A Tale of Two Sams: A Cautionary Tale on Saving the World

Two Sams, one goal: to reshape the world. The current tech landscape means we could face a tsunami of billionaires. The latest to wash up: Sam Bankman-Fried and Sam Altman. Other than sharing a first name, they share a goal: to improve society. Altman is a fierce proponent of universal basic income (UBI) and recently backed the largest US study researching its impact to date (1). Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried—whose goal of doing good is perhaps less obvious considering he is currently serving 25 years for wire fraud (2)—pledged to donate billions of dollars (before he lost it all). Their divergent paths raise intriguing questions: How do we evaluate the moral weight of their actions? Can noble intentions justify questionable means? And what does their rise and fall reveal about the intersection of wealth, technology, and social responsibility in our modern era?

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Keen crypto bros will be well aware of the fall of Bankman-Fried; he rose to riches by starting the crypto trading firm Alameda and then the crypto trading platform, FTX. However, he was found to be misappropriating FTX’s customer funds by storing them in the same account as Alameda’s, available to use in his own firm (3). While his conviction is old news, his personal philosophy never quite reached the light of mainstream media, and that is: Effective Altruism. Effective Altruism aims to maximise the positive impact one has on the world using the time and money one has. The movement, founded by Oxford University philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, does not implicitly disallow for the high-paying jobs and the accumulation of wealth, while it does explicitly condemn the often-ineffective work of charities. The community itself targets policies it thinks it can do to maximise the impact of its donations by finding the world’s problems with the highest margin of return—those that are big, solvable, and neglected (4). Bankman-Fried supposedly sat down with one of the founders and became an effective altruist almost as quick as he became one of the richest men in the world (5).

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As soon as Bankman-Fried’s fraud came to light, his name became target practice for condemnation, from the left and right alike; the Guardian describes him as someone who thinks "he can get rich with no expertise" (6). Michael Lewis (author of ‘The Big Short’) describes him as executing a flawed algorithm, wherein he had been given a goal but no parameters on how he could behave; Bankman-Fried was simply a bug the philosophers forgot to account for. So, while his intentions were noble, the outcome was questionable.

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As the New Yorker puts it, Sam Bankman-Fried ‘seemed to have walked out of a cave and one day and become one of the richest people in the world’, which is just one of his things he has in common with Sam Altman. Open Research, a non-profit owned by Sam Altman, put up the cash for the world’s largest Universal Basic Income study. 3,000 participants in the treatment group received $1,000 monthly for three years (7), conditional only on having an income of less than $29,000. Analysis revealed a moderate reduction in hours worked a week, more leisure time, and higher spending on healthcare. More importantly, it served as an active labour market policy by providing a vital buffer for those in-between jobs: relieving the stress caused by unemployment and allowing more time to find an occupation that matches their skillset and interests.

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Why did he do it? He believes AI will increase the utility of everyone in society by reducing the cost of goods and services, but wealth will be hoarded amongst those with access to AI due to its huge productivity, creating massive inequality. He argues that public policy needs to adapt to prevent the ramifications of such inequality; otherwise, “most people will end up worse off than they are today” (8). In his view, one instrumental policy that should be carried out by governments is universal basic income. By his own logic however, if this policy fails to come to fruition, he will have made no contribution to preventing possible carnage to most people in society. Not to mention, contributing to something you deem catastrophic and then making the philanthropic contribution of demanding the state clean up collateral damage rings a little empty.

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Altman also joined the Giving Pledge, founded by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. The Giving Pledge is a campaign in which the wealthy pledge to give away the majority of their riches to charitable causes… sound familiar? Other patrons include Michael Bloomberg and both halves of Facebook's founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz.

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Both Altman and Bankman-Fried attempted to save the world, so who did it better? It is difficult to say who has a higher positive impact. Bankman-Fried’s donations were targeted to have a higher marginal impact by design, and on the global poor. However, if Open Research’s results from its UBI study gained traction, Altman could manage to shift policy towards redistributing wealth within some, likely wealthier, nations.

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And who had a larger negative impact? Bankman-Fried seems like the obvious answer, being the convicted felon. But with Bankman-Fried, losses were localised to crypto investors. With Altman, there is no telling the negative impact ChatGPT has had or will have in the future. Bankman-Fried broke laws in a fairly regulated arena, but AI has no regulations yet. As a society, we have no sense of what AI should or should not be able to, which is exemplified by a mess of ownership and copyright disputes surrounding Large Language Models(9). If 2008 was the implosion that led to increased financial regulation, what will be the turning point for AI’s regulation, and will Altman be culpable?

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The tales of Altman and Bankman-Fried’s encourage us to re-establish our views on wealth, inequality, and social responsibility as a torrent of tech billionaires soon crashes in. Both men sought to improve society, calling into focus different aspects of this ethical dilemma; Bankman-Fried's forces us to question if noble intentions can justify unethical means, while Altman’s push for a public policy shift forces us to question whether public policy can ever be enough to balance damages created in the private arena.

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Ultimately, we must ask whether social responsibility and philanthropy should be tied to wealth accumulation at all. Surely it should, in some way. But can we trust billionaires, non-democratic non-elected figures, to make decisions that shape society? Are any billionaires capable of fixing the world, at least enough to justify their own wealth? Or would society be better off if their wealth were taxed away, for the government to decide how to improve society?