The AI Question Is Really an Everything Question

The social media addiction verdicts came down this month, and while it’s heartening to see companies held accountable, the relief may be short lived. If the economic incentives stay the same, the same thing will keep happening. Essentially, the Courts punished the behavior without solving the problem.

That is at the center of our founder, Justin Rosenstein’s, recent conversation with POLITICO’s Aaron Mak, and it’s the argument at the center of everything One Project does.

Nearly every crisis we face is the predictable result of what the economy rewards. Trees are more profitable dead than alive. Food is more profitable laced with sugar. Social media is more profitable when it’s addicting you. These aren’t separate failures. They’re the same failure, repeated. We give money for things that hurt the world and don’t give money for things that help it.

AI is not a new problem. It’s the same problem, arriving faster and at a greater scale than anything we’ve seen before. 

Right now, AI companies are building on every book ever written, every idea ever published, thousands of years of collective human culture. They’re adding a thin layer of math atop set to capture trillions of dollars of value that, by any fair accounting, belongs to all of us. If the incentives don’t change, the outcome is already written: AI will lower costs for shareholders, maximize pharmaceutical profits, and replace workers rather than empower them. Because that’s what the incentives reward.

The question is whether that’s inevitable. It isn’t. It’s a political choice.

This is what economic democracy means in practice: an economy where the public decides what gets rewarded, not just markets. Where the rules, the incentives, the wealth, and the ownership of the companies building these technologies are governed by the people most affected by them. Where we the people decide what AI is for, and technical experts are accountable to that decision, not the other way around.

Taiwan, the UK, and Belgium are already using citizens assemblies to set AI policy. These are real people, representative samples of the public, given time and resources to deliberate and decide. Not politicians responding to donors. Just people, doing what juries have done for thousands of years: deciding what’s right.

And the demand is already there. According to Gallup, almost 97% of Americans agree that AI safety and security should be subject to rules and regulations.  People are not apathetic about AI. They are locked out.

That gap between public will and public power is the problem One Project is working to close, and not just for AI. Democratic control of AI is the most urgent application of a much larger idea: that the economy should serve people, and people should govern it. When that becomes the default, nearly every crisis we face starts to resolve. Not because of any single policy, but because the rules that produce the crises change.

The economy is being redesigned by incredible leaders and organizations across the globe. One Project is just one piece of that ecosystem. We are building Common, a platform for making democratic decision-making real at scale. Common helps communities govern resources, set shared priorities, and direct funding toward what actually matters. The infrastructure for economic democracy doesn’t exist yet in the form the moment requires. We’re building it. Join us.