AI, You owe us.

The case for returning the gains to the humans that created the intelligence.

Here’s something I’ve been rumbling with since the very beginning of the roll out of AI. As we know, the large language models reshaping knowledge work were trained on the internet. Which means they were trained on publicly funded research, on journalism produced by people who weren’t paid enough, on forums where strangers answered each other’s questions for free, on creative work that was shared without expectation of return.

The intellectual commons built these systems, yet the returns are flowing almost entirely to a small number of companies and their shareholders.

This is not a conspiracy, it’s has become a structural reality.
Structural realities, when they become visible, provide us an opportunity to redesign them to serve the public good.

I’m interested in what an AI dividend could look like. So is Sam Altman.
But I don’t want his version. I want our homegrown version, infused with our values and our tikanga. I want genuine reciprocity baked in.

Just to be clear, this isn’t a utopian fantasy, it is a genuine policy question.

If AI is going to compress labour markets (and it is) and if it was built on public intellectual infrastructure (and it was) then that productivity gain should find its way back into the public systems it drew from.

Universal basic income. Retraining and transition support. Investment in the creative and caregiving work that AI will never be able to replicate meaningfully. Climate resilience. Health equity. The underfunded commons.

We’re at the moment (briefly ) when the shape of this transition is still being decided.

The narrative we choose for this technology, what it’s for, who it serves, what obligations come with it, will determine a lot of what comes next.

Better stories drive better systems. This is one that needs telling now, and we are its mouthpiece.

#HumaneTech #AIDividends #DigitalJustice #SystemicReform #HopeBasedComms #PublicInfrastructure #TechForGood