Somewhat original ideas.

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James S. Albus, Path to a Better World (2011), a plan for "People's Capitalism" in which every citizen receives credit for investment in capital assets, generating income from ownership rather than labor. Albus, an engineer and robotics pioneer at NIST, argued that automation need not produce mass poverty if the economic surplus is distributed intelligently. I popularized the sovereign wealth fund variant, the Alaska model applied nationally, in philosopher-level discussions starting around 2013, years before universal basic income entered mainstream political discourse.

"There would also be a rising floor at the bottom that would prevent anyone from sinking into poverty."

James S. Albus, Path to a Better World

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Donna Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) introduced the cyborg as a feminist and philosophical concept. The transhumanist movement, including Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), extended it into a practical framework for human enhancement. I began using the specific term "cyborgization" in 2015 to describe the process, not the state, of becoming cyborg, framing it as something that is happening to everyone whether they choose it or not, and arguing that it should be made conscious and deliberate.

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Vannevar Bush's As We May Think (1945) proposed the memex, a device for storing and retrieving all of an individual's books, records, and communications, with associative links between them. The memex is the ancestor of every decision support and knowledge retrieval system that followed. I conceptualized "Lucy" around 2015–2016 as a decision support system and early LLM-like idea, before LLMs existed. The wisdom engine was its core: not a search engine for information, but a search engine for better decisions. The problem it solved was involuntary ignorance, the gap between what a person needs to know to decide well and what they can reasonably know. Lucy was a prototype for what we now see in modern AI assistants, but its role was to empower each citizen, not unlike what Sam Altman later described as "building a brain for the world."

"The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow... he sets a reproducer in action, scans the possible items, and runs off one. He finds the pertinent one, sets the finder in action, and projects it."

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (1945)

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Vitalik Buterin's Bootstrapping a Decentralized Autonomous Corporation (2013) introduced the DAC concept on Ethereum. Daniel Larimer (BitShares) independently developed the DAC as a profit-distributing decentralized entity. The Storj team explored autonomous agents that pay for their own infrastructure. I developed my own variant, the autopoietic DAC, borrowing the concept of autopoiesis (self-creation) from biology and applying it to DACs. The idea: a DAC that doesn't just run autonomously but grows itself from a seed instruction set, using human participation as sunlight and crowdfunding as water. I wrote about this on the DarkAI blog in 2014 and on Steemit. I now call it simply an AI DAC. The repository and the original post are still online.

"An autopoietic DAC is a DAC which is self creating, self designing, and self improving. This kind of DAC is almost like an artificial lifeform because it is given a set of instructions to act as its DNA, those instructions allow the DAC to evolve over time."

DarkAI Blog, "Autopoietic DACs" (January 2014)