https://commongroundnotes.comA shared inquiry by Dorothy Chou, Sandro Gianella and Florian Maganza on technology and public benefit.enhttps://commongroundnotes.com/essays/the-rails-arent-public/https://commongroundnotes.com/essays/the-rails-arent-public/For the rest of my working life, I expect the defining breakthroughs in the world to come from the private sector. Capital, and the talent that follows it, are concentrated there, so public institutions (in the West) are unlikely to fund or build frontier science and technology at the scale and speed our global crises demand. The pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will deepen that pull, drawing even more of the world’s value formation inside companies, where a few people decide what’s worth building and market forces decide who gets it. Unless we build deliberate paths out, that value won’t reach the people who need it most, on terms that work for them.https://commongroundnotes.com/preface/https://commongroundnotes.com/preface/AI gives us reasons to be hopeful about better healthcare, new scientific discoveries and more effective public services. But technological breakthroughs won’t deliver that potential on their own. Our starting hypothesis is that progress depends on building the conditions for useful technology alongside the technology itself: evidence people can trust, credible demand, shared resources and institutions able to put it to work.