Soon enough, the major artificial intelligence companies will take their soaring valuations and go public. When they do, a great many very smart, very eccentric people will suddenly possess enormous liquid wealth — and many have committed to giving great sums of it away.
The future of American philanthropy isn’t the central drama of the A.I. age, but it isn’t a sideshow, either. As Nan Ransohoff wrote this week on Substack, A.I. wealth could soon add as much as $100 billion to American charitable giving every year. She describes this as a potential “third wave” of philanthropy, after the now-distant Carnegie and Rockefeller era and the recent Bill Gates and Warren Buffett wave. And she expects it to be focused on the “A.I. transition” and what lies beyond, especially questions of “flourishing, meaning and what makes a life good” in the shadow of increasingly capable machines.
Let’s suppose she’s right about the philanthropic rush and about the quest for meaning as an organizing impulse. I want to make a personal appeal to the A.I. philanthropists: Take a lesson from your Gilded Age predecessors, and treat beauty as a central charitable pursuit. Build monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens — and yes, even mansions for yourselves. Leave a physical legacy to future generations, not just a record of programs and disbursements. Recognize that meaning inheres in architecture, art and landscape as much as in more measurable goods.
This was a great failure of the most recent philanthropic era. At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads. But there was no real legacy when it came to physical infrastructure — no great beautification campaigns, no beloved architectural landmarks, no equivalent of the Gilded Age’s expansions of museums and libraries and concert halls, and few personal expressions of extravagance (like the Newport mansions or Hearst Castle) for future tourists to admire.
At the beginning of the 20th century, philanthropic dollars had already helped build the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall, the campuses of Vanderbilt, Stanford and the University of Chicago, a network of urban parks, various impressive churches and an array of private homes that would themselves become public spaces within a few generations. Tastes vary, but I do not think that the monuments raised by today’s superrich are in any way comparable.
In part this reflects the challenges of building in a more regulated and sclerotic America, in part it reflects the failings of contemporary architecture. (Where new money builds new buildings, they often look like the Obama Star Destroyer in Chicago.)
But it’s also a problem with Silicon Valley culture specifically, where the idea that the rich person is supposed to be too busy to worry about taste has been folded into the entire tech enterprise, like a gray T-shirt, from the start.
As Will Manidis writes in a recent essay on the cult of the techworld grinder, the Silicon Valley rich seem to have a “terror of being seen to have money and to enjoy it,” a terror of their excess wealth “being visible and not disguised.” This leads to a performative philistinism: I live in a box and wear the same outfit and eat bio-engineered slop so my company can crush all its competitors. I don’t have time to be a snob or show off anything I’ve made.
But rich people prove their value to society not just in business success, but when they create things that only surplus can generate and only a cultivated taste can shape. And those creations, in turn, can make the worlds of ordinary people feel more elevated, transcendent and meaningful — whether they’re attending a school or experiencing a concert or wandering in a park or even visiting a tycoon’s home long after the original owner is dust.
Aesthetics is by no means the only place where meaning lies. But if A.I. money is going to work in this terrain, it cannot neglect beauty in the way that recent philanthropy has done.
I know of at least one tech founder, Stripe’s Patrick Collison, who is putting money into the search for new aesthetic schools. My advice to others who want to follow his example is to take a Waymo from your tech HQ or frontier A.I. lab over to the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, part of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915, which was funded partially by public money, but partially by that era’s gilded rich. Like other such expositions, most of the buildings were dismantled, but the Palace was beloved and endured, with a later reconstruction enabling its permanence.
Sit there for a while, in a space that’s relatively “useless” and yet essential to its city. Figure out what the people who funded its construction understood about beauty and the good life. Now go thou and build likewise.
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