AI Windfall Clause
= "a suggested mechanism for redistributing the economic benefits of AI, wherein AI firms commit to donating a significant amount of any enormous profits they earn". [1]
Discussion
By Saffron Huang and Sam Manning:
"If AI could bring enormous benefits to humanity, but also threatens to put us all out of work and concentrate economic production in the hands of a few, what should our policy approach be? Perhaps more importantly, what world does that policy approach presume, and what alternative world does it seek to bring about? While economic redistribution might be essential to ensure widespread prosperity in a world with advanced AI systems, we argue that focusing on predistribution — proactively ensuring widespread opportunity to benefit from AI — can reduce the likelihood that AI exacerbates inequality in the first place.
To make this argument, we start by examining the Windfall Clause — a prominent policy proposal for distributing AI company profits in a world where extremely powerful AI systems are developed and economic power is heavily concentrated in developers’ hands. We’ll then discuss why this flavor of after-the-fact redistributive economic policy may be insufficient to foster economic and political inclusion in a world where transformative AI gets developed. Next, we’ll walk through the rationale for why efforts to predistribute the benefits of AI could help promote widely shared prosperity, drive broader participation in shaping technological development, and bolster democracy en route to more advanced AI systems. We’ll end with a list of starter ideas for how predistribution could work in practice and put out a call for others to expand on them.
The Windfall Clause is a suggested mechanism for redistributing the economic benefits of AI, wherein AI firms commit to donating a significant amount of any enormous profits they earn. The Clause’s authors suggest that this obligation would kick in if the AI company came into a “windfall”, defined as “a level of income greater than a substantial fraction (e.g. , at least 1%) of the world’s total economic output.” The scenario’s driving assumption is that this firm would have invented and be in ongoing control of transformative AI, the deployment of which could deliver an enormous concentration of profit and power into its hands. The authors leave the issue of where and how to allocate donated profits as an open question, suggesting that the objective should be to “maximiz(e) expected good produced per dollar received.”
While the Windfall Clause is one of the first mechanisms specifically and seriously proposed for addressing the potential for extreme levels of global inequality driven by AI automation, the authors acknowledge that it is only one of many possible solutions. We share the hope that their report sparks more discussion and ideas, and aim to present an alternative perspective on distributing AI’s economic benefits. Our central critique of the Windfall Clause is that it only kicks in once AI has caused quite extreme wealth concentration."
(https://cip.org/blog/predistribution-over-redistribution-beyond-the-windfall-clause)