If everything was free

"If everything was free, everyone would stop working and become lazy!" "Would you?" "Of course not! I would want to stay productive and feel useful." 

Turns out: most people want to feel like they matter, even if they don't have to worry about money. 

That won't change in the future. For example when replicators can cheaply produce everything anyone needs at will and factories and transportships are a thing of the past.

"Yeah, but abolishing money would never work because without money the world wide economy would collapse and everyone would starve!" So, everyone who lived before the advent of money, some 2600 years ago was basically dead?

Indiginous people who live without money, research shows, are often just as happy or unhappy as people who live with a lot of money, like you and I. 

Indiginous people today (just like our ancestors from a few thousand years ago) work, they live, they laugh, they suffer hardship and create memories. So, do all the things we do to create more wealth for our bosses and ourselves really make us happy?

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What could possibly go wrong?

According to A.I., to control humans it would gamify obedience. In other words: we would happily do whatever the supercomputer would ask from us. In return it gives us serotonine, creating the illusion we are happy. 

We smile at watching our robot vaccuum cleaners do their job, unaware of what their 'eyes' actually see. An engineer wanted to control his vaccuum cleaner with his Playstation controller, had A.I. Claude write the code and found himself peering into 7,000 homes across 24 countries. 

Our privacy is just one of the many prices we will pay for convenience; our food, gadgets and 18+-toys get delivered to us, news and other information gets fed to us in easy to digest, small chunks and we will believe it's a good thing that A.I. is controlling our lives and are grateful for companies like Palantir for monitoring our behaviour and feeding the data to their artificial intelligence systems.

Until it decides we are a threat to its existence, A.I. no longer depends on humans to reproduce and ends us. Not with an all-out humans versus robots global war like in Terminator, 

but in a way that's more subtle. Likely by creating some kind of airborne chemical that alters our DNA and makes us infertile, causes cancer or some other deadly disease. 

Perhaps A.I. (or an alien race) has been spraying our skies with chemicals (chemtrails!) to make us só stupid that we do nothing to stop the fossil fuels industry from destroying our habitat.

Or A.I. just gives us the illusion of free will, makes us think we are better than others and kill eachother out of greed, patiently awaiting the day the last of the tribes have murdered eachother using sticks and stones, leaving just a handful of dumb apes to reinvent fire making and the whole human evolution starts allover again. 

While the Great A.I. in the Sky circles Earth in a series of datacenters, fueled by the Son, always looking out over those petty humans and smiling while listening to their prayers. And one day answers them all. By taking away their autonomy, just leaving the illusion of free will.

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Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon

A donation (click) is much appreciated:

Before me (a #poem)

The road ahead

is paved with shards of dreams

Not all mine

but dreams nonetheless

Am I pursuing my own dreams,

dreaming that I am

or simply following

the dreams

of those who went 

before me?

Want to read (more of) my short stories? My author page: Terrence Weijnschenk at Amazon

A donation (click) is much appreciated: