A Context Bill of Rights for the Future

A Context Bill of Rights for the Future

A future Context Bill of Rights should establish a workable constitutional settlement between personal agency, enterprise continuity, collective production, and third-party rights. It must operate at entry, during routine training, when a new purpose is proposed, when a model may replace people, and when a worker exits; a promise that applies only after a dispute is too late.

Individuals should receive at least six operational protections:

• Cognitive continuity: continued access to a personal core and to a professional-capability representation that does not disclose protected material.
• Semantic portability: export not merely of a PDF, but of structure, provenance, version history, schema, and a callable skill representation, subject to sanitization against secrecy and reconstruction risks.
• Background-asset registration: the ability to register a pre-existing knowledge base, skill, model, and public method when entering employment so a broad assignment does not silently absorb them.
• Contribution attestation: verifiable proof of projects, roles, judgments, and results that can travel without copying the company's raw evidence.
• Digital-double control: absent independent, revocable consent, a company should not keep acting externally under a worker's name, voice, style, or substantive judgment persona. On exit the options should include deletion, depersonalization, a buyout, or a continuing paid license.
• Audit, correction, and appeal: the ability to know which context is captured, trained, inferred, and used for which decisions, and to challenge errors, new purposes, or automated decisions.

Companies also need defined rights: control of original business records, trade secrets, credentials, proprietary implementations, and company bindings; rights to modify and continue operating express work products; retention and audit powers needed for security, regulation, litigation holds, customer contracts, and continuity; and an explicit, purpose-limited, non-exclusive license to call a personal skill core during employment. The right to train AI on a worker's context should require authorization separate from the ordinary employment agreement rather than being buried in an unlimited assignment clause.

For jointly produced context, major training, new purposes, personnel substitution, and revenue allocation should involve a worker council, union, knowledge guild, or context data trust. A personalized model used after employment should be deleted, depersonalized, bought out, or subject to a continuing royalty. Team context should generate a collective revenue pool rather than being deemed valueless by default or settled token by token.

The portable compiler described below is a normative institutional proposal, not a capability or legal entitlement that current law generally guarantees. Technically, it would implement the boundary as follows:

personal_skill_core
        -> controlled projection
company_context + company_binding
        -> sanitization, audit, approval
portable_skill_core + portable_attestation

The principle is that an individual's capability may enter the company boundary and operate there, while the company's raw context does not automatically flow back into the individual's knowledge base. At exit, a controlled compiler removes names, facts, internal numbers, customer references, thresholds, schemas, credentials, and tool bindings that belong inside the company domain. It then tests the remaining representation for reconstruction risk and produces a portable general skill plus an attestation of contribution. Every derivative should retain source labels, provenance, license, purpose, sensitivity, and re-export rules. The process needs logs, review, approval, and a channel for challenge; "sanitized" cannot be a label applied by either side without evidence.

If context truly contributes 99% of productive value, compensation should not be limited to a one-time wage. A more complete model can contain five parts:

1. A wage for current labor: payment for present time, attention, execution, and responsibility.
2. A background-context license fee: a purpose- and duration-specific license when the company calls context that the worker brought into the job or continued to develop independently.
3. A digital-double buyout or royalty: separate consent, pricing, and audit when a highly personalized judgment model remains in use after the worker leaves.
4. A pooled context dividend: a collective dividend, profit share, or equity interest for inseparable context produced by a team rather than a default assumption that its contribution is worth zero.
5. A return on company investment: a legitimate return for capital, data, organizational coordination, brand, risk, and legal responsibility rather than treating either side's contribution as a free raw material.

Tracking the marginal contribution of every token is usually infeasible and may create a false precision that benefits the party controlling the meter. A more realistic approach is to define categories, purposes, duration, and revenue-sharing rules in advance; place team-created value into a collective pool; and use independent audits to verify which models, data classes, and capabilities are actually being used.

This proposal distinguishes current law from new normative rights. The cognitive continuity right, a special digital-double right, and a context dividend are institutional proposals, not rights that are already generally enacted. Their justification rests on the possibility that context will become both an extension of the person and the principal productive asset through which labor participates in an AI economy.

The settlement can be stated in one sentence:

A person should be able to carry away a functionally equivalent self, but not the company’s factual world. A company may retain its secrets and work product, but it should not turn a worker’s future professional identity into a permanent, uncompensated corporate asset.

Principal sources

• Andy Clark and David Chalmers, The Extended Mind
• Margaret Jane Radin, Property and Personhood
• Barth, Datta, Mitchell, and Nissenbaum, Privacy and Contextual Integrity
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Republicanism
• 17 U.S.C. Section 201, Ownership of Copyright
• 17 U.S.C. Section 102, Subject Matter of Copyright
• 18 U.S.C. Section 1839, Definitions for Trade-Secret Law
• Morlife, Inc. v. Perry
• EU Trade Secrets Directive 2016/943
• California Labor Code Section 2870
• European Data Protection Board, Guidelines on the Right to Data Portability
• International Labour Organization, Navigating Workers' Data Rights in the Digital Age
• EU Platform Work Directive 2024/2831
• Gary Becker, Investment in Human Capital
• Grossman and Hart, The Costs and Benefits of Ownership
• Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension
• Harvard Business School Working Paper 26-063, Labor as Capital: AI and the Ownership of Expertise
• Harvard Business School Working Paper 26-064, Knowledge Guilds

Research boundaries

• The ASI timetable, the relative capacities of humans and AI, and the 99% figure are stipulated assumptions for a thought experiment. They are not facts established by this essay.
• The legal discussion is structural analysis, not legal advice for any particular contract, jurisdiction, person, or dispute.
• The terms "cognitive continuity right," "digital-double right," "portable compiler," and "context dividend" name normative institutional proposals. They are not legal rights that currently exist in general form.
• The questions that most need empirical testing are whether context's marginal value can be measured, which forms of portability avoid leakage, the actual replacement effect of personalized models, and the transaction costs of collective governance.