I don't need to explain, since I can just quote him from last week.

I think, as I said, that the point of attending to the brains growing within the network is that the brains thereby liberated think about the problems of survival and welfare of the people around them. By multiplying the quantity of human intelligence we multiply the intelligence devoted to human survival and welfare

To be absolutely precise, here I argue the diametric opposite of that last sentence. By multiplying the quantity of human intelligence we do not multiply the intelligence devoted to human survival and welfare. Instead given how the economy is structured we merely multiply the intelligence devoted to socially unproductive or counterproductive work.

To answer your second question (which, to be clear, involves a narrower claim than Eben is making), I will cede that free software makes learning easier, but I do not agree that proprietary software forecloses any possibilities for human progress. People find ways to learn what they need to learn. They have done so for thousands of years, long before computers, and will continue to do so long after either of us are gone. The point is to not to increase the amount of available knowledge, but to structure the economy in such a way that people spend their time acquiring the correct type of knowledge.

-- ShayBanerjee - 01 Oct 2015