Silicon Valley’s leaders were experiencing a rare and remarkable paroxysm of self-doubt. It wasn’t just their sense that they’d poorly deployed their wealth or that, cloistered on the West Coast, they’d misjudged the electorate. They were also coming to wonder if they’d helped create the circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. After the election, Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged Facebook’s role in polarizing citizens by surfacing articles that reinforced their worldviews. Faced with accusations that Twitter had helped Trump set up a one-man propaganda machine, Ev Williams, the company’s co-founder, told The New York Times, “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.” As it became clearer that Silicon Valley’s incessant disruption of older industries contributed to the numbers of underemployed, underpaid Rust Belters who’d helped put Trump in office, Altman posted on Facebook, asking his friends for introductions to Trump supporters who might help him understand what had happened. He then interviewed a hundred of them. On his blog, he offered a pithy Altmanism to summarize their perspectives: “You all can defeat Trump next time, but not if you keep mocking us, refusing to listen to us, and cutting us out. It’s Republicans, not Democrats, who will take Trump down.”
In the past, there’d been a dutiful bent to Silicon Valley’s involvement in politics. Those with means had given to the Clinton and Obama campaigns and had even lent some strategic advice — enough to make Silicon Valley a crucial fundraising stop. But besides supporting a liberal (and in some cases, libertarian) agenda, they’d left the policy details to the politicians. They lobbied for their corporate interests, of course, which sometimes intersected with mainstream issues like immigration reform. But for the most part, they thought they could fix the world’s problems better, faster outside the messy, internecine fighting of Washington, D.C. By early summer, that had changed. The CEOs of the biggest tech companies, including Apple and Google, censured Trump for his policies on immigration and climate change. Musk and Travis Kalanick, then the CEO of Uber, quit a Trump advisory council; later in the summer, after Trump’s controversial comments about violence between white nationalists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, other high-profile CEOs would do the same. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, brought on several high-profile political operators, including Obama strategist David Plouffe, George W. Bush adviser Ken Mehlman, and the research firm of Democratic pollster Joel Benenson. Zuckerberg also embarked on his own listening tour covering all 50 states. (This inspired speculation that he was eyeing a run for office, which he denied.) Zynga’s Mark Pincus announced that he and Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, had committed to invest in a project called Win the Future, for which they hoped to crowdsource an agenda through the internet, and Hoffman told the audience at a tech conference that, over time, his political spending could reach into the hundreds of millions. [...]
To Altman’s mind, the most urgent problem we’re facing — one that Trump exploited to become president — is a widening gap between the rich and the poor and, by extension, a profound feeling of disenfranchisement. He believes we should extend Medicare to people of all ages. We should make college free in exchange for civic service. He also predicts that in the future, artificial intelligence will make blue-collar jobs even scarcer and worsen inequality, at which point he thinks the government could enact a universal basic income — a regular, no-strings-attached payment to every American. The concept has become popular in Silicon Valley, both in progressive and libertarian circles, and YC Research is in the middle of a secretive pilot project in Oakland to test its potential. Altman believes that a universal basic income might be the most equitable, efficient method of expanding the social safety net “when the AI comes.” [...]
“The thing a lot of people forget is that we’ve been losing jobs at the same rate for, like, 300 years,” Altman said. He didn’t expect that rate to accelerate, at least not anytime soon, and when AI does replace some jobs, he said, people will invent new ones. But then he equivocated: Another case, he acknowledged, could be made. People used horses to transport us from place to place until cars came along. “For a while, horses found slightly different jobs,” he said, “and today there are no more jobs for horses.” For a moment, he and the entrepreneurs considered this in gloomy silence. Then he moved on. “All right,” he said. “How can I help?”
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