- Suppose you had a black box that could attribute a new idea to a bundle of old ideas, and identify the novel contribution.
- Can we use this to set up a system where authors get paid based on anything that ever depends on their novel contribution?
- I'm an author. I've taken some other people's ideas, mixed them together, and come up with something new.
- I announce to the world that I have had a new idea. I can't publish the idea openly, because then no-one'd pay me for it! Instead I publish some tags describing the idea so that potential purchasers can come talk to me.
- A potential purchaser shows up. They send me a gogol* of themselves, a little AI approximation of them.
- I put the purchaser's gogol in a sandbox with my idea. It evaluates the idea and proposes a price. The sandbox is then destroyed.
- If I'm happy with the price, I send the purchaser the idea and they send me the cash. This transaction is public.