[tathougies]

> Does it make sense that someone can amass as wealth 50,000 years of brain surgeon economic output ($100bn)? If the distribution of human endowments is Gaussian, as it likely is, this level of wealth accumulation cannot be explained by superior productivity alone.

Well, yeah, if someone figured out how to operate an 10000 brains at once, then all of a sudden one would think that he ought to make 50000 years worth of brain surgeon economic output in five years.

[rmrfstar]

I like your hypothetical, but I'm going to change it a little.

Let's say Amazon records its warehouse workers and captures data which it can use to train industrial robots at some future date.

Those industrial robots have $X of economic value. Who created that value? Did the workers whose data enabled it? Did the DARPA/NSF funded university system who pushed the techniques to the point of being production-ready? Or was all the value created by the Amazon engineer who blended the established modelling techniques and the data?

It's an honest question about the source of value creation and whether inputs are being priced reasonably, efficiently, or fairly.

[tathougies]

Following this line of reasoning, one must be worried about who one ought to pay when one makes a wheel out of dirt. I mean that honestly. As a society, we agree the buck ends somewhere for the most part. That which is freely available or observable knowledge typically doesn't mandate compensative.

Public DARPA knowledge is presumably available to every American citizen (or at least it ought to be, since they presumable paid for it). So is employee behavior.

In general, I'm not sure you should be paid for simply having knowledge. You must apply it. Patents represent a recapture of the process for producing knowledge (however poorly one may argue they do it), but those come with an expiration date too.

That is to say, all knowledge eventually loses its price, and some never had any to begin with.

[rmrfstar]

I think you hit the nail on the head.

DARPA and NSF could very easily attach some IP rights to every project that they fund, but they don't. Maybe they should?

Congress could easily pass a law giving workers an ownership interest in recordings of their work "performance". You can't tape a concert and sell the recording without the musician's permission. Why can you do that with other tasks?

As we speak, there are companies tracking the eye movements of radiologists reviewing charts. I for one think the radiologists should get some ownership stake in the resulting architecture.