ABSTRACT
Digital technologies and AI can be powerful tools to address some of humanity’s greatest challenges. However, the AI revolution raises difficult ethical, economic, political, and legal questions about how to ensure core rights and values such as fairness, non-discrimination and non-stigmatization, benefit-sharing, participation, privacy protection, safety, informational self-determination, and autonomy. Can societies adjust and keep pace with the speed of artificial intelligence? What legal and political boundary conditions are needed for a just and inclusive socio-technological order?
In this chapter, we argue that philanthropies have an important contribution to make. To develop our argument, we draw on a fictional counterfactual of the history of OpenAI. Using the counterfactual as a background foil, we ask how philanthropy could have helped to shape a world that is not characterized by an AI “arms race” but, on the contrary, enjoys the benefits of technological progress in a responsible way. We use the bold and highly imaginary “what if” narrative as a hook to explore how philanthropies could have facilitated such a trajectory, had they been more engaged in and visionary about the benefits and requirements of responsible large-scale technological developments.
In a subsequent step, we then suggest that there are at least five roles that philanthropies can play in shaping the ethical and inclusive AI revolution: from funding and sponsoring research; to catalyzing equitable innovation through public goods; to facilitating a broad and transparent public dialogue about the AI and the digital future; to enabling societal and individual learning processes in the 21st century; to mediating divergent, centrifugal (geo)political and economic interests and worldviews.
