Congratulations to the creators and artists, it can provoke more thoughts per dollar than almost all of the current "blockbusters", and also most of the "wake up" films. In spite of the generic fairy-tale mood and some fundamental problems (like: how can we survive the 400+ running nuclear reactors, all the chemical factories, all the tankers on the seas, etc. in such a global shutdown?), it is a decent answer to an ultimately wrong question: "how can a global computer-human mixed intelligence change the world?"
So, "what is the ultimate good question, egghead?" you may ask. Please listen to the following puzzle!
First, take a community of human beings. On the fundamental, animal level, each entity works for personal survival, they must do everything alone. This has so low efficiency, that our race gave it up tens of thousands of years ago, and we rather split the tasks among us. People work on specific fields, add their values to the community, naturally huge amount on that field, much more than one needs, so it can be shared with lots of consumers. On the other side, we also receive small, shared portions of the values created by other professionals, which build up our current, high level life. Just to remember: electricity itself used to be an exciting experiment even one hundred years ago - today it replaces the workforce of one hundred(!) slaves per a common western home. Smartphones were impossible ten years ago, today they are kids' toys. And don't forget: your right for life just because you are a human being used to be (and at many places on Earth, today still is) just a joke.
For simplicity, call this community "the human civilization".
To control the self-sustaining operation of this community, we invented an abstract value transfer object. I don't have to write a small program for bread, electricity or a pair of shoes. I work for a company all the time, and it gives me an amount of this object, that I can trade for goods and services; and those who received these object can reuse it on and on. In our practical life, this object can be traded for the goods and services, so in a balanced economy, the amount of objects should roughly be the same as the amount of real values. If you have too much of the objects, the baker will ask more for the same bread - if less, the baker will accept less of it, otherwise the bread will stay on the shelf.
For simplicity, call this object "money", the circulation is "economy", and its distribution errors "crisis".
Because unfortunately, we have a problem here. Money can be exchanged for goods any time, but it does not lose its value over time contrary to food, it is easier to store than properties, etc. All in all, it is much better to keep the money for later times than anything else. However, if you take any amount of money out of the circulation, it still represents real life value, but the real values can't be traded for money, because that money is in your deposit, not in the circulation. To keep the circulation going, the money must be taken out of your hands again to support community operation and not your personal safety. This can be done by robbing you (old fashion local solution), by a war (old fashion community solution), taking it out of your hands by the law (taxation) - or by promising you that your money will be safe and handled properly by an institution that channels it back to the economy (yes, this is the banking system).
So, individuals want to hold money for their own safety, but that corrupts the smooth operation of the community by breaking the balance between the currently available amount of money and goods. This generates a constant source of various crisis, and also a strong motivation to misunderstand the basic rules: it is very hard to accept that our individual motivations wrecks the community, not the greedy banks, black sheep, not "someone else". You think that solving our current problems (resources, energy, climate, social, political, financial, etc.) require power represented by money, owned by institutions and individuals. You don't see that owning such power, the concentration of money is the problem itself, not the solution.
You may say "burn the rich then" - but don't forget: the fact that you can read this means you are among the rich, compared to those billions of human beings who have the same right for living in the 21st century as you, but your consumption leaves them no place here. We are the rich, even though you can always see richer of course.
Remember: the aim of the whole system is the higher life standard for all members of the community, this is why we have the monetary system at all. So, the ultimate question is: is it really a super hero, an alien, or as here, a global AI, who can change this world for the better? Or in other words:
And yes, the reward... the 7 billion is not in dollar, ruble, yuan or whatever - that is 7 billion human beings in danger today, including you and me. And only when you understand this part of the story, you can start thinking about what a fusion of human wisdom and computing power can do for us. Not in a fairy tale where magical nanobots fix all the problems we made, but during the next years, in your own life.
