Opinion | What A.I. Philanthropists Can Learn From the Gilded Age
Opinion | What A.I. Philanthropists Can Learn From the Gilded Age
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/opinion/artificial-intelligence-philanthropy-beauty.html
Publish Date: 2026-05-23 07:00:00
Source Domain: www.nytimes.com
Soon enough, the major artificial intelligence companies will take their soaring valuations and go public. When they do, a great many very smart, very eccentric people will suddenly possess enormous liquid wealth — and many have committed to giving great sums of it away.
The future of American philanthropy isn’t the central drama of the A.I. age, but it isn’t a sideshow, either. As Nan Ransohoff wrote this week on Substack, A.I. wealth could soon add as much as $100 billion to American charitable giving every year. She describes this as a potential “third wave” of philanthropy, after the now-distant Carnegie and Rockefeller era and the recent Bill Gates and Warren Buffett wave. And she expects it to be focused on the “A.I. transition” and what lies beyond, especially questions of “flourishing, meaning and what makes a life good” in the shadow of increasingly capable machines.
Let’s suppose she’s right about the philanthropic rush and about the quest for meaning as an organizing impulse. I want to make a personal appeal to the A.I. philanthropists: Take a lesson from your Gilded Age predecessors, and treat beauty as a central charitable pursuit. Build monuments, statues, museums, universities, cathedrals, public gardens — and yes, even mansions for yourselves. Leave a physical legacy to future generations, not just a record of programs and disbursements. Recognize that meaning inheres in architecture, art and landscape as much as in more measurable goods.
This was a great failure of the most recent philanthropic era. At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads. But there was no real legacy when it came to physical infrastructure — no great beautification campaigns, no beloved architectural landmarks, no equivalent of the Gilded Age’s expansions of museums and libraries and…
