Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are spending on space travel. Blackstone Group LP Chief Executive Officer Steve Schwarzman gave $350 million to MIT to open a college of computing. He’s intrigued by how artificial intelligence will transform the nature of work, and he’s doing his part to get his friends on board. At his Park Avenue home, he recently hosted an “AI cocktail party” where guests went gaga over the bartender robot who poured and served Champagne.
Supercomputers and Big Data can also flag today’s problems and offer solutions. In concert with machine learning and gobs of money, philanthropy’s ambitions rise exponentially.
The man at the gala asked, “Who are these people?” The next question for him and his peers is, “What can we accomplish together?” Bridgespan proposes that billionaires could increase their giving by tens of billions a year if they can be connected to new channels, such as a national fund to help the poor—or Blue Meridian Partners, which pools donations and seeks to scale up proven solutions to problems faced by children and youth in poverty.
In taking on the life of the commons, the rich and the ultrarich can cooperate and crowdsource in a way their businesses and personal lives may never have quite called for. Perhaps in the future the wealthy will succeed in finding ways to stand up, not stand out, and remove the barriers that remain between themselves and their fellow humans.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.