Gordon Ritter: workers need a "cognitive passport" for AI traces

Ritter frames the current moment as a repeat of the 1920s, when American broadcasters staked out radio frequencies faster than the law could follow. By the time Congress passed the Radio Act of 1927, control had already solidified, and the Communications Act of 1934 ratified it. His point is that the rules governing the AI economy are likewise being written by default, and that the window to shape them will not stay open long.

The resource at stake this time, he argues, is not airwaves but human intelligence — how people reason, decide and create. He points to RedCompass Labs, which trains its Payment Expert Agent using Cognitive Task Analysis to turn thousands of hours of expert work into datasets. He distinguishes routine operations, which can stay transparent by default, from the outliers — the rep who ignores the script and closes the deal anyway, the engineer's fix not in any runbook — where he says sovereignty claims belong.

Ritter also notes a McKinsey finding that 89% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, while only 44% have started to scale it. He calls that gap exactly the window where a genuine-choice principle has the most impact, and he invites founders, researchers, legal scholars and labor voices to stress-test the framework, saying he expects to be wrong about parts of it.