What Will Happen When the AI Barons Give Back?(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
What Will Happen When the AI Barons Give Back?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/27/opinion/ai-philanthropy-charity.html
2 comments
Hell will freeze over? I mean that's just not going to happen.
"Steel manning (or steelmanning) is a rhetorical technique that involves strengthening the opponent’s position to its strongest possible form before critiquing it."
Allow me to explain.
In the beginning of the article it glosses over what it deems as the three waves of philanthropy.
What it does not mention is this is an entirely new and untraditional way of viewing the american "three waves of philanthropy". Traditionally this is the version used in philanthropy research:
Wave 1 (1890–1930): Institution‑building
Wave 2 (1930–1980): Scientific philanthropy
Wave 3 (1980–present): Tech‑driven, global, scalable philanthropy
This model is long‑arc, spanning 140 years.
As you can see " Obama era" would lie within the current 3rd wave.
This is problematic and highly gratuitous to the Gates foundation. I would consider the Gates foundation as being Philanthrocapitalists. Philanthrocapitalism is a way of doing philanthropy, which mirrors the way that business is done in the for-profit world. It may involve venture philanthropy that actively invests in social programs to pursue specific philanthropic goals that would yield return on investment over the long term, or in a more passive form whereby "social investors" benefit from investing in socially-responsible programs.
The Gates foundation recorded 8.08B in revenue with only 8.015B in spending creating a surplus and that's just in the foundation itself. While Gates himself has verbalized his wishes to close the foundation by 2045 - talk is cheap and actions speak louder so only time will tell.
What I think this article and its writer is TRYING to do is not mapping philanthropy across U.S. history but rather mapping how tech ideology evolved across three political eras: Bush → Obama → Trump.
This isn't the problem. The problem is taking a definition of a topic you know nothing about and adapting it for your own use and then pretending its a standard form of measurement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philanthropy
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/financials/annual-repo...
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-rel...