CZinger and the future of intelligent design

    Through the noise of Covid-19 I discovered the CZinger project, a one and a half million dollar super car competely designed by AI and 3D printed and assembled by robots. This is the beginning of something much larger. The designed components look more like the muscle and arms of animals that are designed by evolution by natural selection rather than the idyllic mathematics of engineering. 

    It is not time to begin to accumulate in the public domain or free software space, these kinds of designs. Also it is time to prepare for an economy with this level of automation. I have often described the economy of physical objects as four things: make, fix, sell, and design. Selling, such as putting an object from the delivery truck to the shelve lends itself well to robotics. Making things lend themselves to robots as the CZinger can attest, and now even the highly educated workers who designed cars are no longer needed, but their input is required in conjunction with the software engineers to make the AI algorithm to begin with. I actually think fixing things will be the last to be automated. Those seeking to be mechanics or repair persons are well in their future prospects. 

    Even being a CEO could be automated. CEOs examine data and then make decisions on that data. It screams to be automated. Businesses based on this automation will employ few, but they will all likely be upper-middle class professionals who work safely in offices so...the usual Marxist deconstruction of exploited workers doesn't apply here, even though it appears to be good old fashioned neoliberal capitalism. 

    An economy as exotic as its AI designed cars.

In Defense of Free-to-Play and Free-to-Use software.

     Bartosz Milewski once mentioned that advertising and the software engineering behind it actually points to things of real value, like beer.

    The ontology of software is different than other things. They have no mass and fundamentally no scarcity, the fundamental economic problem that all business hangs on. Software is infinite in supply, and so ultimately worthless. At the same time, making software costs money. 

    So how then should the craft be funded? One is the religion model, also known was Free-and-Open Source. Contribute to software you will use yourself and you have the incentive to make the best you can. 

    Another structure is advertising. FaceBook, Google, and Twitter are advertising corporations, free use with only the cost of slight inconvenience via advertising. Public relations may be a deviously evil industry, but if they point to a real object, they are supporting real work. 

    Video games consoles are  expensive ripoffs with no consideration to preservation. They take up space in rooms, and it is not efficient to own them. It is better to consume video games on desktop or phone distribution systems. Phones are the biggest consumer base. Development should logically follow to there. That development should be paid by giant corporations advertising their junk food, not the consumer wasting their time. Video games and even free-to-use software like the Google suite are then not non-volatile unchanging objects like old video game ROMs. They are more like historical events. Not sustainable for the preservation of the software itself, but this is what pays real software engineering. 

    It can be ethically done. Don't charge, advertise.