The @nytimes piece today by @ByrneEdsal13590 highlights a concern I share: “If we stay on the current path, the risk of extreme concentration — both economic and political — is very real.”In work with @zhitzig, we ask why AI may shift the balance between dispersed knowledge… pic.twitter.com/10vOTRj4Dq— Erik Brynjolfsson (@erikbryn) March 17, 2026
Alex Imas on Twitter / X
Intelligence is not enough to flourish. You need intelligence and well-functioning economic institutions. Even as AI capabilities continue to massively improve, if they are confronted by sclerotic, inefficient, and outdated institutions, they will do far less for prosperity than… https://t.co/0ZhscpPypH— Alex Imas (@alexolegimas) August 9, 2026
The Missing Institution: A Global Dividend System for the Age of Transformative AI — Digitalist Papers
How do we share prosperity in society if work no longer sits at the center of people’s lives? In this essay, Anna Yelizarova explores one provocative possibility: a “global dividend.” If transformative AI shows little respect for national borders, with effects that spill across countries, then we ne
Meredith Whittaker on Twitter / X
Now that even Goldman, Sequoia, and other major investors are calling it, it's good to remember that the shakiness of the AI market, and the mismatch between capex and ROI, has been clear for a long time to those of us who look closely at the political economy of AI. https://t.co/dLLNAcW5Sn— Meredith Whittaker (@mer__edith) July 30, 2024
Bernie Sanders’ AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Plan - Schneier on Security
Let no one accuse Bernie Sanders of ducking the big questions. Writing in the New York Times last week, the senator asked: “Will the future of humanity be determined by a handful of billionaires who have promoted and developed AI, with virtually no democratic input, who stand to become even richer and more powerful than they are today?” We agree entirely that this is one of the most potent questions facing global democracy today. Our book, Rewiring Democracy, surveys the emerging uses for and impacts of AI in democracy around the world and reaches the same conclusion: that the most urgent risk posed by AI is the ...
AI FOR EPISTEMICS & COORDINATION
Civilization and technology have radically improved the human condition. Nonetheless, the world sometimes goes in directions which essentially nobody would prefer — e.g., nuclear arms races, unexpected financial crashes, predatory marketing, or ubiquitous political misinformation.
AI is now unpopular. That may not make a difference.
The Next Great Divergence: How AI could split the world again if we don’t intervene | Brookings
Michael Muthukrishna and Philip Schellekens argue that AI, like past general-purpose technologies, could drive a new global divergence unless deliberate action ensures its benefits are broadly shared rather than geographically concentrated.
AI as Social Technology: Astor Lecture by Professor Henry Farrell
AI as Social Technology: Astor Lecture by Professor Henry Farrell
3: Consulting the Record: AI Consistently Fails the Public - AI Now Institute
Amid the excitement over AI’s (speculative, hypothetical) potential, we have lost sight of the sobering reality of its present and recent past. AI is already intermediating critical social infrastructures, materially reshaping our institutions in ways that ratchet up inequality and concentrate power in the hands of the already powerful. It is consistently deployed in ways […]
The Real Existential Risk Is AI CEOs Avoiding Oversight: “Alternative Nobel” Winner Timnit Gebru
We speak to the prominent AI researcher and leading critic of the AI industry, Timnit Gebru, who was recently awarded a 2026 Right Livelihood Award for her work investigating the harms and hype behind the global buildup of artificial intelligence. “Instead of discussing faulty, unreliable systems,” Gebru says tech leaders like SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei are “marketing their systems as all-knowing, superpowerful, superintelligent,” and lobbying for “self-policing and self-regulation” to avoid being held “liable through existing laws.” Gebru expresses skepticism over increasingly widespread claims that AI algorithms pose an existential risk to humanity, warning that such claims are overblown and that “what is actually happening is regulatory capture.”
‘Think Everybody Dead’: How the Threat of AI Is Fueling a New Political Alliance
A billionaire-backed movement from Silicon Valley and populists like Bernie Sanders are eager to stop an AI disaster — but can they overcome their mutual distrust and work together?
"Powerful AI can statically help human decision-makers, but can harm collective knowledge building... it can lead to what we call “knowledge collapse” whereby in the long-run all human knowledge is ultimately destroyed.” economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2026-02/A…
As an AI-adjacent network neuroscience person who has also studied bits of media structure and political economy, I strongly agree with @karlbode.com: The biggest threat, by far, isn’t “superintelligence will soon kill us all!” but instead “information control by oligarchs will crush our society”
Karl Bode
one recurring theme in the coverage of this AI Anthropic doomsday newscycle is nobody actually has any REAL ideas of what to do just a lot of ambiguous hand-waving in a country that's too corrupt to have working regulators, by a press that doesn't realize that's a central pillar of the conversation
"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qahd3_v1/
