If you decide you have had enough life, there is always painless assisted suicide. The biggest change will be the sense of freedom, you will not be required to live or to die.

We have grown use to hearing this sort of stuff from the wildly optimistic transhumanist/futurist types, but it is something else entirely to hear this statement from George Church.

Why not have readers only pay when they also read a page, it would make people more willing to take a risk on new unknown authors. If the goal of Amazon's initiative is to make the market for books more efficient then discretizing the transaction of reading would do so.

Enough with the economic nationalism already. Ask yourself this: Why do kids born in America deserve higher wages and better jobs than immigrants? Are the immigrants not human too? In response to all of this "progressive" weeping over the loss of american jobs to globalization, I would just respond that this same globalization has pulled far more humans out of poverty than any aid program ever has or will.