> Let me rephrase my question: How do you suggest a profit driven company can justify employing people to create new knowledge if that knowledge and all its derivatives and representations are immediately available to everyone else without any restrictions?

I have two arguments :

1) The process of creating new knowledge alone won't be valuable once we have enough processing power to evaluate scenarii faster than a coordinated human effort. With vulgar words : AI will make the creation of knowledge a commodity, and my personal opinion is that it will happen before the next human generation, unless some people actively work against that idea to make sure it doesn't happen (because they try to defend previous investments for example.)

2) Knowledge alone is not enough to accomplish or execute anything in the real world. Actually building car requires factories, materials and logistics. Of course, if we have an AI solving all sort of problems, we may ask it to find an efficient way to build car. If we continue the reasoning, we enter a world where the meaning of an human life is completely different than today, with completely different forces acting on it. We may don't even need the cars anymore.

Edit : I mean, the argument of "it gives job to people" won't stand forever. We will have to seriously re-think the system at some point.