The Brave New Automated World: Why a Platform Cooperative Should Shape the Next Economy
“The next frontier is ensuring that we use the technology we build to amplify the best of us and not the worst of us… This takes a new breed of responsible and skilled leader who's ready to exemplify the best of human judgment and creativity. After all, when we enlarge ourselves with technology, we make it easier to step on the people around us. We'll need leaders who are able to direct their steps with wisdom and care in this brave new automated world.”— Cassie Kozyrkov, CEO, Data Scientific, former Google Chief Decision Scientist
When OpenAI was first conceived in 2015 as a non-profit, with investments from Elon Musk, Sam Altman and other Silicon Valley insiders, it had a compelling reason for this status. The founders wanted to ensure that this powerful new technology was developed for the benefit of all humanity, not the short-term profit motives of a handful of shareholders and major corporate investors. In 2019, the incredible cost of computational power to train the Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) on language model sets, and competition from other corporate players without the same public benefit guardrails, encouraged OpenAI to shift to a hybrid model, with a for-profit subsidiary and a capped 100x return on investment.?
Microsoft’s $12B investment sealed its fate. After a very public power struggle and house cleaning earlier this year, it’s clear Sam Altman and Microsoft see a tremendous payday in another winner-takes-all competition for the future of automation and cognition, and guardrails have become gated moats in proprietary A.I.
As we stand at the threshold of a new economic era shaped by exponential advancements in A.I., we must confront a pivotal question: who will own and shape this future? While the possibilities of artificial intelligence are limitless, so too are the potential pitfalls. I remain unconvinced that traditional corporate structures, driven by shareholder interests and monopolistic control, are suited to oversee the A.I. revolution in a manner that benefits everyone. The allure of profit, power, and prestige is too strong to expect self-regulation to prevail. I also question the business fundamentals of an economy based on harvesting data without true consent.?
All of this is happening at incredible speed, without real engagement and dialogue from the public, certainly not the users of A.I. and other information platforms. This is an inflection point, where the decisions on the structures and ownership models we make today will determine decades, if not centuries, of wealth creation and power dynamics. Either we risk descending into a future dominated by monopolies, authoritarianism, and unfettered A.I. or we embrace the change and transition into a more regenerative and decentralized economy, built on shared power and prosperity. It is not an either or scenario. It is a delicate balance of collective evolution against the constraints of our self-ambition; and it will require a new level of awareness, risk-taking, boldness and trust for us to come together and own this future.?
The Real Battle: Ownership of Data & Platforms
The front line of the most important struggle in the world today is not in Ukraine, nor in the next presidential election. It lies in who controls the platforms that govern our data, our algorithms, and increasingly, our lives. I recently came across a manifesto from a former OpenAI employee, Leopold Aschenbrenner, titled “Situational Awareness.” It reads like a roadmap for Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex in the A.I. age. The core premise? We are on the verge of superintelligence, and winning this race against China—at any cost—is crucial to ensuring the free world’s dominance.?
The coming decade will demand unprecedented capital, energy, and computational investments to maintain A.I.’s growth—up to $1 trillion in capital, 10 to 100 times more energy, and 100,000 times more computational power than today’s levels. The manifesto calls for government intervention and A.I. research bunkers to "win" the A.I. race, because superintelligence is right around the corner in 2027, and only the best and the brightest, the Manhattan Project scientists of our generation have what it takes to guide A.I. through the madness.
It is hard to fathom the disconnect between these A.I. giants and the lived experiences of ordinary people. I always felt San Francisco was a weak sauce city compared to New York, and now when I go to Manhattan with its fake Little Island for tourists and Google employees on the West Side Highway I see what global capital is doing to places that used to have heart and street culture. A.I., Big Data, and the Global Capital markets are too important to be left in the hands of an exclusive group of technocrats, investors, and engineers.?
Obviously Sam Altman and friends are too young to have watched Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, but the argument for pouring all of our resources into A.I. sounds eerily similar to the Doomsday Machine and the existential threat posed by a Communist superpower to US hegemony. Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece in satire does a phenomenal job of revealing the absurdity of mutually assured destruction and the hubris of infallible human beings at the center of rational systems.
This framework leaves no room for the people most affected by A.I.’s rise— the workers who will be replaced not just in manufacturing and transportation with autonomous factories and vehicles, but all of us who think for a living. Data-driven decision-making will be autonomous and human agency is going to have to evolve. The moral and ethical questions here deserve serious contemplation, not knee jerk reactions to the markets or international power politics.
There is also a tremendous gap between the imperative for computational growth, energy, and speed for its own sake, whether it is Cold War like mania for continued US hegemony, or geeked out tech marketing to exponentially grow the A.I. investment bubble, and the very real environmental constraints of 8 billion people living on a finite planet. A.I. expansion runs against all of the global sustainability goals we are currently struggling to hit. According to Planetary Health Check 2024, 6 out of 9 of the Earth’s vital signs are flashing red. We all see the impacts from wildfires to flooding to rising temperatures, and transitioning to a net-positive environment requires every industry, including Big Tech, to embrace sustainability as the design constraint for growth.
领英推荐
What are we fighting for, and what are we fighting against?
The United States is trying to figure this out, in real time. We seem adrift without an enemy, and a grand narrative to rally around. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, it spawned a 50-year hot and cold war against first Fascism and then Communism. Our unity was fractured by the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam in the 1960's and 70's, and 21st century wars have done little to bring us together or make the world a better place. September 11th and the War Against Terror led to a 20-year soft occupation of Afghanistan and regime change in Iraq that had no end game and has not achieved any enduring peace in the Middle East.?
50 years ago we embraced China, leading to the offshoring of American manufacturing, weakening of American labor, and addicting us to the incredible cost-saving and convenience of a global supply chain. Over the last few years, the media and the US government seem to have forgotten this bargain we made with the People's Republic of China, and now say China is the great threat to our nation and our way of life, as though the US - China relationship is not the central underpinning of the current global economy, and China's embrace of industrial government sanctioned capitalism is illegal. I do not see people being galvanized by the threat of cheap manufacturing, whether it be solar panels or plastic goods.
As a nation, we are united by Netflix and social media, big box retail and fast, convenient food, our smartphones; but is exponential growth and consumption the grand narrative we've been waiting for? The mental health and loneliness crisis, public epidemics of despair, and nasty partisanship in our public discourse is not a rallying cry for coming together to do big things. A nation, like any community of people, needs a purpose and a story to bind us together.
It is a sign of how weak and distracted we’ve become, full of economic anxiety about the loss of the middle class, stuck in survival mode with our families and provincial concerns, the shallow conceits of social media platforms instead of real community engagement, that we are missing the biggest threat to the American experiment in self-governance since our inception.
The real risk to our democracy, our constitution, and the American Dream is the oligarchy that gets further entrenched when A.I. development and other advanced technologies are concentrated in the hands of a billionaires and trillion dollar monopolies. If monopolies and governments alone control A.I., we risk creating a future where surveillance, control, and economic disparity deepen by design.
We must develop A.I. in the light of day, with as much public involvement as possible. The future must be shaped by people, not monopolies and the intelligence apparatus of the state. This isn't just a fight over technology—it’s a fight for the soul of our economy, for whether our digital platforms will serve the public good or reinforce existing inequalities.
Life is not a video game and a handful of software engineers and Silicon Valley insiders are not the saviors of the Matrix. If this really is our generation’s "Manhattan Project", we need to take Big Data seriously and reimagine its purpose, its economic model, and the consequences of replacing human agency with machines, rain forests with server farms. Our generation is the first to live and work online, and the first to feel the impacts of human growth on the planet’s climate… we are also the last who can do anything about it.?
The New Economic Paradigm: A Platform Cooperative
If A.I. can reshape economies and societies, the challenge we face is how to design a system where that transformation benefits all of humanity. I believe the answer lies in the creation of a Platform Cooperative, a decentralized and community-owned model that redefines the economic framework for A.I. development—and human advancement.
Originally popularized by social theorists, activists and revolutionaries in response to the Great Recession of 2008, and the bailout of the financial institutions that caused the housing bubble of the early 2000s; this model is closely aligned with the creation of block chain technologies fundamental to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, who prioritize decentralized financial systems and shared governance. These technologies are still in their infancy, and much of the crypto economy is a speculative bubble that does nothing to challenge or reimagine the power structures it is designed to replace, yet, they are the seeds for a regenerative system focused on shared prosperity, sustainability, and economic resiliency.
Under this model, the basic economics of Big Tech, platform monopolies that harvest data and accrue value to those at the top, those that own the meta servers and create proprietary data farms, are replaced by a cooperative business model owned by its users. This only works at scale, at the enterprise level, with broad adoption by the public and investment by private capital. It requires a platform that provides a scalable structure and a user interface as attractive as the leading service providers of the current internet economy, but its back end will be collectively owned, transparent and open sourced.?
Users would share in the wealth it generates and have a say in how the platform develops, ensuring that A.I. serves the collective good. The key is the platform cooperative needs to balance economic vitality and social benefit. Without an economic engine that can attract private capital and provide a long-term sustainable return, it will never be built and achieve broad adoption, at least not to the point where it can achieve its fullest potential, an ethical alternative that actually surpass monopolies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon and creates the world’s first trillion dollar cooperative business.
The Future We Must Build
At the core of this vision is the belief that language data—upon which A.I. is built—is a collective asset of all people and cultures. Today, A.I. companies scrape this data from the vast internet, leveraging humanity’s collective knowledge to ultimately generate immense profits. It is unjust for a handful of corporations to monopolize this wealth of data, which belongs to everyone.
We stand at a crossroads. Either we embrace a regenerative, cooperative model for A.I. that prioritizes shared prosperity and human flourishing, or we allow it to become a tool of oppression and exploitation. We need an operating system for belonging, one that rethinks capitalism and technology’s role in our lives. By embracing cooperative ownership, we ensure that A.I. is aligned with our highest values, driving collective well-being rather than consolidating power for a small group of people.
This moment is not just about creating another company. It’s about starting a movement—one that leverages the best of capitalism while addressing its flaws. A movement to reclaim technology for the people. The next economy must be one where we all belong.