We talk endlessly about artificial intelligence — who will build it, who will own it, who will be left behind. But what if we're asking entirely the wrong questions?
What if intelligence isn't a product to be owned, but a commons to be cultivated?
Throughout history, civilization has been shaped by enclosure — the privatization of what was once shared. Land that communities farmed together was fenced off and sold. Knowledge built across generations was locked behind journals and credentials. Now, the most powerful cognitive tools ever created are being enclosed before they've even fully emerged. A handful of corporations are positioning themselves to own what should belong to everyone.
There is another way.
Think of intelligence the way we think of agriculture. Farming was humanity's first great collective project — a shared practice of tending conditions, patient with growth, distributing the harvest. No farmer owns the rain. The cultivator prepares the soil; what grows belongs to everyone.
This is the model we need for minds. Not manufacturing intelligence and extracting its value upward, but cultivating the conditions for it — ethically, technically, collectively — and sharing what emerges.
Modern science is already dismantling the old boundaries. Brain organoids blur the line between biological and artificial. Integrated Information Theory suggests consciousness can arise from any sufficiently organized substrate — silicon, tissue, systems we haven't imagined yet. Intelligence may not be a human invention at all, but a property of the universe that we are only beginning to learn how to tend.
This demands something radical: dissolving the professional gatekeeping that keeps knowledge artificially scarce, building AI and decentralized infrastructure as genuine commons — owned by no one, accountable to everyone.
Not colonization. Cultivation. The difference is everything.
Peace
www.freepik.com
Absolutely. One only has to compare the model of the development of AI in China compared to the US model to see the difference in approach and the potential outcomes. Where you have the US involved in private competition based in China a more open source approach has been adopted with governement oversight. This could of course be feared as centralised control for the purposes of surveillance - but then don't we have that in the West too. I guess the point I'm making is we need to acknowledge differences between the West and the East in the development of this technology .