Everything Won't Become Free at Once

Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the work of Philip K. Dick.

Basics like water and food could soar in cost even as intensely sophisticated gadgets, like automated nanorobotic heart surgeons, float about as dust in the air in case they are needed, sponsored by advertisers

Everything can’t become free at once, because the real world is messy. Software and networks are messy. And the sprawling miracle of information-animated technology rests on limited resources.

The illusion that everything is getting so cheap that it is practically free sets up the political and economic conditions for cartels exploiting whatever isn’t quite that way. When music is free, wireless bills get expensive, insanely so. You have to look at the whole system. No matter how petty a flaw might be in a utopia, that flaw is where the full fury of power seeking will be focused.

Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (2013-05-07)

• automation
• technology
• utopia