OpenAI Urges New Economic Rules for the AI Era

As artificial intelligence (AI) advances toward superintelligence, there will be a need for an industrial policy to manage the challenges it will pose, OpenAI said in a report issued Monday (April 6).

The report, “Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First,” outlines 20 policy ideas for this transition, OpenAI Global Affairs said in a Monday post on LinkedIn.

“As AI reshapes work, knowledge, and production, incremental updates won’t be enough,” the company said in the post. “The scale of change demands new ideas and institutions to ensure this transition benefits everyone.”

The benefits of the technology will outweigh the challenges, OpenAI said in the report. But, the company added, there will be risks around the disruption of jobs and industries, the misuse of AI by fraudsters, the potential of misaligned systems to evade human control, the undermining of democratic values by the ways governments or institutions deploy AI, and the concentration of power and wealth.

OpenAI’s proposals outlined in the report include creating a Public Wealth Fund that gives every citizen a stake in the economic growth driven by AI; modernizing the tax base to account for shifts in the composition of economic activity; and establishing a mechanism for companies to share with a designated public authority information about incidents that cause concern.

“We’re sharing these proposals to start a broader conversation about how to shape an AI economy that expands opportunity and strengthens society,” OpenAI Global Affairs said in its LinkedIn post.

Together with the report, the company is establishing a pilot program of fellowships and research grants for work that builds on these policy ideas and will host discussions around these issues at an OpenAI workshop scheduled for May in Washington, D.C., per the post.

PYMNTS reported in March that governments are reexamining technology as industrial policy increasingly confronts an era defined by AI and uneven economic gains.

A report published in February by Citrini Research shook the stock market by saying that if AI makes a lot of human labor obsolete, there could be job losses as well as drops in consumer spending and the stock market.

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