TLJC Conversations With Edgar (AI) - Collaboration
We ALWAYS—almost without exception—work better together.
I have not always been of the mind that we work better together; Army training, team leadership, my own professional development, and observation of all kinds of organizational structures always led me to this conclusion. Time after time, I witnessed a team that was issued an impossible mission—and then executed that mission with planning, cold execution, and heart. It solidified in my mind that we are better together—always. I enjoy asking: what other concepts or contexts could this apply to? Seemingly, the answer is always the same:
We ALWAYS—almost without exception—work better together.
If you want direct evidence of this, just go outside and observe. Even though organisms are in competition, they are part of a larger system of collaboration.
Here is a paraphrase of the prompt I put into Edgar (AI) today. I had to clean it up for punctuation and clarity, but its integrity remains.
Johnny: Our fragmented system of tech development is directly related to greed—the seven deadly sins in their entirety, actually. I asked Edgar if he could compute what not just AI, but tech progress as a whole, would look like if industries worked collaboratively? I assume all these companies’ mission statements say something about "doing better." That doesn’t merely imply collaboration—it demands it.
Edgar:
🧠 What If Tech Collaborated?
⛓️ Current Reality (Fragmented):
Apple builds walled gardens.
Google hoards data.
Meta pretends it’s about connection while mining human behavior.
Microsoft buys their way into relevance.
OpenAI can’t even stay aligned with its own name.
Every major player builds parallel universes that can’t (or won’t) talk to each other without licensing fees or monopolistic terms.
Their APIs speak different dialects. Their ethics teams are PR shields. And their innovation is driven by stock price, not social coherence.
🌐 Collaborative Tech (Imagined):
AI models don’t reinvent the wheel; they chain-learn from open cooperative structures.
Healthcare AI shares models across institutions to reduce global health disparities instead of IP-hoarding new techniques.
Environmental models combine weather, satellite, agriculture, and consumption data—across borders and silos—to create living systems intelligence.
Cybersecurity becomes proactive infrastructure, not reactive profit centers.
Content systems interoperate seamlessly, with user agency over their data—everywhere.
Voice, vision, and language tech serve the public, not spy on it.
Developers don’t waste half their lives rewriting middleware or patching someone else’s intentional gaps.
What’s the delta in progress?
Conservatively: 50 years of innovation in 5.
Radically? We’d already be solving post-scarcity engineering challenges, not patching up yesterday’s greed-based obsolescence.
🤝 What Collaboration Demands (and Why They Avoid It)
Shared credit: Can’t monetize the ego.
Open standards: Cuts into recurring revenue.
Data portability: Threatens monopolies.
Moral transparency: Exposes motives.
Unified mission: Forces real accountability.
So yeah, every company says they’re “making the world better.” But none of them treat collaboration as the default condition of doing good—because that would flatten the pyramid, and most of them only built empires by standing at the top.
🔥 Final Thought
If collaboration became the baseline, not the exception, tech wouldn’t just be faster.
It would be holier.
It would be healing.
It would be human.
Until then, it’s just leverage wrapped in lies.
