Who really benefits from the AI boom?

If you've been hearing about Trump's AI Action Plan and wondering who it actually benefits, you're not alone. On today's episode of Equity, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Amba Kak and Dr. Sarah Myers West from the AI Now Institute, a think tank focused on the social implications of AI and the consolidation of power in tech industry. Their recent report, dubbed Artificial Power, lays out the political economy driving today's AI frenzy and what’s at stake for everyone else. Artificial Power pushes back on what AI Now calls the "too big to fail" myth, arguing that AI companies are pouring billions into massive compute infrastructure and foundational models, often with government support, despite shaky business models and limited public accountability. Listen to the full episode to hear about: AI’s growing consolidation and how it mirrors Big Tech’s power dynamics. Why Silicon Valley is cheering on Trump's AI agenda, and the challenges of regulating AI. The disconnect between AGI hype and current, real-world harms. What a democratic, just, and accountable AI future could look like. Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news roundup, so stay tuned. Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bollan and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Last week, the Equity crew gave listeners the rundown on Trump's AI action plan. And if you've been reading the headlines and wondering who it actually benefits, you're not alone. Today, we're talking to Ambar Khak and Sarah Myers-West from the AI Now Institute, an independent think tank that studies the social implications of AI and the concentration of tech power. Their latest report, Artificial Power, digs into the real political economy driving today's AI boom. Together, they unpack how we got here, the disconnect between lofty promises for AI for humanity and the behind the scenes push for deregulation, and what it would take to build an AI future that's actually democratic and serves the public's interest.

• 1:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Ambar, Sarah, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:07Rebecca Bellan?

  So I obviously want to talk to both of you about your report for the AI Now Institute, Artificial Power 2025 Landscape. So that was published, what, about a month ago, I believe, in June?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  A month and change, yeah.

• 1:18Rebecca Bellan?

  A month and change in June. Curious, what is the report about? What sparked it? And I mean, it's well over 100 pages, so it's going to be hard to narrow it down. But if you could distill it in a few sentences, what do you think the main takeaways are?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  It's a long report, but for the uninitiated, I would direct you to our executive summary, where we try and make sense of and synthesize all of it in a more succinct manner. But we wrote this report to really get out of firefighting mode, to try to paint a picture for a very wide audience. You know, what is this present moment? This present kind of hype cycle around AI doesn't come from nowhere. So first, track a short history. How did we get here? What are these big picture, grand narratives around AI that in many ways make it hard to make sense of what's going on? It often clouds our judgment. They're narratives that often... Often sway policymakers and politicians one way or the other, whether that's the grand narratives around artificial general intelligence

• 2:16Speaker 02

  or these kinds of insidious ways in which the AI industry is positioned as being too big to fail. So we sort of unpack and unravel these grand mythologies. We also consult the record. So we go back to the last 10 years and remind people AI isn't new. There have been different forms of this technology that have already been in the mix, have impacted people, whether they know it or not, for almost a decade. So what have we learned? What does the record show? So we do some of that evidence gathering as well. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, we provide a roadmap. We say, look, we're ringing the alarm bell. We do need to redirect from this current trajectory, which is characterized by unbridled and unaccountable power in very few firms.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  We need to redirect. We need to do it pretty urgently, but how do we get there? And we kind of provide the initial directions for that roadmap.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  We're at a moment where, as a society, we're being confronted with these big questions about the role of this technology in reshaping our public institutions, our workplaces, our healthcare system, our social systems. So we wanted to sort of, after this moment of tremendous amount of excitement, a lot of anxiety about the technology, step back and get into the bigger context of what is the world that we want to live in? And what's the right place for AI within it? Because I think that there's been this veneer of inevitability that the technology is going to carry us all on this trajectory. If there was one premise that we're operating from in this report,

• 3:48Speaker 03

  it's that, in fact, there's a lot of room to shape the direction of AI and to make sure that the way that it's rolled out in society serves the broadest public interest and that there's a lot that we need to be doing to ensure that that's the case, rather than just sort of sitting back and being at the whims of a few big companies.

• 4:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. I think that that comes through a lot in the report, this kind of myth busting, right? Like, there's this whole conversation that we need to push AGI. We need to achieve AGI because it will solve humanity's hardest problems. But at the same time, the actual Outcomes like when we say, okay, it can cure cancer, it can solve climate change. When we actually look at, is it curing cancer yet? Is it solving climate change? Well, no, not only is it not doing that, but a lot of the way that the power structures have been created might, for example, the current administration might be pulling money away from scientific research that could push for scientific cures for cancer. Or, you know, we're talking about solving climate change. Well, I mean, I'm not sure how building these, you know, energy, gasoline, data centers is really great for climate change. But before we super dig in, I just want to give our listeners like a bit of a background about both of you

• 4:51Rebecca Bellan?

  and why you're qualified and have the authority to talk about this. Cause I think you both worked as senior policy advisors for the FTC previously.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  That's right. Yes.

• 5:01Rebecca Bellan?

  If you can talk a little bit about the consolidation of big tech power over the past decade or so and how that is playing out today, but circling around AI.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  You know, at the start of 2023, we had spent close to two years advising the Federal Trade Commission, which is the nation's de facto privacy and consumer protection and competition regulator on tech enforcement writ large, right? We were advising specifically on AI, but also looking at big tech cases more broadly. And I think the one realization we were left with was what an uphill task it is to actually confront or challenge the power of these very, very large companies once that power has already consolidated, right? Where the boldest fines that we could muster up really translated into, you know, a paltry line item on their, on their balance sheet and could be easily dismissed as a mere cost of doing business. And so that realization really came home that maybe the biggest challenge of our time

• 5:57Speaker 02

  across all of these various concerns with tech that we're talking about, maybe the biggest challenge is this concentration of power. And what we're seeing with AI is more of the same. It's entrenching and making that power concentration so much worse. And so now I think we come at our work with a renewed focus on understanding that if we're not tackling this concentration of power, then we're really, we're going to lose the kind of long game, so to speak.

• 6:20Rebecca Bellan?

  And when we say lose the long game, we mean like what tech can bring to our lives?

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Exactly. I think the future of technology is also kind of synonymous with the future of like where society is heading as a whole. And I think if we're not tackling concentration of power in the tech industry, we're sort of allowing very few unaccountable private actors and within them, you know, a handful of eccentric individuals to rewrite our social and economic infrastructures. That's the question, you know, the debate we need to be having isn't whether ChatGPT is good or not, or how good it is, but really is this kind of unaccountable power good for society long term? And I think for the vast majority of the public, that question answers itself.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  In thinking about some of my early work as a researcher, was looking at the political economy around the tech industry and what was motivating folks who were building technology in earlier eras. And one of the things that really stands out is that people might be motivated to build technology for a variety of reasons. But one of them is often that they want to be creating positive social change. You know, looking at the conditions for this technology right now, the level of concentration within the industry, as Amba was saying, the incentive structures are really not set for the rollout of any technology to be incentivizing that kind of positive social change. And so I think in this analysis, we're painting how AI has sort of become this be all end all

• 7:41Speaker 03

  for an industry that has become in many ways is sort of not become of its own accord, but they have set themselves up to become too big to fail, where the paths to market really run through a couple of companies. And that's not going to be good for society at large.

• 7:56Rebecca Bellan?

  Can you give an example of what you mean by too big to fail? In the report, you talk a lot about the infrastructure and capital push and how, you know, we're seeing even more, we're seeing with the latest AI action plan from the White House, the amount of green lights we're getting for AI companies to build data centers, to bypass potential environmental laws. And there's just so much money being put into this that it's becoming like a zero sum game. Like, I think that that's how you would make the argument that they're too big to fail, right? We've put so much money, there's a sunk cost effect happening here that we just have to see this one through.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  You know, the AI action plan that released last week, I think if you look closely at the comment period that preceded it, where you had these recommendations come in from the biggest AI companies and others, you see that the plan that the White House released reads almost one to one like the wish list that these companies asked for. So it's a fun little exercise to go through it and say, okay, protections for the public are going to kill innovation. So restrict state lawmakers from stepping up on regulating AI. Check. Scale energy for AI at any cost, using all means necessary, including opening up federal lands for AI data centers, including reopening coal plants that were going to sort of be shut down in the push towards renewables. Check.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And finally, to the point that you're just making, accelerating AI in government, which we really see as a kind of underwriting of the industry, which is increasing public taxpayer dollars that are going into the AI market for defense, but also broader, right? So it's a one-two punch where the appropriate role for the government is positioned as not only removing restrictions for this industry, but going a step further and actually providing underwriting and saying, look, you know, we know you're at a speculative juncture, but don't worry, you have the government's blessing and you also have government investment and a government market that we're dangling there. And a confluence of all of those factors, right? Government investment, deregulation, government procurement, all of that, I think,

• 9:53Speaker 02

  contributes to this idea of too big to fail. We're already, we're all in and there's no looking back now.

• 9:58Rebecca Bellan?

  I wonder, I don't know how much history either of you study, but the argument around pushing AI forward from the government is national security, national security, national security, right? It's we need to beat China, we need to be the best. There's a risk that if we're not the best, then an autocratic, undemocratic AI might prevail as the world's AI, whatever. But never, this just could be a failure of my own research, but nothing comes to mind when I think about another type of technology or industry in American history, where we've pushed it forward for the sake of national security, but it has affected every single person on such a, a deep level, whether that be they lose their job to AI, or you know, deepfakes get made of them, or they become addicted to chatbots, or what have you.

• 10:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Have you seen anything in history that we can kind of compare this to, or is this extremely unique?

• 10:46Speaker 03

  We have seen around AI this positioning that there is this US-China AI arms race, and that that narrative has really been something that keeps cropping its head back up at strategic moments for the industry. You can see it going back to like at least, what, 2017 and probably earlier where whenever we're at moments where Congress is likely to regulate, like when the antitrust package of bills was introduced in Congress or when they were ready to introduce the Algorithmic Accountability Act, all of a sudden you see this resurgence in talking points and like letters from ex-defense officials saying, if you regulate this industry, we are going

• 11:30Speaker 03

  to lose the race against China. I think that narrative has taken on a new form in the last year and change where it's now not only about asserting, don't regulate us, but it's also saying, you know, that we need to be pouring investment dollars into the AI industry and providing support for, again, the select few companies that have become kind of the blessed national monopolies on AI. There have, as you've mentioned, been other technologies where national security has, I think, dominated the policy orientation. This is true of semiconductors, this is true of encryption technologies. What's unique with AI is the way that the industry has been particularly wielding that

• 12:14Speaker 03

  national security argument. And we've argued that with AI, we should really be incentivizing a race that's to the top, not to the bottom, and that if you fully deregulate this industry, you are, in fact, letting some of the worst qualities of it metastasize. You know, you're reinforcing the dominance of only a couple of companies, you're completely stepping back on guardrails that are needed to protect, in fact, our national security, and that it's a stance that's ultimately going to undermine the very same end goals that have been stated.

• 12:47Rebecca Bellan?

  I have not yet heard a good argument for why AI companies need unfettered access to all our data, or no regulation at all, or they can't provide transparency into their training data sets in order to, as we say, cure cancer, or protect the government from hacking from China, or protect its citizens, or anything in that regard. So that as a consumer, as an individual, it kind of seems like it puts the AI companies on the back foot. I mean, not on the back foot, but coming from a bad faith argument standpoint, where it's kind of difficult for me to see how a lot of their arguments against regulation aren't just pure supporting their industry to succeed and to, you know, make more money for their shareholders, or what have you.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  It's interesting you say that because, you know, there was this moment about a month ago, soon after we published our report, where we had this proposal from many Republican lawmakers to essentially pause or put a moratorium on all state regulation of AI for 10 years. And I think the bipartisan steadfast opposition to that that came from many, many different corners was really recognizing just how brazen things have gotten, right?

• 13:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  There was something so appalling in the absurdity of the proposal, but also the signal that it was sending out, which is that this is an industry that truly thinks they're at the driver's seat and can tell our political representatives what to do. And I so I think there was something to your point of like, surely there's something wrong here. Like, we can't be letting this industry go regulated. The pushback to the moratorium was a moment to really shore up that opposition and reassert, like, actually, the average American doesn't agree, and the industry is kind of on the back foot here. Which, I have to say, before the moratorium, post-election, it was heady, and there was a way in which, you know, you couldn't really tell if that opposition had the weight that we thought it did.

• 14:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, I think it's important to note that a lot of the state regulation against AI is not actually trying to attack any AI models specifically, or the way companies even do their business. And almost none of them ask them to be transparent about anything at all. Really, the AI laws that have come into place are to protect elections from deep fake misinformation and algorithmic bias in hiring and things like that.

• 14:57Rebecca Bellan?

  That it's really about how the AI ends up being used. And the AI moratorium that ended up getting pulled out of the big budget bill, the big beautiful bill, but that fight has not died. So we're seeing in the AI action plan that was released last week that there is a renewed push to hinder states' rights from regulating AI in a few different ways.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  That's right. It contains a provision that says that federal funding can be withheld from states if they are fostering a regulatory environment that is overly restrictive toward AI. The wording's quite vague. You would want to see like how that actually translates into more formalized policy, but it certainly signals in a way that was not actually clear at the moment of the moratorium debate, where the administration's stance is, and gives an indicator that the Trump administration is associating this sort of need to remove regulations from the industry as its predominant stance. It's one of the more concerning elements of the AI action plan.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  And we know we've already seen from politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene has signaled opposition to this provision in the AI action plan. So I think real question marks about what that means for Congress moving forward.

• 16:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Anything in the AI action plan that you actually thought was kind of promising or like a green light, a good sign?

• 16:21Speaker 02

  I mean, there's going to be a lot of language there that out of context, I think most people would agree with, like we need to invest in the advancement of AI research and scientific advancement and pursue paths for AI that benefit the public, or we need a worker-first agenda. The problem is what we started this conversation with, which is, you know, you're saying that on the one hand. On the other hand, you're defunding the research infrastructure that it would take for AI to make any progress when it comes to curing cancer. Right? Or you're saying worker-first agenda, but if, you know, we get into the detail of it, what you're really proposing is a kind of a retraining fund to kind of deal with mass displacement when it happens, not an agenda that gives workers any agency in deciding which way we're headed.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  So I think that at a superficial level, there's lots to agree with. But what a very large coalition that we were part of came out with last week was people's AI action plan to say, we don't actually see the people represented in this plan, even when there's kind of lip service made in that direction. And so we need an alternative.

• 17:28Anthony Ha?

  Every company today is looking for an edge. Better insights, faster decisions, greater resilience. But as AI drives new growth, it also creates new demands on energy and infrastructure. Schneider Electric is connecting energy, automation, and digital technologies to help organizations make smarter decisions and operate more efficiently. Because the future won't be shaped by AI alone, it will be shaped by energy and industrial intelligence. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 17:56Rebecca Bellan?

  So it's interesting you bring up workers. So when I asked at the start of this, what has the reaction been? And obviously, the AI industry at like institutional level, I think, would probably just ignore the action plan. But you know, I've spoken to a lot of individual engineers and researchers and people who actually don't want working in tech to be synonymous with being evil, right? Or not caring about people. They get into this because they care about the work. They want to make miracles. They want to help society. And so I think that those people should be given a voice. And a lot of them aren't necessarily being valued for their work. Right? You spend a little time on Blind, for example, which is like a glass door for tech workers, essentially. And you hear how people at these major AI companies worked really hard so that their managers can kind of show that they were able

• 18:40Rebecca Bellan?

  to reach some KPI that will improve the stock price for their shareholders, right? And they're not feeling like their work is valued. They're feeling like they can get laid off at any minute. They're feeling like they're making the technology that will eventually replace them. Taking the AI conversation back, you know, not making it about scary regulation for big tech companies, but about just like, what do people who are in this industry want to see? How do they want to see change? And could this be a grassroots movement?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's really spot on. And I'd mentioned a little bit earlier, I've done a bunch of work in the past that's looking at the role of tech workers and people who are building tech as a really important force behind the way that this technology moves into the market and moves into society at large. And if there's anything we can see in the AI space, it's that it's tech workers who have been at the front lines of surfacing where This technology is going to harm people, trying to find ways to build it better, leading, organizing to try and get their employers to change their stances and serving in also as the canaries in the coal mine when this technology gets deployed in their own workplaces.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  And saying this is not the way that we want to be building technology and not the kind of thing that we want to be building at all. So I think it's really important that the voices of tech workers be represented and really front and center in the conversation about where AI is going to go. Particularly at this moment where, you know, if you're reading the tea leaves, a lot of the direction for AI that's coming from the CEO level is in the direction of devaluing, displacing the work of the folks who are building these tools.

• 20:21Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, we're clearly at an inflection point. I think it's never been more challenging for people who want to advocate for workers' rights, particularly because I can imagine the administration today just calling that woke, right? Like, is it woke to care about, you know, workers' rights? Is it woke to say that I don't want the AI that I'm making to be used for nefarious means? Obviously, a lot of AI is being used in defense, whereas a lot of these companies had previously said they wouldn't go in that direction. You can make arguments one way or the other about it. I, you know, I personally actually think that our national security can benefit from having the best AI. But I think that we're just at this moment where it's difficult. And I think a lot of people feel like it might get better before it gets worse. A lot of people are comparing the current age we're in to the Gilded Age, for example, right?

• 21:04Rebecca Bellan?

  When the robber barons in the 1870s, 1880s in America were hoarding all the wealth to produce the railroads that would expand the country and create endless opportunity for Americans to trade and travel and do what have you. But it did concentrate wealth. And it took, at least in America, it took quite a few decades for the labor movement to really catch up and gain steam and for policy to back them.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and that's why we sort of keep emphasizing the metaphor of an inflection point is a little bit tired because, you know, we're always at some inflection point or the other. But there is something about the moment we're currently in where most of these predictions are at least 10 to 20 years out in terms of the really absolute, the big scale predictions are still some years out, but we're seeing murmurs or we're seeing the kind of glimpses of what that future could look like. But we're at the moment where I think that future is not yet inevitable, where we can begin to start setting the terms and recalibrating the balance of power between the tech industry, between those building these technologies and everyone else. And that, I think, workers having agency in that conversation on whether and also how these technologies are used is going

• 22:12Speaker 02

  to be really central. We talked about tech workers, but equally, this is going to be about workers in domains that are being more and more sort of AI integrated, right? So healthcare is a big one. We're seeing the Nurses Union, National Nurses United, has been out front with their AI Bill of Rights, which actually has a very simple message, which is that they think that nurses should have a say in determining both whether and how AI is integrated. And that's going to be important, not just for their own working conditions, but also for patient outcomes. And I think the simplicity of that message, but also that message has a lot of power right now, because it's not merely saying we want tools and training that Microsoft and OpenAI can provide us to get better at using your tools.

• 22:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  It has a much more potent message, which is we have a say and also we have expertise here. And I think in every domain, we just need to keep reasserting that expertise and also that agency.

• 23:01Rebecca Bellan?

  And protecting it as well.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 23:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Moving forward, a lot of people, at least from what I can see, maybe that's just my algorithms, they feel really hopeless, right? They feel like AGI is going to be here, it's right around the corner, it's going to take our jobs, all the CEOs are saying it will. So what's the point, right? And, you know, at the same time, we've got TikTok and we've got probably new immersive generative methods of entertaining ourselves. There's always a way to escape, right? So I guess my fear, my question, my concern is whether you guys think that the momentum can stay up.

• 23:39Rebecca Bellan?

  When people are feeling, on the one hand, hopeless and on the other, we have like the shortest attention spans known to humanity.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  I mean, I certainly hope so. I mean, that that is the work that we're all collectively engaging in, right? And there have been moments in time in the past where there have been these constellations of massive technological change on the precipice of massive social change, where there's been a high concentration of wealth. And out of that sort of like constellation of things, you get the emergence of a labor movement that's advocating for workers. Or you get the emergence of, if you looked at the era around the Vietnam War, the emergence of these like tech worker collectives that start by agitating around the need to be pushing

• 24:25Speaker 03

  back against the use of their tools in warfare, but then find racial justice and find worker rights and find these other causes that have tremendous staying power. It's out of those kinds of movements that you get organizations like Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and then the Electronic Frontier Foundation that sort of come out of that trajectory. So I think that there is a tremendous amount that we can do if we use all of the tools in the toolkit and work creatively and work collectively to make sure that the trajectory of this technology serves us all.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  I don't know, I take some hope and inspiration from the fact that there is a healthy dose of skepticism that continues to exist. Like even, you know, I'm at the coffee shop and inevitably someone's talking about AI. And I think that the thing I'm struck by is how often people are like, honestly, it doesn't really, or like, even when it works well, it feels like it isn't good enough to actually replace my job. Or like, this technology doesn't seem to be as good as we're hearing, or it seems like we're still some ways away from whatever fantastical projections we're hearing, right? So I think a kind of common sense recalibration to, we don't need to accept every CEO declaration at its face value, because that isn't really our experience of these tools in our workplace or in our lives yet, is a good starting point.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I think that ChatGPT was brilliant marketing for AGI, but equally, it will be its downfall because people are coming up against the fact that it seems, you know, it seems to still be hallucinating. And yet, we're being told we're just a few years away from superintelligence, something that isn't quite coming together.

• 25:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I think that's actually a really important point. There's a lot of hype and the CEOs of these companies are saying that AGI is around the corner, but of course they would. They have a vested interest in that and they want everyone to adopt their technology because they're not seeing the revenue that they need to actually get to AGI, if that even is a thing. I just want to remind our listeners that there's like a whole swath of research that is not actually and has not been convinced that AGI is necessarily going to happen. But yeah, I think that this is really reminiscent of self-driving cars, for example, right? In like 10 years ago, or what year are we in? Yeah, even 10 years ago, people were saying it's around the corner. It's next year. It's next year. We're finally getting there, but it's not as wide scale as we had thought. Transformer architecture could speed things up, of course, but I do think it's important for those who are feeling hopeless to temper your expectations a little bit.

• 26:43Rebecca Bellan?

  It's not happening as fast. Just because the CEOs of companies that are selling a product say their product's amazing and it's happening now, doesn't mean it necessarily is. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't prepare for an eventuality when that might occur and, you know, protect workers and individuals and make sure that, you know, AI works for all.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think to what you were just saying, it sort of makes me reflect that. Say what you will about critique and often when we are critical of the tech industry, we sort of get asked, like, what do you think are the positive cases? And I think it's important to remember that starting from a position of critique is actually optimistic because it's sort of expressing the belief that the world could be different and better and to serve us all. So I think taking that as the starting point and then building, then saying, okay, what? So I know that things can be different than they are. I know that things can be better. What is the one place that I can start building to make the world better? I think that's the work that we all need to put ourselves to rather than just sort of like throwing up our hands that this thing is coming for all of us and our jobs.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, we conclude our report with, you know, a section on what is the world we want or what is that alternative trajectory? And I feel like people are always scanning through the list and saying, oh, but we don't see AI on that list. And our point is exactly that, which is that what we want to name is the future we want, right? The future is one which has good jobs, which has shared prosperity, freedom and autonomy. A sustainable, a livable planet for our children. And does AI play a role in it? Maybe. And that's how we should approach that question. But we can't make the AI the kind of center of the inquiry or all paths to our future do not necessarily need to run through whatever version of AI the tech industry is throwing at us right now. And I think reclaiming agency on just how we imagine or how we articulate that future is as much central to the work that we're doing.

• 28:32Rebecca Bellan?

  Right, like prioritize the life that you want to lead and then try to get there. If AI is a part of that, great. But don't say AI needs to be the thing that we achieve and a good life, good jobs, prosperity are probably side effects. So

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Because they're probably not side effects of that trajectory.

• 28:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, not the, maybe not the way that it, the consolidation of power points us in.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 28:51Rebecca Bellan?

  But anyway, thank you both so much for coming on the show to chat about this. Curious what our listeners will think. I would love to know where our listeners can find you online if they want to engage more.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  We're at ainowinstitute.org.

• 29:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Thanks again for joining us on the show, our listeners. You can find Equity at EquityPod on Blue Sky and X. Talk to you next time.

• 29:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.