Race to the bottom

Some would say this is a good trend -- towards the abundance -- so what's next? £0 food, £0 medicine, £0 transportation... Don't you enjoy £0 music? Some would say, cause certain things had been automated, those people who still make them and expect to be paid, should go find other things to do. The problem at the bottom is zero marginal cost, when an extra copy costs close to zero, and the initial copy costs a lot to make. So, the bottom of the question may be -- how do we pay to the artists, musicians, software developers, etc. for the initial copy, that is then spread anonymously? (we do want privacy)

If we could only have all people carry cryptographic keys, forming a set %%S%% of public keys that are verified to belong to living humans, and if those keys could derive signatures of playbacks or views or uses, that are verifyably signed with a key from that set, but cannot be resolved to any particular public key from that set, then -- we could all be signing each of our playback, identifying human use, without the need to solve any captchas and without compromising our privacy, and this could be helpful in giving appropriate credit to the providers. However, when it comes to creators of the initial copy, having a unique "artwork signature" (think like a biosignature) generated from the feature-sets of works of art or engineering, may solve the problem of tracking uniqueness. In fact, such artwork signatures could be hierarchical, as other people derive work from other people, and may serve better than patents.

Nobody should want to become commodity.

Commodity is good because it makes things cheap it just has a knock on effect of making people poor.

It's disintermediation. And it's harmful.

I like the idea of microtransactions to pay for the media we consume. I think that's what your idea is getting at.

Interesting question. Where does the money come from? For the music, the money comes from subscriptions and/or user data used to sell marketing. In the case of software is the same. I would speculate that these companies are exclusively selling advertising...

£0 food, £0 medicine, £0 transportation

Will never happen. But I'm open for ideas that make commodities of food, medicine and transportation.

Secretly think transportation is a waste of human effort and people should just live in well managed communities whereby everybody who you need to interact with is automatically placed into your life.