The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

The true value of products, then, would lie in the information they contain—in essence, all the innovation that has gone into them, from creative ideas to lines of software code that control their manufacture. This has already taken place for goods that can be digitized. Think of e-books. When books were first invented, they had to be copied by hand, so labor was a massive component of their value. With the advent of the printing press, physical materials like paper, binding, and ink took on the dominant share of the price. But with e-books, the costs of energy and computation to copy, store, and transmit a book are effectively zero. What you’re paying for is creative assembly of information into something worth reading (and often some ancillary factors, like marketing). One way to see this difference for yourself is by browsing Amazon for blank journals and then browsing for hardcover novels with roughly similar bindings. If you look only at the prices, you won’t be immediately and consistently able to tell which are which. On the other hand, e-book novels are usually priced at several dollars, while the idea of paying any money at all for a blank e-book is laughable. This is what it means for a product’s value to be entirely information.