AI is rewriting rulebooks faster than thoughtful policy can keep up. That’s why I’d recommend reading the short paper released last week by ChatGPT’s Sam Altman, Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age. It offers a menu of ideas to share AI’s benefits and reduce its risks, like giving workers a voice and modernizing tax policy to protect safety-net programs as automation shrinks employment-based revenue.
There are blind spots, including silence on data centers’ climate impacts and the growing evidence that AI can lull users into lowering their cognitive effort. But beyond its prescriptions, the paper makes clear that AI’s revolutionary impacts on work, daily life and democracy deserve a public conversation as broad as the technology itself.
On Tuesday, residents of Port Washington, WI voted 2-1 to require local leaders to get voter approval before awarding tax incentives to data center developers. The public is ready for a national debate on the future of AI. Attention needs to scale up fast, including think tank proposals, broadly inclusive commissions, policy platforms, educational campaigns, media focus, citizen assemblies, voter guides, etc.
Our civic ecosystem should be pressuring candidates to stake out positions this November—so that by the 2028 elections, the future of AI is developed as a permanent democracy issue.
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