Your Data Their Wealth: The Price of Human Input to the Al Economy

AI did not appear from nowhere. It was built from human language, human behavior, human culture, human correction, and human life made legible to machines.

In Your Data, Their Wealth, James Felton Keith argues that the modern economy has been fundamentally misdescribed. We still talk as though value comes mainly from labor, capital, and innovation in their familiar forms. But the age of AI has exposed something larger: ordinary people are generating economically useful informational value every day, and firms are capturing that value under ownership terms that leave the public with little claim on the upside.

This is not just a book about privacy or technology. It is a book about political economy. It asks what happens when human beings become part of the productive base of intelligent systems while remaining structurally excluded from ownership of the gains. It challenges the language of the “user,” traces how law and economics helped normalize this arrangement, and argues for a new framework of claim, bargaining, and stakeholdership in the AI economy.

Provocative, timely, and structurally ambitious, this book insists on a simple truth: if the machine is built from us, the future cannot belong only to those who own the machine.