“So the larger truth here is that machines want information to be free. But of course, it wasn’t just printing and information. The industrial revolution was about powered machines enabling people to produce more and more things more quickly and cheaply, over the last two centuries enabling a remarkable, continual increase in prosperity (and, with luck and political will, social progress). So if information wants to be free, that’s just a particular digital-age instance of machines want everything to be free—including the cost of every kind of work. Machines want to do all the jobs. In this century, as computers and AI become ever more powerful and ever cheaper, we’re seeing machines get ever closer to their goal, so to speak, of doing all the jobs. We’ve already moved from the exurbs to the outskirts of that science fiction destination. So the 64-quadrillion-dollar question now is, what happens after the machines’ mission is accomplished, and most of us are economically redundant? What is the machines’ ultimate goal? Do they want to enrich all of us, or to immiserate most of us? To be our willing slaves or to enslave us? Of course, it isn’t actually up to the machines. It’s up to us.”
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