A lively debate has been taking place in Jacobin over what to do about artificial intelligence. AI is clearly a technology with potential for enormous benefit and harm — and perhaps both at the same time. Financially, it could put even more income in the hands of billionaires, or it could produce a bubble the implosion of which pushes the net worth of investors, innocent and guilty alike, off a cliff. Either way, it needs to be redirected away from narrow financial imperatives and toward social ends, and this requires a change in ownership.

But what change, and how? The obvious go-to for socialists is to give government a controlling interest, and that’s what Bernie Sanders has proposed: use a onetime tax to transfer half the equity in US-based AI companies to a new sovereign wealth fund, which would then have veto power over future decisions affecting the technology while sharing in the profits it generates. But there is also unease with the idea, not least because Donald Trump has also floated federal ownership stakes — and even a remote similarity is grounds for suspicion. More precisely, given the state of American democracy and the grotesque imbalance of political power favoring the ultrarich, it is reasonable to doubt that a large public stake would yield the outcomes we want to see from it.

To design social ownership so it truly reflects social purposes in a globalizing world, we need to rethink the issue from the ground up. Just why do we need to remove ownership and control from the hands of wealthy investors? Exactly what changes are we trying to bring about?