You trained the AI. Big Tech got paid

On January 24, 1956, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company was the largest private company in the world. Its revenues amounted to almost 2% of the U.S. gross domestic product. It employed 746,000 people. It owned Bell Labs, the fabled research division that had already produced the transistor, the solar cell, information theory, and radio astronomy, while also laying the first transatlantic telephone cable. In the following decades, it would add UNIX, modern cellular telephony, the CCD…