Why I am begging today's A.I. billionaires to build massive, terrifying physical monuments to themselves

I spend a lot of time thinking about the legacy of the Gilded Age, usually while looking down at the city from a very high, very expensive window. Say what you will about Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller—and certainly, their Pinkerton guards said plenty—but they understood the fundamental contract of extreme wealth inequality. If you are going to hoover up all the capital in the known world, you must at least leave behind a giant, heavy building with your name chiseled into the pediment.

Today’s A.I. philanthropists are tragically failing at this basic obligation. I recently had lunch with a cohort of "effective altruists" in Silicon Valley, and I was appalled by their lack of vision. They want to cure diseases. They want to optimize mosquito net distribution. They want to quietly fund policy papers to mitigate the existential risk of the god-machines they are currently building. It is all so terribly invisible. You cannot take your children to gaze up in awe at a perfectly executed grain disbursement ledger. You cannot hold a black-tie gala inside a spreadsheet of carbon offsets.

I recently visited the site of an OpenAI-funded universal basic income pilot program in a struggling rust-belt town. Do you know what I saw? Regular people quietly buying groceries and paying rent. It was profoundly uninspiring. Where were the marble columns? Where was the massive gilded dome echoing with the footsteps of the elite? Giving poor people money to live on leaves absolutely no architectural footprint. It is a staggering waste of ego.

When Henry Clay Frick ordered the violent suppression of striking steelworkers, he had the decency to eventually leave us the Frick Collection—a stunning Manhattan mansion filled with Vermeer and Rembrandt. If Sam Altman displaces the entire global knowledge workforce, what do we get? A polite blog post about "alignment" and a digital wallet containing fifty SamCoins? It is insulting. The robber barons knew that philanthropy isn’t about helping people; it’s about making sure people in the year 2300 know you were vastly superior to them.

Imagine what we could have. The Dario Amodei Anthropic Colossus, a three-thousand-foot bronze statue of a neural network straddling the Golden Gate Bridge. The Mark Zuckerberg Memorial Compute Ziggurat, a sprawling complex of cooling towers built directly on top of a demolished working-class neighborhood, just like they used to do in the 1890s. This is what inspires a nation.

When the inevitable A.I. displacement leaves eighty percent of the populace destitute, they will need somewhere nice to sit outside of and weep. Why not a grand plaza paved with the crushed remains of the middle class, leading up to a hundred-story titanium bust of Elon Musk? Programs and disbursements are for the weak. They imply a guilt about having money, a desire to quietly give it back to the society you extracted it from. But a physical legacy? A physical legacy says, "I was here, I took everything, and I used it to block your view of the mountains." It is time for our tech billionaires to stop apologizing for the future they are forcing upon us, and start building the horrifying monuments history demands.