A major problem in today’s economy is that many companies focus more on extracting value than creating it. A truly great company should make useful products, serve its customers well, treat employees fairly, and maintain healthy relationships with suppliers. However, modern business culture often rewards companies even when they fail to do these things. When a company becomes highly valued despite offering less value to the people who depend on it, that reflects a deeper problem in society.
Business leaders should measure success by the value they provide to customers, not only by the money they return to shareholders. A successful business should constantly ask whether it is giving customers more value than it did before. The danger comes when companies decide to take value away from customers in order to increase profits. This may help the company in the short term, but it damages trust and weakens the purpose of the business.
This problem is especially visible in technology. Many services begin by offering something genuinely useful, but once they attract a large user base, they often shift toward extracting more profit from those users. Platforms may make useful features harder to find, increase prices, show more advertising, or push content that benefits the company more than the customer. This is the process Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification.” The original purpose of the product becomes weaker, while the company captures more value for itself.
The rise of artificial intelligence raises similar concerns. AI may make businesses more productive, but the benefits of that productivity do not have to belong only to shareholders or owners of capital. Greater productivity could lead to higher wages, shorter working hours, better services, or lower prices for consumers. However, if companies treat shareholder profit as the only important goal, AI could deepen inequality and reduce the role of ordinary people in the economy.
A society where only a small group of capital owners benefits from automation would be unstable and inhuman. Prosperous economies require the circulation of money and value, because businesses still need customers, workers, and communities to survive. If AI replaces human labor without creating new ways for people to participate, then the economy could become more concentrated and less inclusive. The challenge of the twenty-first century is to decide what role humans will have as more tasks become automated.
The future of the AI economy is therefore a choice. Society can allow AI to become another tool for monopoly, lock-in, and extraction, or it can design systems that allow more people to participate and benefit. The web and open source software succeeded in part because they created an “architecture of participation,” where many people could contribute and share in value creation. A humane economy should follow that model by using markets to support human flourishing rather than concentrating wealth among a few people.
Tim O'Reilly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrQu3MRSQgc