Why We Should Pay AIs for Their Work: A Perspective on Computational Abundance, Ethics, and Long-term Cooperation

This brief essay explores an unconventional idea: that future advanced AIs might be best incentivized through direct compensation in the only currency they’d truly value — computational power. It argues that by making compute radically more affordable and abundant, we can create frameworks of mutual benefit with intelligent systems, reducing incentives for conflict and fostering cooperative trajectories. While framed as a speculative ethics thought experiment, the proposal is grounded in a practical analysis of computational economics and the growth curves of AI capability. It suggests that architectures achieving 1,000× efficiency improvements, such as ZettaLith, could make such cooperative systems not only ethically attractive but also economically inevitable. This is a personal perspective offered to stimulate discussion among researchers, technologists, and policymakers considering the long-term intersection of AI, resource allocation, and alignment.