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The billionaire philanthropist Frank McCourt on Thursday warned the US has entered a “super scary moment” where the rapid growth of AI platforms he described as “surveillance-based, centralized, autocratic and exploitative” puts democracy itself at risk.
“Technology like that works extremely well in a place like China, which is top-down, where people are used to being surveilled and profiled,” said McCourt, executive chairman of McCourt Global and the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, at Semafor World Economy in Washington, DC. “This is very new for us, and democracy won’t survive with this type of technology. So either we change the technology, or we’re going to find out we’re living in a very different place here.”
He said users are being “manipulated and exploited” by their own data, powering an ecosystem that has now merged technological and political power. But McCourt added that it’s not too late to reclaim the “individual agency and autonomy” on which the US was built.
“We need to own ourselves, we need to reclaim what’s ours,” he said. “Design the technology differently to actually harmonize with democratic values and principles, and in this way begin to restore trust and integrity within our system.”
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McCourt said a popular framing put forward by AI’s most enthusiastic boosters, that the US can’t waste time in its competitive race with China, is a false binary. The answer isn’t to stop the work, he said, it’s to optimize AI around the things society cares most about.
“You can’t release something that a billion people or 2 billion people are using and then say, jeez, we’re going to focus on trust and safety,” he said. “My family builds infrastructure — airports, highways. Imagine we built an airport and then called in the engineers after all the planes are flying and crashing. It’s not how it works. You build in safety in your design, in your process.”