Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

A core idea is borrowed from the open-source software movement: if software is free to copy, then everyone can use as much of it as they need and issues of ownership and property become moot.*1 According to the law of supply and demand, cost reflects scarcity, so if supply is essentially unlimited, the price becomes negligible. In this spirit, all intellectual property rights are abolished: there are no patents, copyrights or trademarked designs—people simply share their good ideas, and everyone is free to use them. Thanks to advanced robotics, this same no-property idea applies not only to information products such as software, books, movies and designs, but also to material products such as houses, cars, clothing and computers. All these products are simply atoms rearranged in particular ways, and there’s no shortage of atoms, so whenever a person wants a particular product, a network of robots will use one of the available open-source designs to build it for them for free. Care is taken to use easily recyclable materials, so that whenever someone gets tired of an object they’ve used, robots can rearrange its atoms into something someone else wants. In this way, all resources are recycled, so none are permanently destroyed.