We don’t need more Rosey robots: A response to the third wave of philanthropy

Shayna Robinson, ICANN

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the internet’s influence on philanthropy when I came across Nan Ransohoff’s piece on Substack. I appreciate Ransohoff’s identification of a potential “third wave” of philanthropy driven by AI-generated wealth; I encourage you to read it. I think it’s a bellwether for the philanthropic sector. To summarize its analysis it argues that those who own and develop AI systems will gain a lot of new money and they will decide to give away some of their new wealth via philanthropy. The problem, Ransohoof argues, is that philanthropy does not have the capacity to absorb this incoming influx of philanthropic money. I think the analysis rests on several assumptions that deserve greater scrutiny, so I thought I would share some quick thoughts about the ideas it introduces.

First, the idea that there’s no mechanism to give away the hoard of cash AI will generate assumes that philanthropy lacks sufficient infrastructure to absorb and deploy large amounts of capital. Yet this overlooks the vast ecosystem of giving that exists beyond traditional institutional philanthropy. As Lucy Bernholz argues in How We Give Now, indexes like Giving USA capture only a portion of how people contribute to the public good. In many parts of the world, mutual aid, crowdfunding, remittances, giving circles, online communities, religious giving and countless informal networks move billions of dollars around the world every year; not to mention emerging philanthropic models based on blockchain-based giving. The challenge is not a lack of philanthropic infrastructure, but a tendency to recognize only certain forms of it. Sometimes there is a cultivated blindness within the institutional philanthropic sector, what the women of INCITE! so perfectly describe as “the non-profit industrial complex” — to only see the forms and infrastructure of giving that fit its bureaucratic systems.

This is an excerpt of a blog. To read the piece in its entirety, head to the #ShiftThePower Treehouse. A version on this blog was first published on Shayna Robinson’s LinkedIn Account. 

By: Shayna Robinson, Grant Programme Director at ICANN.