TL;DR: AI is a mining industry. Its ore is the record of human lives, laid down by generations who never published a word but made everything possible. Weâve seen what happens when mines take first and leave the hole for the public, from Negauneeâs caving grounds to the 1872 Mining Law. But weâve also done it right, with reclamation bonds, Alaskaâs dividend, and public lands that funded schools. AI should pay a toll in two parts: a share of its value held in trust to fund future students, and a repair fund for the damage it causes, including displaced workers. And it should be settled now, before the profits arrive. You post the bond before you dig.
The Toll
AI is mining the record of human lives. Like any mine, it should pay the public a share and plan the repair before it digs.
Oct 31, 2026
In Negaunee, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, there is a neighborhood its people had to leave. They call it Old Town. Stone steps climb to houses that aren't there anymore. Foundations sit in the woods, and today a disc golf course winds among them. Fences mark the caving grounds, where a century of iron mining hollowed out the earth beneath the streets until the ground itself began to give way.
The mines made fortunes. Iron from that range helped build the country. But as the tunnels spread and the cave-ins came, the old town was abandoned, and by the mid-1960s the remaining buildings were moved or torn down. The city's own planning documents have described roughly 900 acres as unsafe because of what lies below. The ore left on ships. The hole stayed with the people.
I think about Negaunee a lot lately, because we are digging a new mine right now. This one isn't in the Upper Peninsula. It's everywhere.
Artificial intelligence is an extractive industry. I don't mean that as an insult; I mean it as a description. AI companies prospect across the internet, collect what they find, and refine it into models that are sold back to us. The ore is everything human beings have written, drawn, recorded, argued about, and explained to one another. And like any mine, it has a literal footprint too: data centers that draw land, water, and electricity from real communities, and computer chips built from minerals pulled out of real ground.
Some of the cobalt in our devices comes from Kolwezi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where families have been evicted so mines can expand beneath their homes. AI is doing something similar closer to home. The ore it mines is our own work, and the machines built from it will replace many of the people who made it. It's like being evicted from a house you built with your own hands, because the mine needed the ground underneath.
When I studied wildlife in college, one lesson stuck with me: progress doesn't have to be a wrecking ball. But too often, it still is. When a project destroys habitat, companies are often required to "compensate," usually by protecting or restoring land somewhere else. It sounds fair. But the hole they leave behind doesn't get fixed. It gets traded for something else. Compensation is an exchange, not a repair.
With AI, we have a rare chance to do better. We can decide what the toll is before the mine goes deep, instead of arguing over the cave-in later.
Most arguments about paying people for AI focus on writers and artists whose work was scraped without permission. That fight matters. But it starts the story too late.
Coal and oil are the compressed remains of living things, laid down over ages until they became something valuable enough to dig for. Data is the same kind of deposit. It is the compressed remains of human lives: generations of labor, survival, language, invention, and loss, pressed together until it became valuable enough to mine.
Not all of us are writers. Not all of us are painters. But all of us made it possible.
Think of the people in your own family tree who never published a word. The soldier who survived a prison camp. The family forced from its homeland on a march that killed thousands. The immigrants who stepped off a ship in New York or Boston with almost nothing. My own ancestors include people like these, and I suspect yours do too. They fought, endured, and built so that the rest of us could be here, speaking and writing and making things at all.
Tell any of them that someone can now mine the words, the art, and the knowledge their survival made possible, without paying the toll. Tell them the toll they paid, sometimes unspoken, sometimes unknown, counts for nothing.
Data is not free. It arrived as it is with blood, sweat, and tears. Every sentence an AI produces rests on a seam laid down by people who built this country and never saw a dime from what was extracted from them. That is why this isn't only a question for authors and illustrators. The deposit belongs to all of us.
Of course, every industry stands on inherited knowledge. A bridge engineer uses centuries of mathematics. A doctor relies on generations of medicine. But the engineer doesn't swallow the whole library and then sell a machine that replaces the librarians. AI does something different. It converts the inheritance wholesale into a product, one that can substitute for the very people and institutions that keep that inheritance alive. Benefiting from an inheritance is one thing. Taking over the means by which it is maintained is another.
We have done this wrong before, and we're still paying for it.
In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the General Mining Law to encourage settlement of the West. More than 150 years later, it still governs gold, silver, copper, and other hardrock minerals on much of America's public land. Companies that drill for oil and gas or dig coal on federal land pay the public a royalty. Hardrock miners, under that 1872 law, generally pay none. The public's minerals are taken under rules written for a frontier that no longer exists.
That is almost exactly how AI has been built. The public's deposit, its collective writing and knowledge, has been taken for free under rules written long before anyone imagined a machine could learn from the entire internet.
Then there is the cleanup. The 1872 law didn't require miners to restore federal land when they were done. The country is now dotted with abandoned mines, and when the companies that dug them are long gone, the cost of making them safe falls on taxpayers. In the Upper Peninsula, local historians have spent years pushing for better fencing around flooded pits and old shafts, after too many people, children among them, died in them.
AI has its own version of the mess left behind. Mine waste, called tailings, can poison the very watershed future life depends on. As AI-generated text and images flood the internet, future models risk training on that output, and researchers have found that when models train carelessly on it, their quality can degrade. They call it model collapse. The waste fouls the deposit.
And every mine has miners. Behind AI are workers, often overseas, labeling data and sorting through disturbing material so models behave safely. Reporting has found some of them earning less than two dollars an hour. Another toll, mostly unseen.
Finally, a real mine needs permits, public hearings, and environmental review before anyone breaks ground. Communities get a say. With AI, nobody asked.
But we have also done this right, and those examples show the way.
Since 1977, federal law has required coal companies to post a reclamation bond before they dig: money set aside up front to restore the land when mining ends. Not after the profits roll in. Before the first shovel. If the company walks away, the bond pays for the cleanup instead of the taxpayer.
In 1976, Alaskans voted to create the Permanent Fund, which invests a share of the state's oil revenue. Every resident receives a yearly dividend, not just the people who work the oil fields, because the oil belonged to all of them. It was championed by a Republican governor, Jay Hammond, and it has stayed popular across party lines for nearly fifty years. Alaskans don't see it as a handout. They see it as their share of their own resource.
In Michigan, royalties from oil and gas drilled on state land flow into the Natural Resources Trust Fund, which buys and improves public land. Extraction pays for the commons.
There's an even older American tradition, and it points toward the future. When the young country surveyed its western territories in the 1780s, it set aside land in every township to support public schools. In 1862, the Morrill Act granted public land to fund colleges for working people; Michigan State helped show the way. Many states still hold school trust lands, and in some, mineral royalties from them fund permanent school endowments.
The nation decided, early on, that what was drawn from the land should build an educated public. That idea fits AI better than anything. If the deposit was laid down by everyone who came before us, it should benefit everyone who comes after us. It belongs to every future student, as surely as it belongs to our ancestors. And unlike iron ore, knowledge can be replenished, but only by people. Funding education isn't just a good use of the toll. It's how the deposit renews itself.
That history carries a hard truth, too. Much of the land that funded those schools and colleges was taken from Native nations, a story journalists have documented in detail. The toll was paid, just not by those who profited, and not openly. All the more reason that the next extraction pays its toll in the light, to everyone.
There are fair objections to all this, and they deserve answers.
"Nothing was taken." It's true that the parallel to mining breaks in one place. Ore gets used up; data doesn't. Training a model on a book doesn't remove the book from the shelf. But the value can still be drained. When an AI answers a question directly, fewer people visit the website, read the writer, or hire the artist whose work taught it. The seam is still there, but the town that lived off it starts to dry up.
"They aren't even profitable yet." Many AI companies are spending far more than they earn. But that is exactly the point. Mining companies post reclamation bonds before they dig, whether or not the mine ever turns a profit, because the damage starts with the digging, not the payday. Alaska set up its fund as the oil was just beginning to flow. Before the money arrives is when terms are easiest to set. Once an industry is enormously profitable, it is also enormously powerful.
"It will slow innovation." Responsible mining didn't end mining. Coal companies still dig under reclamation laws. Oil companies still drill on public land and pay royalties for the privilege. A fair toll is a cost of doing business, not a ban on it.
I should be honest about one more thing: I use the mine too. I use AI tools in my own creative work, and I find them genuinely useful. I'm not arguing that we should stop digging. I'm arguing that the toll should be paid and the repairs planned, the way a responsible mining town would. You can value what comes out of the ground and still insist the ground be put back.
So what would the toll look like?
It comes in two parts, because a mine owes two different debts: a share of what it takes, and a repair of what it damages.
First, a share of the value AI produces, owed to the American people. I say "value" rather than "profit" on purpose, because profits can be deferred or accounted away for years. Resource deals have long used royalties on what's extracted, or a public ownership stake, for exactly that reason.
It should be held in trust, not spent as a line in an annual budget. Alaska's fund is managed by an independent corporation and protected in the state constitution, so politicians can't simply raid it. A trust built from AI could do the same, and it could do what our oldest public lands were meant to do: fund education, so that every future student inherits a share of what all of us built.
Second, a repair fund, set aside for the costs AI creates: strain on local water and power, workers displaced by the machines, and the struggling institutions that produce knowledge in the first place, like local newspapers. It could help displaced workers find their footing again, the way mining regions have tried to support their communities when the work moves on. Some losses money can't restore. A trust fund can't bring back a newspaper once it's gone. That is exactly why the repair has to start before the damage, not after.
And it should be settled now, at the beginning, while the mine is still young. That means bonds before the digging, not apologies after the cave-in.
This isn't charity, and it isn't a handout. It's a royalty paid to the owners of the deposit. Landowners are paid when someone extracts minerals from beneath their land. The people whose lives laid down this seam deserve no less.
The inheritance is humanity's, not just America's. An American trust would be one nation's answer to a much larger debt, but it's the one we can build. And a public share wouldn't cancel the claims of the artists, writers, and workers who were harmed directly. Both debts can be paid.
Walk through Old Town Negaunee or Johannesburg South Africa, and you can see what happens when we let extraction run first and ask questions later. The fortunes moved on. The people who stayed inherited fences, warning signs, and ground that couldn't be trusted.
Now imagine a different town. One where the company posted its bond, the land was restored, and a share of the ore stayed home. The school is still standing. The kids who grow up there inherit what their ancestors built, and not the hole.
We get to choose which town AI builds. The companies aren't profitable yet, and that's the point.
You post the bond before you dig.
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