The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Intellectual Property. If the primary value of products and services resides in their information, then the protection of information rights will be critical to supporting the business models that provide the capital to fund the creation of valuable information. The skirmishes today in the entertainment industry regarding illegal downloading of music and movies are a harbinger of what will be a profound struggle, once essentially everything of value is composed of information. Clearly, existing or new business models that allow for the creation of valuable intellectual property (IP) need to be protected, otherwise the supply of IP will itself be threatened. However, the pressure from the ease of copying information is a reality that is not going away, so industries will suffer if they do not keep their business models in line with public expectations. In music, for example, rather than provide leadership with new paradigms, the recording industry stuck rigidly (until just recently) with the idea of an expensive record album, a business model that has remained unchanged from the time my father was a young, struggling musician in the 1940s. The public will avoid wide-scale pirating of information services only if commercial prices are kept at what are perceived to be reasonable levels. The mobile-phone sector is a prime example of an industry that has not invited rampant piracy. The cost of cell-phone calls has fallen rapidly with improving technology. If the mobile-phone in...