Would you use a product if you knew that the company that made it stole half of its components from others?

As an ethical and socially minded person surely you'd refuse to buy it.

But the company's success in the market doesn't just depend on my actions or yours — it depends on the actions of multitudes of people.

What if, for example, using the product puts people at a significant advantage over non-users?

Or what if the product is a cure to a disease, or could save the life of a loved one?

Suddenly the ethical considerations become more complicated.

Of course if it's just a few companies engaging in such crooked practices it's not a big deal. But what happens when it's a lot more widespread? 

What happens when much of economic growth, the products and services that most people rely on, and most of the innovation in medicine and tech, essentially comes from theft?

Sounds unlikely, right?

Well, this is where our economy is currently headed — if Big Tech was based on the mantra of “move fast and break things,”  the AI age will be based on a new model: “move fast and steal things.”

The most innovative companies in biotech, engineering, robotics, and so on are likely to be those who harness AI technology with few scruples about scraping other people's intellectual property.

And so we're moving into a fundamentally unstable phase of the economy. A phase of extreme social instability, when one group becomes obscenely wealthy by stealing from others, while the rest of society is forced to choose between integrity and prosperity.

But what if we chose a different path?

A path where innovators can profit massively not by stealing from others but by rewarding people fairly for their contributions.

And where society can prosper without compromising its integrity.

How can we do it?

We can build an economy where the AI companies who fairly compensate everyone in the “value creation chain” are also far more prosperous than those who try to keep all the revenue for themselves.

So how is it possible? How can collaborative companies “share the cake and eat it too”?

The logic here is quite simple: it can be better to have just a portion of a much bigger pie than to have a smaller whole pie all for yourself.

Why would the collaborative companies have “bigger pies” to share?

Because no one wants others to make a profit at their expense, but when people are compensated fairly they're more than willing to cooperate.

Extractors then have a much harder time getting reliable information. Meanwhile, contributors will proactively help companies who reward them.

With this wealth of reliable information, and the ability to fill in knowledge gaps from contributors, collaborative companies will have a structural advantage in the market.

They will be able to innovate much faster than extractors who try to scrape intellectual property.

This principle applies not just to biotech or robotics. It works just as well for content creation — writing, art, video, and so on.

But why stop there?

If we can build an economy where AI companies have a financial incentive to open up and reward those whose data they use to train their LLMs, why not expand that concept to the rest of the economy?

Why not let people do research, build open source software, advance science in the open, and let everyone benefit from the fruits of this open collaboration. 

Then allow companies to take full advantage of this work — as long as they fairly compensate the Value Creation Chain.

The new mode of production that this paradigm will enable can be far more efficient, and lead to greater economic prosperity, than we've ever seen.

Yet, rewarding Value Creation Chains is easier said than done.

To get there we’ll need a mechanism that incentivizes each link in the value creation chain to faithfully report their own contribution, as well as how much others contributed to that link’s impact in the chain.

Without such credible data it would be extremely difficult to reward contributors fairly.

So how can we make sure that links don't overvalue their own contribution or undervalue the contribution of others? That would be the subject of my next post.