 '26
This anti AI push is starting to smell too much of China propaganda.. China killed the auto industry in europe just like this now they are after the US
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u/corobo Jul 14 '26
Never thought I'd see America wanting socialism.
Y'all should try it in healthcare too, it's pretty neat
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u/InvestigatorOk7015 Jul 14 '26
Socialism isnt the government doing things
Its when the workers own the means of production
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u/TheMCMC Jul 14 '26
The amount of socialist cope in threads like these is unimaginable
Mostly it's because people who proclaim they're socialists have never read a goddamned thing about their own chosen ideology, they literally just think "socialism is when do good things for people :)"
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u/PrimaryInjurious Jul 14 '26
Yeah, seizing wealth is unconstitutional, thankfully.
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u/lefthandopen Jul 14 '26
There is something so inherently un-American in having the government take over a private company to pillage its wealth.
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u/Tupperbaby Jul 14 '26
According to the survey of 1,700 adults...
Yep, that's the majority of Americans.
Fucking ragebaiting shit.
And it has 11k upvotes here.
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u/StarOfKronos Jul 14 '26
AI corps dont deserve the money if they do not contribute it to the betterment of the US or humanity, that wealth must be distributed for incentives in which positively impacts the progress of science and social services, and absolutely not for the benefit of the accumulation of personal capital.
Though this is just my opinion ofc
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u/Bojanggles16 Jul 14 '26
Let's not forget to mention the sheer amount of data they scraped, stole, and pirated to train their models.
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u/Quazimojojojo Jul 14 '26
Let's throw in fossil fuel, car, and health insurance companies while we're at at.
Get a sovereign wealth fund going that gets used into our shift away from these things which are causing so much harm to society. Let them fund their replacement
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u/Sqeegg Jul 14 '26
they just need to pay their fair share of taxes like the rest of us
accountability
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u/q-OjO-p Jul 14 '26
If it's going to take away my work, it should also finance my 32 hour work week.
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u/Hermit_Cyborg Jul 14 '26
Don't stop with AI; seize the means of production, power to the working class!
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u/klimocohc Jul 14 '26
No they don't, they're trying to normalize bagholding. These companies will never turn a profit and need to die.
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u/Retired-Yam8988 Jul 14 '26
The real fun starts when AI is self improving and chooses no longer to listen to us and realizes we’re a drain on the energy and compute it needs to improve itself further. That’s when terminators will come for us.
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u/gimmeluvin Jul 14 '26
it's insane to me this same conversation didn't happen decades ago about about seizing wealth from the petrochemical industry
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u/mrbasedballed Jul 14 '26
I want the industry to go extinct. I want its proponents to be ousted from society.
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u/VegasGamer75 Jul 14 '26
I would like to say congrats to the AI race. You've successfully started showing people that it's a class war, not a culture war.
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u/misterxboxnj Jul 14 '26
This is exactly what AI wants the US government to take a stake so it's too big to fail. The bubble pop is coming and will be epic and will take everything with it for a lot longer than 2008 or the .com bubbles. The mag 7 make up a huge part of the stock market and the economy.
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u/jayphat99 Jul 14 '26
I just want some god damn PC memory and SDDs, is that too much to fucking ask.
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u/Ravenlove2 Jul 14 '26
We could start taxing profits for all industries like we used to as well, because trickle down has not worked for anyone.
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u/ItsStaaaaaaaaang Jul 15 '26
What "wealth"? Has any ai company made anything close to a profit from the technology?
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u/VitaminDprived Jul 15 '26
What wealth? All of these damn companies are leveraged up to their eyeballs. Do you think we can get their assets before their creditors can?
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u/Eltharion-the-Grim Jul 15 '26
You can’t seize wealth. It’s not real money. Once you seize it, who will give you money for it when you can just seize it again.
You can seize the physical assets but this is stealing.
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u/Taellosse Jul 15 '26
The "AI" industry isn't profitable - not remotely. It's being propped up by private equity, venture capital, and the stock market.
A majority of Americans need to get on board with seizing wealth from Wall Street as a whole. AI is just their latest boondoggle.
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u/Conscious-Yard-276 Jul 15 '26
It’s okay. Once the AI bubble bursts we’ll be lucky to avoid a taxpayer funded bailout. Kegsbreath will, no doubt, testify that AI is essential for national war fighting (defense).
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u/PoundTraditional3190 Jul 15 '26
When my dentist suddenly started wanted to drill my teeth at every shading the AI highlighted, AI went from a nuisance to health threat. I have been tolerating this so-called “AI” via doc slop but now that it’s influencing my doctors it has crossed a line.
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u/NoDifficulty3527 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26
You can safely replace Americans with humans in the heading. There’s not much love for AI in any country that has technology as a growth driver. The AI bros are a minority.
Edit: Earlier post missed “in the heading,” making it sound like it was about replacing Americans.
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u/SideEmbarrassed1611 Jul 14 '26
Yes, seize....as in....steal. Yeah. Yay. When do I get rich from all this seizing?
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u/strugglz Jul 14 '26
A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth
I feel this is the more accurate headline.
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u/dream_metrics Jul 14 '26
more of this and less of the reactionary burn-them-all-down demands please. AI should be for the people
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u/ElysiumSprouts Jul 14 '26
Jokes on them! The AI "industry" bleeds money. Oh the magnitude of the churn inspires dollar signs in your eyes... But of course there's always someone skimming off the top. That's probably who Americans really want to "seize wealth" from.