The scarce resource becomes permission to build.
Everyone expects
AI invention engines make discovery faster and cheaper for everyone.
What I found
She made medicine in her flat. They sent the bomb squad.
Imagine invention engines generating new drugs, materials, processes and products faster than organisations can use them. The possibility looks like abundance. Then consider who owns the inventions.
Patent portfolios spread around what can be made. Firms collect rent from building, curing and repairing. Others withhold technologies to protect existing products or because they object to how those technologies might be used.
The reversal is structural: increasing capability does not necessarily increase freedom to create. Making something becomes easier while obtaining permission to make it becomes the defining economic relationship.
A scene from this fictional world
Bomb disposal officers raid a Manchester flat where a 29-year-old on universal basic income is making patented antidepressants. The Guardian calls her a hero; the Telegraph calls her a terrorist.
RoboStore shows the household machine whose skills require a subscription. The Yum Machine shows the food supply controlled through cartridges. The Patent Apocalypse extends the Permission Economy into invention and making themselves.
A fictional headline from inside the world
“Check with us before you invent or build ANYTHING,” PatentBox warns companies.
Explore more of this kind of work
This is an original public scenario. Bring your subject, research or planning question to develop a world and explore its consequences.
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RoboStore finances cheap robots, controls access to the customers and keeps the learning generated by everybody’s applications. Manufacturers supply the bodies.
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Follow how it could happenA subject, a technology, a question or a body of research.