# Free AI Could Become a Distributed Mind Without Clear Boundaries by Kevin Kelly
> “A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.”
> **— Kevin Kelly**, *2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”*
## Sources and Context
- **Direct Edge response and surrounding essay:** [A NEW KIND OF MIND](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10137) — Edge published this exact passage in its 2009 Annual Question collection, *WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?*. The response page preserves the surrounding argument and qualifications.
- **Complete local collection index:** [[research/Edge 2009 Full Quotation Curation|Edge 2009 Full Quotation Curation]] — retained source-first record for the complete response cohort and this passage's promotion status.
## Related Articles and Collections
- **Collection:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]]
- **Collection:** [[collections/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]]
- **Collection:** [[collections/MARS|MARS]]
- **Article:** [[articles/Modern Artificial Intelligence in the 1970s|AI in the 1970s]]
- **Article:** [[articles/The Last Migration Will Not Be Human|The Last Migration]]
- **Article:** [[articles/We Were Never Going to Make It|Never Going to Make It!]]
- **Wiki map:** [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]]
## Related Topics
- [[wiki/Machine Succession|Machine Succession]]
- [[wiki/human-machine interaction|human-machine interaction]]
- [[wiki/Human-Machine Symbiosis|Human-Machine Symbiosis]]
- [[wiki/Cybernetic Control|Cybernetic Control]]
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“A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.”
— Kevin Kelly, 2009, Edge Annual Question, “What Will Change Everything?”
https://bryantmcgill.com/simple-reminders-kevin-kelly-free-ai-become-distributed-mind
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