So...just looking really far down the road here, but it seems that a common theme among lots of films set in the future is that currency is a thing of the past. If you could print any physical item, especially if you could pirate the plans, then there would hardly be a need for a currency because everything would almost be free. The only way to make money would be to either produce the printers or create new products and sell the plans.
I want to build my own Matrioshka Brain out of Jupiter.
Post-scarcity is interesting from the point of view of the necessities of life being so close to free as to make no difference. But it's a long way to go before we truly will have more resources than we know what to do with. Our desires show a clear trend of scaling with our resources; we already have more wealth than any Mesopotamian farm peasant could ever dream of, and most of us could probably easily figure out what to do with another $100,000.
And if they evenly distributed them to everybody in some borderline mythical manner (because wealth isn't actually that portable), it would still roughly double or triple your personal wealth, tops. Again, I think most people could figure out what to do with that and would still after a year or two resume wanting something or other they can't afford.
Even if replicators could completely replace manufacturing and agriculture (and that would be looking pretty far down the road), the change in society wouldn't be as big as you'd think. The service sector already constitutes about 75% of GDP in just about any mature economy, and we all still use money.
If you can replicate material at will, you can spend all your time perfecting robotics to perform service work. Said robotics can than be replicated en masse across the world with previous "replicators".
I don't think you grasp the entirety of the service sector. Creative services (programming, consulting, design, etc.) can't yet be readily replaced be robotics or machines. Creating beings that can themselves create is a significant undertaking.
I presume you'd still need to pay for the cost of materials.
Even if you had a printer that could machine whatever you wanted, and the plans were available for free (and not licensed to the printer as software,) then you'd still need to pay for a rather large amount of steel, plastic, rubber, copper and all the other materials that go into the manufacture of a car.
This. Just because labor is no longer a factor in production functions doesn't mean capital is not.
Specifically, raw material scarcity will actually have a larger impact on price and availability of items than it does at the moment, even though the majority of items will be generally more available as a result of less constraining factors.
That's assuming that money is still an adequate motivator in a (word I just learned) post-scarcity world. Governments might be responsible for providing the raw materials?
Automatic printing of items doesn't create a post-scarcity world.
The printing machines can only print from plans. People who create those plans may sell them, and those plans may be pirated, but there's still industry. There's still supply and demand.
If nobody is compensated for the manufacture of the plans, you're either on your own to create them or perhaps they'll be donated. Given the state of charity in the world, one can assume that they won't be donated, but given the state of open source, one might assume that they will. Regardless, the plans aren't self-creating and/or limitless.
Why would the governments supply the raw materials for you to purchase a car? If they aren't currently motivated to just buy you a car, why would they be suddenly motivated to pay for all the materials that go into a car's manufacture, even if the labor cost is reduced? If the materials were free, what's to stop everyone from printing out 20 different types of cars and luxury mansions?
And who would mine, gather, process, prospect, and distribute the materials? What motivation would those individuals have? (Actually, I would love to see a candidate who was actively sinking a shovel every day to produce or driving a tractor trailer to deliver raw materials for her/his constituents.)
Based on the current trend, however, I doubt we'd ever see a post scarcity world: oil, rare-earth metals, gold, silver, and even wood and stone are all scarce at scale. Sunlight may be one of the only things available on earth that humans can't destructively consume.
"I would love to see a candidate who was actively sinking a shovel every day to produce or driving a tractor trailer to deliver raw materials for her/his constituents."
Haha, yeah that would definitely have to be done by robots. Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
> Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
Anything that makes more stuff with fewer input resources (especially in terms of human time and effort) moves us closer to a post-scarcity world.
Implicit in all of the treatments of a post-scarcity world I've ever seen, though, is the idea that humans will be only doing the jobs that only humans can do, such as acting, painting, programming, advanced mathematics, governing, and so on. Robots certainly help us move towards that.
Oh that's insane. It says it's self-replicating, but can it assemble the parts it creates or is a human needed? And what about the microchips? Those still take expensive machinery to produce, right?
Well, their goal is to make it self-replicating, but it's far from it for now. I think it can essentially make the specialized parts, but you still need to buy various common parts and assemble it yourself.
> Well, their goal is to make it self-replicating, but it's far from it for now.
Indeed. Replicators are at roughly the same point today that personal computers were in 1975. So expect that in a few decades everyone will have one in their house, able to make a very wide range of objects.
Energy wouldn't be free, it may be vastly more abundant and for practical purposes free for "consumer uses", but not exactly free in the general sense. To print you also need raw materials, some of which may be more rare but in high demand (and therefore more expensive). Lastly, there would presumably be high technological processes (like chip manufacturing) or simply huge industrial ventures ({space} ship manufacturing) which can't be readily replicated with semiportable 3d printers.
I wonder if someday you could take a material like a rock (or something with the proper atoms) and convert that into something like a shirt. I mean, look how far technology went from 1900 to 2000. Imagine 200 more years.
