Humanity, According to America
Humanity, According to America
Humanity, According to America
In a recent Jacobin article titled “Everybody Should Welcome Nationalizing AI,” Ben Burgis defends Bernie Sanders’s proposal to nationalise half the stock of major artificial-intelligence companies and place the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund for the American people. Burgis begins with Sanders’s claim that, because AI is built on “the collective knowledge of humanity,” the wealth it creates should benefit humanity.
The sentence sounds right because it begins from a truth that the owners of AI companies would rather obscure. No company invented language, mathematics, science, literature, history, philosophy or code. No founder assembled the intellectual inheritance on which these systems depend. People built that inheritance over centuries and across continents, through books, archives, universities, libraries, laboratories, newspapers, public records and the ordinary use of language.
But neither Sanders nor Burgis follows this argument beyond the borders of the United States.
Sanders proposes an American sovereign wealth fund. Burgis welcomes the idea and argues that the case for going further is stronger than most people realise. The article speaks about humanity, the human race and the collective intellectual products of everyone, but the political world it imagines remains American. Humanity produces the knowledge. American companies capture it. The American state takes a share. American citizens receive the benefit. The rest of humanity disappears somewhere between the moral claim and the policy proposal.
This is not merely a missing qualification. It shows how deeply the American national frame shapes even arguments that present themselves as universal. The United States often speaks as though its domestic political disputes contain the whole world. Its companies operate globally, draw on global labour and knowledge, and control infrastructures used across borders, but when questions of ownership and distribution arise, the discussion narrows. The wealth becomes American because the firms are American. The problem becomes American because American jobs are at risk. The solution becomes American because American institutions possess the power to act.
The source of the value receives less attention.
The knowledge absorbed into large language models did not emerge inside Silicon Valley. It includes the work of writers, scientists, translators, teachers, programmers and researchers from every part of the world. It includes bodies of thought built long before the United States existed. It includes public knowledge produced by institutions funded by taxpayers in other countries, and cultural and intellectual traditions that cannot become American property simply because an American company built the machines that processed them.
Burgis compares this collective inheritance to a village path created over time by everyone who walked it. No single villager can claim the path because all of them helped make it. The example supports his case against private ownership, but it also exposes the limit of his argument. The village is global. The proposed wealth fund is not. America places a toll booth on the path and then debates whether the tolls should go to private shareholders or the American public. Both positions assume that America controls the gate.
Nationalisation would still matter. Public ownership could weaken the power of private firms and redirect some wealth towards people whose livelihoods may be damaged by automation. But public ownership by one powerful state does not automatically turn a global inheritance into a global commons. It may merely replace private American ownership with public American ownership. The legal form changes, but the border around the benefit remains.
This is the contradiction that Sanders and Burgis leave untouched. They recognise that AI rests on knowledge built by humanity, but they treat that knowledge as an American asset once it produces money. They challenge private appropriation while leaving national appropriation intact.
A serious argument about AI and justice must begin where Sanders begins, with humanity, but it cannot stop at the United States. The knowledge is global. The labour is global. The consequences will be global. Anyone who claims that the wealth should benefit humanity must explain why most of humanity has no place in the settlement.
Otherwise, “humanity” is only the language America uses before it divides the proceeds among itself.