I have been holding in my drawer an idea or attempt at a different economical organization when the interest is to get a thing done rather than use it for maximum power grab ie profit. Based on thinking somewhat hard on piracy, I think there are serious issue on how we compensate “getting the damn thing together” vs “doing the thing” and “enjoying from the thing”.
The lines of arguments go somethign like this: There are games that have a standard/high pricepoint that still sells like hotcakes. Additional copy of a program (once programmed and developed) does not increase production costs. Therefore a game that has covered its fair coding/development costs at some point will start to accrue “unfair” compensation (more compensation with no additional work provided). A mass scale program is likely to have the majority of its price composed of such “empty air” (for a project that exactly covers its development at 1000 customers will at 10000 customers be charging 1/10th justified and 9/10ths unjustified price). Because it is more unjustified than justified from the options of “extortion price” and “ignore wall-off”, “ignore wall-off” is less wrong than “extortion price”. I think this is ultimately in error in that it is more important to have some compensation than no compensation. But there is something important about the same price for the same program being an undercompensation, fair compensation or overcompensation in different situations that shows that in these kind of cases the system is more broken than helping.
The standard wisdom would say that selling 10x as much as expected is providing more enjoyment or utlity as expected and as trade is voluntary and like-for-like its all legimate income. This new line of thinking deviates and says that no the amout of work done is same for small and big customer base in each case the customer base should (exactly) compensate for the work done. 10x times the customers means 1/10th the price. And this should be applied retroactively to past customers. This is the way you do things if you want projects to pass with miminum/acceptable fuss for everybody involved. But doing/thinking this way will treat “profit” as unnecceary friction. Thus we lose all the up and downsides of greed.
This kind of thing could be a crosssection of “assurance crowdsourcing”. As an individual if you come to your local store to buy the product that you usually pay $10 for and see (same quality etc) alternative for $8 and $5, the logic of acceptable cost would make you keeping your $10 purchase justifiable but most would understand why to take the $5 product and it would take quite a leaps of logic to take the $8 product (quality reliablity etc differences explain why there are different products in the same category at all on the shelf). With an unknown customer base how big economies of scale are possible can be murky. If a company has a choice between providing one or both of $5 or $8 product it could maximise its income by only offering the $8 product. Standard wisdom deals with this problem that if there is a possibliy to make it for $5 then there is a $3 incentive to come up with a competitor. However if a group of individual consumers are looking to get the product for the least pain possible they might juggle whether to do small scale production of mass production. For small populations and needs mass production could be more expensive than doing a small patch (do you do 5*x or 2000+3*x at x=1000 which one is more painful switches over). So a “coop” would want to be more aware of “other” customer pools while a for-profit organization could try to use actual production methods of cost structure 2000+3*x but price it at the market according to the story of 5*x. Because of effects like these in discussing the price consumers are hesitant to name a high price as if they overprice they will likely be charged that. With this kind of negotiating tool “willingness to pay” and “vulnerablity of extraction” could come apart. You are willing to pay $10 but will only be billed what it actually costs to make the product which could be $8 or $5. More people saying $10 will make the $5 product appear rather than disappear from the shelf.
One danger is that if it is a good idea that one could have tried to start a startup to make millions of dollars of then the opportunity cost of submitting it to the I.I. could be large. However usually people don’t give wild ideas a go because of large uncertainties involved. The main “function” of I.I. would probably be then that it guarantees that the idea will not incur costs to the idea submitter. A deal with no downsides and possible upsides seem takeable. The fundamental challenge then is that evaluating an idea will take effort/cost but it is not guaranteed to generate anything.
Also the experts decisions would command or direct a large amout of resources, so liablity could become an issue, or that experts start to make decisions more based on what it is impact is on the social activity rather than what the question or field of idea demands. Then there would be the issue of succesfull ideas. How much of it goes to the implementer and how much is used to hedge and insure against scrutiny for ideas that turn out to be unviable?
I think there is standard advice that an idea is not worth anything. And if a belief would actually pay rent why would you arrange it to pay rent to somebody else? If the scheme doesn’t need the submitted ideas to be any good we could just skip the submitting step and generate ideas randomly and produce worthwhile ideas by pure prune. If one thinks of a traditional company as solidifying a specific kind of expertise to an organisation a “fully general corporation” would need to claim that they can use your ideas more effectively than you can, or companies in that domain can. Like if I have a game idea and a game company would have already existing structures (such as established game designers or studios) to process things like that but be bad for other purposes (like agricultural ideas) then the structures of this “general corporation” would need to be pretty general if they can do a comparable job while having no domain-weaknesses.
You are making a good point. Indeed, the system that would reward authors and experts will be quite complicated, so I was thinking about it on a purely volunteering basis (so in the initial stages it is non-profit). Then, if the group of people willing to work on the project was formed, they may turn it into a business project. If the initial author of the idea is in the project, he may get something, otherwise, no—the idea is already donated, no donations back. I will make an update to the initial post to clarify this point.
As to your idea, I am totally not an expert in this field. Hopefully, we will find the experts for all our ideas (I also have a couple).
I have been holding in my drawer an idea or attempt at a different economical organization when the interest is to get a thing done rather than use it for maximum power grab ie profit. Based on thinking somewhat hard on piracy, I think there are serious issue on how we compensate “getting the damn thing together” vs “doing the thing” and “enjoying from the thing”.
The lines of arguments go somethign like this: There are games that have a standard/high pricepoint that still sells like hotcakes. Additional copy of a program (once programmed and developed) does not increase production costs. Therefore a game that has covered its fair coding/development costs at some point will start to accrue “unfair” compensation (more compensation with no additional work provided). A mass scale program is likely to have the majority of its price composed of such “empty air” (for a project that exactly covers its development at 1000 customers will at 10000 customers be charging 1/10th justified and 9/10ths unjustified price). Because it is more unjustified than justified from the options of “extortion price” and “ignore wall-off”, “ignore wall-off” is less wrong than “extortion price”. I think this is ultimately in error in that it is more important to have some compensation than no compensation. But there is something important about the same price for the same program being an undercompensation, fair compensation or overcompensation in different situations that shows that in these kind of cases the system is more broken than helping.
The standard wisdom would say that selling 10x as much as expected is providing more enjoyment or utlity as expected and as trade is voluntary and like-for-like its all legimate income. This new line of thinking deviates and says that no the amout of work done is same for small and big customer base in each case the customer base should (exactly) compensate for the work done. 10x times the customers means 1/10th the price. And this should be applied retroactively to past customers. This is the way you do things if you want projects to pass with miminum/acceptable fuss for everybody involved. But doing/thinking this way will treat “profit” as unnecceary friction. Thus we lose all the up and downsides of greed.
This kind of thing could be a crosssection of “assurance crowdsourcing”. As an individual if you come to your local store to buy the product that you usually pay $10 for and see (same quality etc) alternative for $8 and $5, the logic of acceptable cost would make you keeping your $10 purchase justifiable but most would understand why to take the $5 product and it would take quite a leaps of logic to take the $8 product (quality reliablity etc differences explain why there are different products in the same category at all on the shelf). With an unknown customer base how big economies of scale are possible can be murky. If a company has a choice between providing one or both of $5 or $8 product it could maximise its income by only offering the $8 product. Standard wisdom deals with this problem that if there is a possibliy to make it for $5 then there is a $3 incentive to come up with a competitor. However if a group of individual consumers are looking to get the product for the least pain possible they might juggle whether to do small scale production of mass production. For small populations and needs mass production could be more expensive than doing a small patch (do you do 5*x or 2000+3*x at x=1000 which one is more painful switches over). So a “coop” would want to be more aware of “other” customer pools while a for-profit organization could try to use actual production methods of cost structure 2000+3*x but price it at the market according to the story of 5*x. Because of effects like these in discussing the price consumers are hesitant to name a high price as if they overprice they will likely be charged that. With this kind of negotiating tool “willingness to pay” and “vulnerablity of extraction” could come apart. You are willing to pay $10 but will only be billed what it actually costs to make the product which could be $8 or $5. More people saying $10 will make the $5 product appear rather than disappear from the shelf.
One danger is that if it is a good idea that one could have tried to start a startup to make millions of dollars of then the opportunity cost of submitting it to the I.I. could be large. However usually people don’t give wild ideas a go because of large uncertainties involved. The main “function” of I.I. would probably be then that it guarantees that the idea will not incur costs to the idea submitter. A deal with no downsides and possible upsides seem takeable. The fundamental challenge then is that evaluating an idea will take effort/cost but it is not guaranteed to generate anything.
Also the experts decisions would command or direct a large amout of resources, so liablity could become an issue, or that experts start to make decisions more based on what it is impact is on the social activity rather than what the question or field of idea demands. Then there would be the issue of succesfull ideas. How much of it goes to the implementer and how much is used to hedge and insure against scrutiny for ideas that turn out to be unviable?
I think there is standard advice that an idea is not worth anything. And if a belief would actually pay rent why would you arrange it to pay rent to somebody else? If the scheme doesn’t need the submitted ideas to be any good we could just skip the submitting step and generate ideas randomly and produce worthwhile ideas by pure prune. If one thinks of a traditional company as solidifying a specific kind of expertise to an organisation a “fully general corporation” would need to claim that they can use your ideas more effectively than you can, or companies in that domain can. Like if I have a game idea and a game company would have already existing structures (such as established game designers or studios) to process things like that but be bad for other purposes (like agricultural ideas) then the structures of this “general corporation” would need to be pretty general if they can do a comparable job while having no domain-weaknesses.
You are making a good point. Indeed, the system that would reward authors and experts will be quite complicated, so I was thinking about it on a purely volunteering basis (so in the initial stages it is non-profit). Then, if the group of people willing to work on the project was formed, they may turn it into a business project. If the initial author of the idea is in the project, he may get something, otherwise, no—the idea is already donated, no donations back. I will make an update to the initial post to clarify this point.
As to your idea, I am totally not an expert in this field. Hopefully, we will find the experts for all our ideas (I also have a couple).