imo there are actually too few answers for what a better path would even look like.
hard to move forward when you don't know where you want to go. answers in the negative are insufficient, as are those that offer little more than nostalgia.
We could use another Roosevelt.
It's just not a well thought out comment. If we focus on the "better path forward", the entrance to which is only unlocked by the realisation that big techs achievements (and thus, profits) belong to humanity collectively... After we reach this enlightened state, what does op believe the first couple of things a traveller on this path is likely to encounter (beyond Big Techs money, which incidentally we take loads of already in the form of taxes, just maybe not enough)?
First you have tech's ability to scale. The ability to scale also has it creep new changes/behaviors into every aspect of our lives faster than any 'engine for change' could previous.
Tech also inherits, so you can treat it as legos using, what are we at, definitely tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of human years of work, of building blocks to build on top of. Imagine if you started every house with a hundred thousand human years of labor already completed instantly. No other domain in human history accumulates tens of millions of skilled human years annually and allows so much of that work to stack, copy, and propagate at relatively low cost.
And tech's speed of iteration is insane. You can try something, measure it, change it, and redeploy in hours. Unprecedented experimentation on a mass scale leading to quicker evolution.
It's so disingenuous to have tech valuations as high as they are based on these differentiations but at the same time say 'tech is just like everything from the past and must not be treated differently, and it must be assumed outcomes from it are just like historical outcomes'. No it is a completely different beast, and the differences are becoming more pronounced as the above 10Xs over and over.
- big tech should pay for the data they extract and sell back to us
- startups should stop forcing ai features that no one wants down our throats
- the vanguard of ai should be open and accessible to all not locked in the cloud behind paywalls