Human–AI Collaboration
A Core Vision Pillar — ensuring AI benefits are shared across our entire human family, honoring creators while enabling species‑wide thriving.
AI may be one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Whether it becomes a family invention that uplifts all of us — or a fortress that serves a few — depends on the mindset we encode into its design, deployment, and rewards. If we act as one extended family, the gains can be universal. If we slip into us vs them, most people will be excluded from the benefits while bearing the risks.
The stakes, made vivid
- Scenario — us vs them: AI triples global productivity, but access is paywalled, models are closed, and policy is shaped by a handful of firms. Ninety percent of people see little change in their daily lives beyond more precarity and surveillance. The risk includes AI taking over or assuming every job humans once performed, leading potentially to mass collapse of the human workforce, significantly increased global poverty, and heightened risks of civil unrest and wars.
- Scenario — only us: A breakthrough in medical diagnosis is deployed everywhere within months; every student gets a capable tutor; small businesses automate drudgery and grow; dangerous jobs become safer; public services get faster, fairer, and kinder. All 8 billion plus members of the human race realize the benefits of AI, leading to unprecedented health and prosperity for the entirety of our species.
The technology can support either future. Our mindset chooses.
How mindset becomes outcomes
- Boundary of care: Who counts as “we” determines who gets access to models, compute, and training.
- Ownership and rewards: Closed IP and winner‑take‑all platforms privatize upside and socialize downside.
- Policy capture: Concentrated influence writes rules that entrench advantage and mute public interest.
- Narratives of desert: “Winners earned it alone” becomes the rationale for excluding the wider family from benefits.
- Externalized harms: Bias, displacement, and environmental costs land on those with the least voice.
Flip the mindset to “only us,” and these same levers route access, rewards, and accountability to everyone.
Side‑by‑side: how mindset shapes AI ecosystems
| Dimension | Us vs them mindset | Only us (extended family) |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Outcompete others; extract advantage | Augment everyone; expand shared capability |
| Access | Closed models, paywalled benefits | Tiered openness, universal baselines, public‑interest compute |
| Rewards | Upside to inventors/investors only | Broad dividends while honoring creators’ outsized contributions |
| Safety | PR‑driven, liability‑minimizing | Community‑grounded; mitigations tied to real‑world harms and justice |
| Labor | Automation to cut costs | Universal security, independent of employments |
| Governance | Self‑regulation by a few | Multi‑stakeholder stewardship with democratic oversight |
Sources: observed industry patterns; conceptual comparison.
Design principles for an extended‑family AI
- Universal capability floor: Ensure everyone can access a baseline of AI assistance for health, learning, work, and civic life.
- Augmentation first: Design for human flourishing — safer work, deeper creativity, better decisions — not just cost cutting.
- Open building blocks, trusted rails: Open knowledge, standards, and auditable components paired with safety guardrails that protect people.
- Fair rewards with commons return: Celebrate and reward creators and investors, while dedicating a meaningful share of gains to public dividends, services, and shared infrastructure.
- Data dignity: Consent, value return for data contributions, and strong privacy as defaults.
- Care‑led safety: Evaluate and mitigate harms with affected communities shaping tests and remedies.
- Planetary stewardship: Align scaling with clean power, efficiency, and circular lifecycle design.
From principles to practice
Access and infrastructure
- Public‑interest compute: Capacity dedicated to education, healthcare, small business, and research.
- Connectivity and devices: Programs that ensure people have the tools to use AI well.
- Local language and culture: Models that serve people where they are, in their words and contexts.
Work and prosperity
- Augment then automate: Redesign roles so AI lifts quality and safety first; automate where it improves lives.
- Transition guarantees: Training, wage insurance, job matching, and entrepreneurship support during shifts.
- Shared dividends: A portion of AI‑driven productivity growth funds universal benefits.
Rights and protections
- Model accountability: Traceability, incident reporting, recall powers for unsafe systems, and redress for harms.
- Non‑discrimination: Bias and impact audits with remedies that reach affected people.
Participation and oversight
- Civic assemblies for AI: Ongoing forums where workers, communities, and experts co‑shape rules.
- Independent audits: Technical, social, and environmental audits with public summaries.
- Global cooperation: Shared safety standards and emergency protocols for transboundary risks.
Honoring individual success and enabling species‑wide thriving
Both can be true: Those who invent and advance sophisticated AI deserve recognition and exceptional rewards.
And: Because AI can massively expand global wealth, it is both possible and necessary to ensure every human being also benefits — even if they weren’t involved in building it.
The family metaphor holds: When one of us “makes it,” we care for the whole family. Our family is 8‑plus billion people.
How we’ll know it’s working
- Access: Share of people with reliable, meaningful AI assistance for health, learning, and work.
- Prosperity: Growth in median incomes and reductions in poverty linked to AI‑enabled productivity.
- Work quality: Gains in safety, satisfaction, and upward mobility in AI‑touched roles.
- Fair rewards: Visible flows from AI gains into public dividends and services, alongside thriving creator ecosystems.
- Safety and justice: Declines in documented harms; timely redress when incidents occur.
- Sustainability: Useful capability per unit energy trending up and aligned with clean power.
Core reframe and invitation
If you wouldn’t accept your sibling being left behind by a technology this powerful, don’t accept any person being left behind.
If AI is the brainchild of our human family, its benefits are the inheritance of us all.