The possibility of new kinds of personal assistants adds to the arsenal of answers to the question "What would people do?" In a world of thorough and honest accounting, whole new large classes of service professions should naturally pop up.

The price of computation in a humanistic information economy ought never to be set exclusively by rote, but always be determined to a significant degree by market negotiation. We will never know for sure in advance how valuable a particular datum might turn out to be. Each use of data will determine a fresh valuation of it in context.

There will be vastly more commercial events than in the world we are used to. Every time code runs, a lot of people will be paid a tiny bit each. There is no such thing as calculation without data. Therefore, if the provenance of the data has been preserved, then calculations can generally be expanded to yield additional results about who should get credit for making them possible.

The principle would apply to code as well as data. Computer code these days tends to be either proprietary or open-source. A third option would come into being in the future proposed here, and perhaps into ubiquity. Code would remember the people who coded each line, and those people would be sent nanopayments as part of code execution. A programmer who writes code everyone uses will be able to benefit directly, instead of having to leverage code into a Siren Server scheme. The Google guys would have gotten rich from the search code without having to create the private spying agency. At the same time, an open community of programmers would have been able to contribute incrementally, without any more barriers than are found in today's open-source community.

You meet a future spouse on an online dating service. The algorithms that implement that service take note of your marriage. As the years go by, and you're still together, the algorithms increasingly apply what seemed to be the correlations between you and your spouse to matching other prospective couples. When some of them also get married, it is automatically calculated that the correlations from your case were particularly relevant to the recommendations. You get extra nanopayments as a result.

[...] Once in a risk pool, you'd have a much better shot at attracting investors than as individuals. Maybe then you could issue a bond to the newspaper in order to read it.

I wish I didn't have to use mortgages as a point of reference since as I'm writing this, the world is still suffering from financial troubles that radiated from stupidly securitized mortgages. Mortgages were a reliable, clean mechanism for many years. What happened in the early 21st century was exceptional, and caused by the poor use of digital networks. It's exactly the kind of failure all these ideas are intended to prevent.

Trying to create an overly flattened society inevitably and unintentionally creates new centers of power. A revolution might dethrone the old rich, but only at the expense of empaneling an unchallenged communist party, along with a politburo and legions of clever schemers and ass kissers who turn into a new privileged class. The right way to deal with concentrations of power is not to try to vaporize them, but to balance them.

It's worse than foolish to imagine that technologists will be able to fix the world if economists and politics have gone insane. We can't function alone. What we do is empower people. The world needs to be approximately sane for us to make any positive difference.

If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start, and would have been paid for by the investor creating the risk. Benefits would have been shared with those who were creating the fundamental value: homeowners who promised to pay the mortgages. Economic symmetry would have prevented investors from taking risks on other people's uninformed behavior, using yet other people's money.

This is basically a way of saying that the better your computer skills are, the more right you have to be a genuine individual in control of your own digital life. But we technologists ought to be serving mankind, not turning ourselves into a privileged class.