Monday 12 May 2014

People Struggle To Comprehend All Free

My explanation of the Hawking Fallacy was published via Singularity Weblog on 10 May 2014. Below is one of my comments in response to one person struggling to comprehend how everything will be free.

I think the decreasing price of aluminium, computers, phones, and data storage are good demonstrations of how technology reduces price in the direction of free. The many free services on the Web are also good examples. Legally people can watch free videos, listen to free music, download various free operating systems (Linux), download free word processing software (Libre Office), or free image manipulation software (GIMP).

Going back to the issue of aluminium. I stated in another comment: I love how Peter Diamandis (and Steve Kotler) used a simulation of aluminium for the book cover Abundance. Someone should give him, them, a Nobel prize for that. The point is in the 1840s aluminium was more expensive than gold or platinum but in the year 2014 I throw sheets of it away each week after cooking.

Peter Diamandis has stated a Massi warrior "today" [it was 2012 when he stated this] has more communication power than the US President did 25 years ago. Here is a quote via Forbes (note also CNN):

"In Africa today a Masai warrior on a cellphone has better mobile communications than the President did 25 years ago; if he’s on a smartphone with Google, he has ­access to more information than the President did just 15 years ago, with a feast of standard features: watch, stereo, camera, videocamera, voice recorder, GPS tracker, video teleconferencing equipment, a vast library of books, films, games, music. Just 20 years ago these same goods and services would have cost over $1 million."

On the issue of competition consider how we all compete to breathe air. How much does it cost to breathe air? There is a lot of air, it is very abundant. Air does remain scarce despite being one of the closest examples of something beyond scarcity on Earth. There is a very large amount of air to breathe, it is very abundant, it is all around you. Why are people not charged money for breathing? The issue with air is the large amount of means competition for it, the need for all of us to breathe, does not diminish the supply. Imagine is the air was full of nano-sized, bacteria-sized, computers. How much would those computers cost?

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