Knowledge is not an ordinary commodity. It is not suitable to be treated as private property. Its holders do not lose it when they share it; the more widely it is disseminated, the richer society becomes. It demands to be treated as a common good and to be viewed from the outset as a result of collective societal effort. However, if knowledge is to function as fixed capital and serve the extraction of surplus value—as capitalism desires—it must be a patented monopoly property that generates monopoly rents for its owner. Knowledge capitalism thus privatizes common goods such as the genomes of plants, animals, and humans, and seeks to appropriate cultural common goods to exploit them as cultural capital, as "human capital." In this logic lies the massive promotion of artificial intelligence and artificial life: Their goal is not a knowledge society, but a post-human civilization. According to André Gorz, only when science and economics align with socio-political, ecological, and cultural goals, rather than the imperative of capital valorization, can we speak of a knowledge society in a forward-looking sense. There is still a small but growing number of advocates for this.