Basement Whatever

AI could be used as a lever to rebuild institutions, markets, and daily life in ways that are more productive, fair, and humane than today, but only if we design for that explicitly rather than just “optimize engagement” or “cut headcount.”

1. Productive, not extractive, economies

• Use AI to raise productivity in essential sectors (healthcare, education, climate/energy, public services) rather than mostly in adtech and speculation.
• Tie AI subsidies and tax breaks to demonstrable public benefits: lower drug‑error rates, shorter court backlogs, higher student outcomes, reduced emissions, rather than just headcount reductions.
• Encourage open standards and interoperable models so small and mid‑sized firms can adopt AI without being locked into a few mega‑platforms, spreading gains beyond big tech.

2. Work that is augmented, not hollowed out

• Design AI as “co‑pilot” infrastructure: tools that remove drudgery (documentation, compliance, rote coding, basic admin) so humans spend more time on judgment, relationships, and creativity.
• Pair deployment with active labor policy: wage insurance, portable benefits, retraining “on the clock,” and pathways into new roles instead of passive “disruption” that workers must absorb alone.
• Use collective bargaining and professional standards to define where human sign‑off is mandatory (medicine, law, safety‑critical engineering), keeping core responsibility and expertise with people.

3. Stronger public services and democracy

• Build public, non‑commercial AI systems for things like legal aid, benefits navigation, tax questions, and translation of government processes into plain language, so access to the state doesn’t depend on income or English fluency.
• Apply AI to transparency and oversight: tools that help auditors, journalists, and watchdogs scan contracts, budgets, and lobbying records for patterns of corruption or waste.
• Require that when AI is used in policing, sentencing, or benefits decisions, its logic is inspectable, contestable, and governed by independent bodies—not black‑box vendor systems.

4. Science, health, and climate breakthroughs

• Use AI to accelerate discovery: new materials, drugs, crop strains, energy and grid optimization—then link public funding to conditions like open data sharing or affordable access to resulting treatments.
• Deploy AI for climate resilience: better forecasting, adaptive infrastructure planning, precision agriculture, smart grids, and building‑level efficiency, so “AI capex” supports physical systems we’ll need anyway.
• Create global research commons—shared model weights, datasets, and simulation tools for things like pandemics and climate scenarios—so poorer countries can participate and benefit, not just buy proprietary tools.

5. Fairer markets and less “enshittification”

• Use AI to empower consumers and workers: agents that automatically compare prices, flag junk fees, read fine print, or detect wage theft, making exploitation less profitable.
• Enforce rules that platforms cannot use behavioral profiling and AI optimization solely to maximize addictive engagement or dark‑pattern conversions; require consumer‑protection‑style audits.
• Encourage business models where AI helps reduce structural costs (waste, friction, fraud) rather than just amplifying short‑term financial engineering.

6. Culture, education, and human flourishing

• Treat AI as a public learning and creativity infrastructure: open educational tutors, language tools, and creative assistants available through libraries and schools, not just subscription apps.
• Give people meaningful control over “personal models” trained on their own data and preferences, so they can carry an AI “companion” across services that works for them rather than for advertisers.
• Invest in cultural and ethical frameworks—norms, laws, and shared expectations—about when it is good to use AI and when we deliberately choose slower, more human ways of doing things.

In other words, rebuilding positively around AI means treating it like electricity or the internet: a general‑purpose capability that we steer with policy, ownership, and norms, rather than letting short‑term financial incentives decide everything by default.

Source: perplexity.ai