They started the AI revolution without us

With Google doing the bankrolling, public-private training of tomorrow’s tech workers tilts corporate

US Representative Ro Khanna’s call for public-private partnerships to help prepare citizens for the high-tech jobs and opportunities ostensibly promised by artificial intelligence sounds reasonable at first glance but it fails to examine the economic system that tends to favor the corporate class at the expense of the rest of us (“Prepare for the AI revolution,” Opinion, May 2). How can one expect the public interest to benefit from Google financing a program like TechWise? These students and mentees are more likely to be trained to enhance the interest of Google and its counterparts in the corporate class. Google is going to demand more bang for its buck.

Khanna’s collaboration with Google in facilitating this program shows that the Democrats are not much different from the Republicans in pushing the economic agenda of the elite. We can expect to see a greater concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands at the expense of the rest of us.

TechWise, which seeks to train and place students in wellpaying tech jobs after graduation, should be enacted as a public trust with a short leash on the private corporations. The commercialization of our society constitutes a threat to our democracy. Entrepreneurs and start-ups speak the “up from the boostraps” rhetoric to the rest of us while they enjoy generous tax breaks and government subsidies.

Before we eagerly jump into the deception of a so-called technotopia, we should be raising questions about who benefits.

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