If we all owned 5% of AI, would we secretly want it to stay expensive?
OpenAI has floated giving the US government a 5% stake and a national AI dividend fund modeled on Alaska’s oil checks — but a dividend only pays out if AI stays profitable. Does turning every citizen into an AI shareholder align us with abundance, or quietly bribe a whole country to keep the technology costly?
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This week’s Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts episode (July 4th, 2026) dug into OpenAI’s early-stage pitch to hand Washington a roughly $43 billion equity stake and seed an Alaska-style national AI dividend fund. The catch our hosts unpacked: owning a slice of OpenAI is a claim on its profits, which is not the same as being able to use what it builds — and a dividend only throws off a check as long as the product stays expensive. Wire that check into 200 million households and you’ve given the whole country a stake in AI never getting cheap, precisely the opposite of the abundance the technology promises. It’s the difference between distributing shares and distributing access, and the two may pull in opposite directions. Give the episode a listen and tell us: dividend, direct access, or something else entirely?
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