I think if your desire is to innovate and seek long-term positive-sum improvements while creating win-wins along the way, then finding valid Kaldor-Hicks improvements should be really central to planning. In other words it’s important to do things in a way so that you can compensate the losers (e.g. recipients of negative externalities from whatever it is you’re doing) and turn them into winners as well. This could go for policy, business plans, etc.
If you can’t do it alone (e.g. a single AI company can’t compensate everyone in society for job displacement), then maybe you can still advocate for society-wide policies that enforce the compensation onto everyone. Notably I think that most companies (that want to do good) operating in competitive markets have to do this because they can’t really compensate the losers unilaterally without getting a disadvantage compared to competitors who don’t do the same. The only exception being that if you have such a big moat that you can just eat the competitive disadvantage that this causes you.
Also, I think maybe you could be extra generous when compensating in order to really make sure that everyone wins. For example, if you seize someone’s land to build a railway, maybe give than an extra 5% above fair market value to make this a beneficial change to everyone involved. (Note: 5% is in the ballpark of transaction costs, so not enough for people to start speculating and bidding the market value of the land up simply due to anticipating that you will need to buy it off them no matter the price.)
I think if your desire is to innovate and seek long-term positive-sum improvements while creating win-wins along the way, then finding valid Kaldor-Hicks improvements should be really central to planning. In other words it’s important to do things in a way so that you can compensate the losers (e.g. recipients of negative externalities from whatever it is you’re doing) and turn them into winners as well. This could go for policy, business plans, etc.
If you can’t do it alone (e.g. a single AI company can’t compensate everyone in society for job displacement), then maybe you can still advocate for society-wide policies that enforce the compensation onto everyone. Notably I think that most companies (that want to do good) operating in competitive markets have to do this because they can’t really compensate the losers unilaterally without getting a disadvantage compared to competitors who don’t do the same. The only exception being that if you have such a big moat that you can just eat the competitive disadvantage that this causes you.
Also, I think maybe you could be extra generous when compensating in order to really make sure that everyone wins. For example, if you seize someone’s land to build a railway, maybe give than an extra 5% above fair market value to make this a beneficial change to everyone involved. (Note: 5% is in the ballpark of transaction costs, so not enough for people to start speculating and bidding the market value of the land up simply due to anticipating that you will need to buy it off them no matter the price.)