Wired’s got a good post talking about the future of movies and why you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical.

“Thanks to Gillette, the idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical. But until recently, practically everything “free” was really just the result of what economists would call a cross-subsidy: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.” [Wired]

Chris Anderson is editor in chief of Wired magazine, a position he has held since 2001 and the author of a book that discusses this type of economy. The book is titled the The Long Tail. You can also watch the following video.

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Ray Kurzweil thinks in the future work will be like  a video game and that humans will one day upload their brains and consciousness into computers. Kurzweil is an inventor and futurist. He has been a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity, and futurism.
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“[…] his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.

“Games are a harbinger of everything,” said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. “In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.”

By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. “They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,” he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects “full-immersion” games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don’t forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We’ll have to “enforce reality,” maybe “by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.”

A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called “an intimate merger.” Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having “complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.” [The Globe and Mail]

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