Economic game changers: Replicators

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Transporters:
Pros:
*Signifcantly less time wasted on travel.
*Assuming Star Trek-like quality, far fewer deaths and injuries due to travel, especially by automobile.
*Far less pollution in the air.
*Significant amount of real estate currently used for roads and highways (primarily within cities) could be put to more productive use.
*If I understand correctly, Star Trek transporters convert matter into energy, then back again. It's a small step to then have any matter converted to energy, then transfer the energy to where it's needed. So long as more energy is created than is required to run the transporter, you have infinite energy from trash.

Cons:
*As with replicators, you need energy. Even if the total energy used for transporters was the same as what we use currently for real world transportation, we'd have to build a huge number of additional power plants, power lines, and so on.
*Still have need for some alternative transportation. Unless you assume there is a transporter on literally every street corner, in every building, on every farm in the world, some things will have to be carried by person or vehicle.
*Ultimate weapon. Just begin the transporter process on someone, then never reintegrate them. Dead person with no body as evidence.

Imagine some of the additional social and political repercussions:

- If you can be anywhere instantaneously, where are you a citizen? Does a government function? How does it maintain a tax base, when everyone can live in a no-tax area, or easily move life or business to a no-tax area?

- At the same time, oppressive regimes and politicians might be meaningless: everyone leaves. By that might force governments to pander to the masses to keep their populations.

- The transporter is now an alibi-destroying machine -- it's almost impossible to prove innocence via alibi when any bathroom break could have had you popping out to commit a murder. Imagine the effects on crime (and punishment -- no prison, just dematerialize and store!)

- Imagine the changes in warfare: every war becomes an insurgency; the high ground is the teleportation infrastructure.

- What does this do to personal space an privacy? Why do I need an entire house or apartment, when one room is sufficient and I can teleport to a communal kitchen, bathroom, living room ...

 

[fireinthedust]

The most plausible form of post scarcity economy (that isn't a market or planned economy exploiting 'free' energy and automated manufacturing) is a reputation based gift economy. If you sit at home and do nothing and interact with nobody, you have no reputation, no social capital, no Whuffie, etc. You can only rely on whatever the bare minimum society has decided will be available. Now, from our perspective, that might well be unimaginable luxury. However, poverty in the G8 may well look luxurious to people from a developing world heckhole. It certainly would to some one in 1511. No matter how good that bare minimum point is to us, it will be poverty in the society it exists in and undesirable.

I don't know that this is reasonable. The need for favours would be manufactured, just like many needs in this economy are (example: pokemon cards, and membership in exclusive clubs).

Concrete things are more than just favours; you need concrete goods, but you don't need someone to give you something you already have.

Various cultures have practiced senilicide, invalidicide, and infanticide. (You forgot the kids. )

Nope, left them out intentionally. Kids grow up and have a replacement value, while old and infirmed have already given much of their economic productivity (if they had any to begin with).

Unrelated to the topic at hand though. People with those tendencies will tend to kill themselves in a post scarcity economy.

What?! I can find you piles of people who won't. If they have the machine they'll defend it with their lives. I know people who've lived under bridges and live off generators for heat during the winter. They might spend the rest of their money on Crack, but if they had a crack-making machine they'd just stay in their tent 24/7 (or abandoned apartment) and be high all the time. Why kill themselves when they can be high forever?

And they live in isolated poverty because no one wants to associate with them. No one will do them any favors. The won't have any priority for the mass/energy distribution system. They may well find themselves the target of do-gooders looking to rehabilitate them.

Basically, they're the post scarcity equivalent to the habitually homeless.

They won't want favours. They're... willing to live with that.

People who don't have ambition are willing to accept whatever circumstance they're in. If they had a machine that could make them anything they wanted at the click of a button, they'd still be fine.

However you say it does.

Zero Point Energy is the lowest possible energy level of a system. Due to quantum uncertainty it is never zero. Schemes to use it rely on taking energy out of a system at it's zero point and hoping that the universe will replace it somehow so the laws of thermodynamics aren't splattered all over the room.

In science fiction it's really just a modern form handwave for free, unlimited, more or less consequentless energy.

So the Zero Point is some theoretical minimum amount of energy (other than no energy) that exists in the universe, like how there's 0 degrees Kelvin as the coldest things can get (but particles exist ergo there's some kind of energy existing). I get it, though if it's the minimum amount of energy existing, how does one build up a charge of it to use (ie: create a high concentration out of minimum concentration, so I can do work with it)? Maybe that's why it's a narrative tool in sci fi rather than a reality?

thanks, btw.

 

[jonesy]

Like Krensky already said, instant plague. Transporters on the scale of what is proposed here would cause a spread of diseases on a scale unimaginable. Bird flu in Singapore? Bird flu EVERYWHERE. On that note, better stay good friends with that citizen killing dictatorship on the other side of the planet, or you might find a couple of lovely virus bombs EVERYWHERE. So you start putting in counter-measures and locking your transporters with passwords? Spies, traitors, air-dropped transporters spewing virus bombs. And bombers only need to carry one transporter to deliver multimegatons of presents to you EVERY..ok, I'm stopping now.

 

[fireinthedust]

yeah, but commerce is still the same. We have the same needs, just different methods of delivery.

Replicators would eliminate needs, ergo dictatorships would be hard pressed except how they controlled replicators. Replicate all the guns I want, and take out those dictatorships. Heck, if we started with one nation owningthem all, it could create a world-spanning empire.

And you'd need an empire, a single authority, for a transporter world, sure. Some provinces with autonomy, like Texas and England, but in general you'd want some kind of control everywhere.

English would become the only language in a Transporter world, like on the internet. Like in Europe, every restaurant would have multilingual menus. Canada is used to that stuff: all packages have English and French on them.

 

[RedTonic]

Iain M Banks wrote an interesting series called Culture dealing with a post commodity economy. I think a point is missing in the preceding analyses: services remain finite and thus scarce, unless you are also bending the force of infinite material towards self replicating AI. Expertise remains limited when sentience is propogated by our normal reproduction. Expertise requires learning and hence teachers (unless we make several other technological or biological leaps in this scenario) and lifetimes remain finite, so no one is an expert in everything. Despite population growth, thenumber of humans yet falls short of infinity.

 

[jonesy]

Replicators would eliminate needs, ergo dictatorships would be hard pressed except how they controlled replicators.

Material needs are far from the only things that cause wars. For instance:

Replicate all the guns I want, and take out those dictatorships. Heck, if we started with one nation owningthem all, it could create a world-spanning empire.

That's a reason for a rebellion right there.

And you'd need an empire, a single authority, for a transporter world, sure. Some provinces with autonomy, like Texas and England, but in general you'd want some kind of control everywhere.

And that's another reason for a rebellion. A world-wide rebellion.

English would become the only language in a Transporter world, like on the internet. Like in Europe, every restaurant would have multilingual menus. Canada is used to that stuff: all packages have English and French on them.

That's the biggest assumption yet on this thread.

Suppose that the inventor is a Swede. And he opensources it.

Suppose that the inventor is North Korean. Everyone else just lost the game.

Suppose that the inventor is Swiss, keeps the source, and controls the product himself.

 

[Umbran]

Transporters on the scale of what is proposed here would cause a spread of diseases on a scale unimaginable.

...

Spies, traitors, air-dropped transporters spewing virus bombs.

Okay, let us take as granted that the transporter does allow spread of disease like that.

It then follows that:

1) You must be crazy to use a biological weapon of any sort, as geographical borders or distance are no longer meaningful. It'll come back to bite you, no matter where you deploy it.

2) You don't actually need the bomb to deliver the weapon - the transporter network does the job for you. Just infect a few of your own people, ship them out through the transporter network, and you're done.

 

[jonesy]

Okay, let us take as granted that the transporter does allow spread of disease like that.

Now let's try the opposite. Assume that you can set them to allow or disallow any particular thing. Someone hacks the system and disallows brain cells. Ouch.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Expertise remains limited

Up to a point.

If enough aspects of expertise are programmable into a computer, it becomes ubiquitous. A food replicator programmed with the recipes of Gordon Ramsay, for instance, could deliver a stunning version of whatever you ordered.

However, it WOULD be the same every time. Changing a recipe on the fly; creating new recipes; all that kind of skill would still remain in short supply.

IOW, you could deliver perfectly reproduceable results worldwide, but creativity and flexibility would still be scarce commodity.

 

[Umbran]

Replicators are not "unlimited everything for free" machines. Replicators do not suddenly mean everyone can have anything they ever want. Thermodynamics tells us quite clearly that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

A replicator needs either base materials to operate from, or an energy supply more copious than anything humankind has ever really considered. If you take the *entire* energy consumption of the United States in 2005 (100 quadrillion BTU, or thereabouts), you could make one single moderately sized car. And that's it.

If you don't have nigh-unlimited energy resources, then you still need raw materials - presumably they still need to be gathered and processed for efficient use, and transported to the devices. If you want these delivered to homes, you're talking about a major infrastructure that's going to shape the society.