People's AI Manifesto
Big Tech billionaires have infiltrated the highest levels of government globally. They are lobbying to keep AI unregulated so they can profit off war, pandemics, and human exploitation.
This is our one window of opportunity to rein them in before it's too late.
AI was built on our collective human knowledge—it belongs to us, not a few billionaires. If we act today, we can support brave lawmakers with a massive people’s mandate to shut down the lobbyists and put humans back in control.
Ekō members around the world are calling for political and business leaders to commit to five principles to govern the future of AI:
1. Humans are in the driving seat: Humanity must remain in control of the technologies it creates.
2. AI must not wipe out humanity and create catastrophic and existential risks: We must safeguard humanity from the catastrophic and existential risks posed by advanced AI.
3. Human rights and democracy must be protected: We must safeguard human rights and democracy against the misuse of AI.
4. AI companies and their users are on the hook for harms: We must ensure AI is regulated in the public interest, with clear accountability for both developers and users.
5. Environmental and climate impacts must be minimized: We must protect nature and the climate from environmental harms that result from AI development
We’ve already witnessed the devastating consequences of leaving Big Tech companies to regulate themselves – democracies shaken by industrial scale disinformation; societies divided by algorithmically driven hate; our privacy violated and our children harmed.
But this technology can only exist because we do. It depends on the sum of all of humanity’s knowledge and creativity. Therefore AI belongs to all of us - for all of humanity - not just tech billionaires like OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Palantir’s Alex Karp.
And this particular class of billionaire is lodging itself in the halls of power, with political access at terrifying levels. There’s hardly an election Musk isn’t trying to interfere in, and billionaires have put up $100 million to help anti-regulation candidates win in the US mid-terms.
Tech companies seem unbothered by the damage they might do. The world has become the laboratory for their untested technology and billions of us are their subjects. Big Tech is fighting hard to resist regulation – throwing millions at a lobbying effort to crush the opposition, while they release new products every month.
But we can unite behind our own vision - a manifesto for a pro-human AI future - and we can take it to governments, courts, and boardrooms to make sure tech is working for the people…not against them.
