The Government Wants a Piece of the Machine

The laundromat had three broken dryers and one working television mounted too high on the wall, showing a man in a suit moving his mouth without sound.

The captions were late. They always are. The mouth makes its promises first, then the words drag in afterward like hungover witnesses.

A woman folding little pink socks looked up at the screen and said, “They’re going to own it now?”

Nobody answered her.

A man feeding quarters into a washer that had already eaten two dollars said, “They own everything else.”

There it was. The whole republic, steaming under fluorescent lights, smelling like detergent and burned dust.

The new idea is that the public might get a piece of the big artificial intelligence companies. A stake. Shares. Some official slice of the machine before it eats the payroll, rewrites the textbooks, answers the phones, diagnoses the cough, teaches the kid, fires the clerk, and writes the apology email afterward.

The public, they say, should profit from the industry’s success.

That is a beautiful sentence if you do not stare at it too long. Like a motel painting. From across the room it looks like a sunset. Up close it is just orange paint trying not to be embarrassed.

The boys in Washington have finally looked at the money pile and realized it is not a pile anymore. It is a mountain range. It has weather. It has its own birds. It blocks the sun in certain towns.

So now they are talking about partnership.

Partnership is a fine word. I have heard it used by landlords, loan sharks, bad lovers, and bosses who wanted me to work Saturday. It usually means one fellow holds the knife and the other fellow holds still.

One version of the plan sounds polite. The companies could donate equity. A gift. The machine kings, moved by civic tenderness, would hand the people a few chips from the casino they built on top of everybody’s future.

Another version comes with teeth. Take half. Put the shares in a public fund. Let the government sit on the board and block the nastier decisions. Make the owners of the new electric brain admit that maybe the people whose lives will be rearranged by it deserve more than a motivational speech and a coupon for retraining.

Naturally, everybody starts clutching his pearls.

The free market has fainted onto the chaise longue. The founders are looking for the smelling salts. The lawyers are chewing through their leashes. Somewhere a man who owns eight homes is explaining property rights to a woman whose rent went up because software told her landlord it could.

I am not in love with politicians. That would require a head injury.

But I understand the impulse. I understand looking at these companies, at their valuations fattening like ticks, at their executives speaking in cathedral tones about abundance while the rest of us try to keep the teeth in our heads, and thinking: wait a minute, pal. If this thing is going to be trained on the whole culture, plugged into the whole economy, subsidized by public research, protected by public courts, powered by public infrastructure, and unleashed on public jobs, maybe the public is not some beggar at the gate.

Maybe the public is the meal.

That is the part nobody wants to say plainly.

The machines did not rise from a sacred pond holding tablets. They came out of universities, government grants, scraped books, unpaid forum posts, photographs, code, translations, medical notes, customer service logs, dead poets, living illustrators, and every poor bastard who ever typed a useful sentence into the web without realizing it would one day be melted down into someone else’s fortune.

Now the fortune is here, or close enough that men are fighting over its shadow.

The question is not whether the people should get something. The question is whether anyone powerful can design a way for the people to get something without turning it into another carnival game where the prize is nailed to the shelf.

Because government ownership has its own stink.

If the referee owns part of the fighter, do not expect too many penalties. If the agency charged with keeping the machine from chewing off fingers also benefits when the machine sells faster, you have built yourself a nice clean conflict of interest and put a flag on it.

Safety rules become bad for the portfolio. Enforcement becomes a drag on growth. The public gets told to be patient because their little national piggy bank is maturing, and meanwhile some chatbot with the bedside manner of a toaster is making decisions in places where decisions used to require a pulse.

There is always a trick.

When companies own everything, they call it innovation.

When the state wants a piece, they call it redistribution.

When workers ask for wages, they call it inflation.

When artists ask not to be strip-mined, they call it friction.

When citizens ask what happens after the machine takes the boring jobs and then the decent jobs and then the strange little jobs nobody respected until they disappeared, they call it fear of change.

I have seen this language before. Different suit, same rotten breath.

At the post office they had a phrase for everything. Route adjustment. Time study. Operational improvement. It all meant the same thing: fewer bodies doing more work while some man upstairs discovered a new chart.

The chart always looked reasonable. That was the worst part. A clean chart can hide a lot of ruined knees.

Now the chart has a brain. Or something close enough to fool the investors.

And the public is being offered a stake in the miracle.

Maybe a check arrives one day. Maybe every citizen gets a tiny dividend from the machine that replaced his nephew. Maybe the government opens a grand public fund and fills it with shares and patriotic speeches and enough administrative fog to hide a battleship. Maybe nothing happens at all except the companies get to look generous while keeping both hands in the jar.

I can already hear the campaign slogan: Everyone owns the future.

Sure.

But ownership is a funny thing. If you own one crumb of the bakery and someone else owns the oven, the recipes, the building, the delivery trucks, and the cops guarding the door, you are still hungry.

The woman at the laundromat finished folding the little socks. The television moved on to weather. Rain later, then heat.

The man at the washer slapped the machine with the flat of his hand. It had stopped again, full of water and someone’s exhausted shirts. He stood there waiting for it to remember its purpose.

That is where most of us are now.

Standing in front of the machine.

Watching it hold our clothes hostage.

Listening to rich men argue about who gets the quarters.

Source: Trump eyes public stake in $850bn OpenAI as Sanders wants 50%