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# Who owns the upside?
- URL: https://who-owns-the-upside.ghost.io/who-owns-the-upside/
- Published: 2026-08-04T23:58:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-04T23:58:10.000Z
- Author: Julia Ford

This morning I started my day by googling- because yes, I still use Google as a search engine- if there were any studies on AI making people dumber.

Whether it's my daily use of AI as a central part of my professional workflows, my recent entry into the year of 40, holdover from too much extracurricular activity when I was a teenager, or just the fog of being a human during these increasingly dangerous, brain bending times where it feels like the fabric of community and humanity is eroding, I just feel less sharp and more foggy.

Then I had a meeting, and our Chief Partnerships Officer mentioned that her husband was at a quantum computing conference in Chicago. "What the heck is quantum?" I thought. So I googled that too.

And because I'd like to retrain, or at least put through some serious fitness tests, the part of my brain that used to confidently hold onto new information, I'm going to tell you what I learned about quantum computing and AI using just my brain alone. I know, *wayback playback, an ode to 2023, and super novel right?!* 

Quantum computing has been a theoretical concept for decades, and only more recently has it started moving into practical application. Like algebra, geometry, trigonometry, or quantum mechanics itself, the human ability to create, interrogate, pontificate, and ultimately extrapolate theory into practice is well beyond me. That said, I can understand what it's trying to do.

My very simplified takeaway is that quantum computing isn't here to replace our existing computers. It's another layer. A different kind of computational power that's uniquely good at solving incredibly complex problems that would take traditional computers an impractical amount of time to solve. It has implications for everything from communications and pharmaceuticals to weather modeling, disaster prediction, optimization, and yes, AI. Not because quantum replaces AI, but because it has the potential to make some of the underlying computational work dramatically more powerful.

Which got me thinking.

If we are marching, as tech workers, company owners, entrepreneurs, and innovators, toward increasingly powerful computers that power increasingly powerful computers, all in pursuit of making our everyday computers better, making us more efficient, helping us live longer, stay healthier, predict disasters sooner, and move from Point A to Point B faster... how are we going to balance that with not having enough land, water, or clean air? These technologies require enormous amounts of energy, land, water, and infrastructure. 

We celebrate every leap forward in computational capability, and we should. There is so much promise here. But every leap has a physical footprint, one that, until recently, has been surprisingly easy to ignore because it mostly lives somewhere else, inside data centers and power grids that most of us never think about. *Just wait til my next post on data centers and local opposition to them being built being the single bipartisan, fully unifying issue for voters in the near future. Stay tuned.* 

I spent last weekend rafting the Colorado River, which continues to experience historic lows in water volume and flow. We got off the river to news of the massive fires in Spokane and spreading fires in Oregon. Then today, post the Quantum mic drop meeting, I had a Board of Supervisors live streamed meeting for a county I work with a lot playing in the background. They were discussing a permanent business interruption fund to better and more efficiently respond to the constant nature of disasters impacting their communities.

One supervisor said, "It's clear that there will never not be a disaster that we need to be ready to mobilize and respond to quickly." There will never not be a disaster. I work in disaster recovery, so I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to build better systems to help people after the worst day of their lives. I believe deeply in that work. Communities deserve infrastructure that can respond quickly, equitably, and at scale.

But right now I find myself wondering whether we've quietly accepted something much bigger. We've become remarkably good at building systems to respond. I'm not sure we're asking enough questions about what it would look like to build systems that not only mitigate, but prevent. Because when I zoom out, I can't shake the feeling that we're creating a circular economy. We build technologies that require enormous natural resources. Those technologies create extraordinary wealth, but that wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a remarkably small number of people. At the same time, the environmental pressures associated with our relentless pursuit of growth contribute to more frequent and more severe disasters. We then build increasingly sophisticated systems, programs, funding streams, and technologies to help people recover from those disasters, often financed by the very fortunes generated during that same cycle.

Round and round we go. It reminds me less of frogs in boiling water than of an economy that has become extraordinarily effective at responding to the consequences of its own momentum. So how do we break that cycle? How do we move beyond mitigation? How do we stop accepting perpetual response as the inevitable endpoint and instead ask what it would take to fundamentally change the equation?

I don't think the answer is slowing down innovation. I certainly don't think it's abandoning AI or quantum computing. If anything, I think these technologies have the potential to solve problems we've never before been able to solve. I think the harder question is: who owns the upside?

Right now we seem to be on a path where the benefits are becoming increasingly concentrated while the costs are becoming increasingly shared. The computational power, the productivity gains, the market value, the equity appreciation, those accrue to a relatively small group of founders, investors, and corporations. The water consumption, the energy demand, the environmental impacts, and ultimately the costs of responding to climate-fueled disasters are distributed across everyone else. 

What if the technologies that fundamentally reshape society also fundamentally reshape who benefits from them? Senator Bernie Sanders' recently introduced legislation that would require the largest AI companies to share a significant portion of their ownership with the American public. 

What if we fought for broader ownership of the technologies that are redefining our economy? What if the wealth they generate wasn't simply another mechanism for concentrating capital, but a mechanism for strengthening the commons? For investing in resilient infrastructure, safeguarding our air and water, restoring our lands, and ensuring that the prosperity created by AI, quantum computing, and whatever comes next is shared by the people whose lives will inevitably be shaped by it.

My next line of thinking and probable internet rabbit hole isn’t about what Quantum technology is and can do, instead it’s, who gets to financially profit from it? And perhaps even more importantly, who gets to decide where we're going and how it’s applied?