Nan Ransohoff argues that we’re at the dawn of the third wave of American philanthropy.
In her telling, the first wave was born of industrial fortunes (Carnegie, Rockefeller), and led to the civic improvements—libraries, universities, hospitals, and foundations—that we still enjoy today, and that still shape our understanding of philanthropy.
The second wave was born of technology wealth, starting in the 1990s, and led to efforts to solve major problems for humanity: poverty, disease, lack of access to education. Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are the defining examples here, in that they “treat[ed] philanthropy as a serious operating discipline.”
Now the third wave is here. It will be fueled by AI wealth, and given the preoccupations of the set raking it in, will likely be directed towards preparing the world for AI and similarly large-scale problems: “AI safety, biosecurity, pandemic preparedness, and so on.”
Ransohoff puts the amount at roughly an additional $50 billion a year. For comparison, the Gates Foundation, whose gravity is large enough to bend the philanthropic world around it, has a budget of about $9 billion.
Her argument is that existing philanthropies don’t have the capacity or talent to absorb that funding and put it to good use, i.e., “traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it.” So, we need a new “Silicon Valley for public goods” to bring in “tech-caliber talent and execution” to make sure the money is used well.
There are a few things I really like about this argument.
First, at the most basic level, I love that she is thinking in terms of preparedness. So much of the public debate about AI is stuck on two questions:
- Is AI really valuable, or is it just hype and/or more harm than good?
- Should we slow down or stop AI development, e.g., with bans on model development or moratoria on constructing data centers?
For reasons I’ve written about elsewhere, I find these questions to be a waste of precious time. To be brief: AI really is valuable, the risks are real and demand our full attention, and there’s no practical chance of stopping development in the foreseeable future. We should be spending more time working on preparedness: environmental protections, labor market readiness, forums for public participation and alignment, safeguards on development—but these questions are clogging the channel for those conversations. Ransohoff is talking about a real and important question.
Second, her core observation makes sense. There is going to be a lot of new philanthropic cash, it will be directed at specific ends, and the existing infrastructure likely can’t quickly absorb that much additional spending for those ends.
That’s all good. That’s where I diverge.
To paint with a broad brush, that first wave was directed at civic improvements, motivated (depending on the account) by patrons’ guilt for a lifetime of ruthless dealings, by the desire to launder their reputations and legacy, or both. The institutions they created outlived them, in the trust of others, including the public. The second seems to be motivated by a desire to solve big problems (and the confidence that they were capable of doing it)—and of course the same desire to leave a more positive image.
If the third wave develops as Ransohoff describes, I wouldn’t even call it philanthropy. The leaders of major AI companies often have ambitions that are in a different realm from even the wealthiest robber barons of the past; Bill Gates’s vision of a “computer on every desk and in every home” seemed audacious at the time, but is quaint in comparison to the quest to create superintelligence. And, whatever self-deprecating remarks they offer, their view of themselves appears to be mythical—not only are they capable of birthing a new form of consciousness, they alone can be trusted to wield that power. The companies they’ve founded are powerful instruments for molding the world, and they’re also happy to pay to get the government they want. If they take a portion of the profits they generate and use it to remake the world around AI, that is not “giving” in the sense of Carnegie endowing a library or Gates trying to stamp out malaria. It is putting another hand into the clay.
That’s particularly true since we know by now that these leaders are willing to play with corporate forms (for profit? non-profit?) and manipulate messaging to advance their causes. They rush to tell us when a model is so powerful it can’t be contained. They say it’s responsibility, and maybe it is. But it’s also marketing, and it’s also a warning to governments that might regulate: if models are this dangerous, better that we’re the ones making them. I don’t mind if a university is founded as reputation laundering, because at the end of the day, you still get a university. That isn’t the case when money is spent in furtherance of a social, economic, and political vision that, if realized, we will all have to inhabit.
I’m glad American companies are building AI, and if some self-aggrandizement helps the leaders give it their all, we can indulge it. And, they could do worse than putting their billions to work on real problems for humanity. And, I’m also sympathetic to the idea that our public capacity to address problems is degraded to the point that we need other ideas.
But I’d rather not concentrate power in those hands even further. Nobody, however brilliant, should have it, and it’s all the worse if they’re convinced of their own infallible brilliance. If, like Ransohoff, they adopt the idea that people who work in technology are more capable than the people who work on difficult social problems, we will repeat the farce that was DOGE, but over the long term and on the greatest existential problems confronting humanity.
We will have AI regulation, and we should: for the public’s fate to be decided without the public’s voice is not compatible with our democracy. But we should question now how we bring the spending of this new set of messianic billionaires in line with public values and intention. One approach is to take the public representation model I’ve written about—where a representative of the public is embedded in the operations of an AI company—and bring a version of it to these private projects.
As this third wave approaches, how to distribute the money is not as pressing a question as whether that spending is aligned with our values.