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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4686505" data-attributes="member: 5143">At the moment that is true.  I think there might be a time where it stops being true.  When people realize that the value something has had in the past doesn't need to be the value it has in the future.Often old DOES equal worthless or valueless in the case of information.  If someone tried to sell me a book telling me that the world was flat.  I would not pay for it.  I know the world is round.  Old information is not very useful.Likewise, a book explaining that you can use a turbine to generate electricity is not very useful either.  There are too many people in the world who know that already and will tell you for free.  Once information is available for free or is widely known, you can't sell it.The same thing often goes for media.  If everyone read the same book in high school, there is going to be very little market for it.  If nearly everyone has already watched that summer blockbuster movie 2 or 3 times, there's very little demand to see it again.  Sure, there's SOME demand.  But at what point does a piece of art just become part of our culture and not one person's property?This is part of what concerns me.  It might be possible using this technique to essentially make free food, free shelter, free clothes, free medicine for everyone in the world.  But due to Copyright and Patents, the rights to actually manufacture these things will be in the hands of some corporations whose primary goal is to make as much profit as possible.  This means that, although we have the technology to essentially never need to work except if we wanted to with no cost to anyone, while keeping the entire world alive and fed and with a decent lifestyle....we won't see that day because of Copyright and Patents.  To create food, we'll need to pay a licensing fee to the company who owns the "blueprints" for the food.  And a licensing fee to use the nano-robots and so on.That's not entirely true.  Publicly traded companies have a goal: Increase shareholder value.  And, for the most part, the only way to do this is to continually make more profit than the year before hand.The problem is, that you eventually reach a practical limit on how much money you can make.  But shareholders don't like to hear that they won't be getting any more money, so they push you until you make changes that aren't good for for anyone except the shareholders.  They will increase profits, likely at the expense of employees, the public, the planet, or whatever.  But their goal is to worry about increasing profit, not any of those other things.And that isn't very moral.  It doesn't matter who is running the corporations, they eventually have to reach that limit.  It might just take a LONG time to get there.Materials are always going to be limited.  But once you have a device, any digital media you put on there is going to be free.  But there's a LOT of material.  It won't run out any time soon.  Especially if we develop the ability to manipulate materials into other materials.As for energy.  It's pretty close to unlimited.  The sun provides us energy as long as it shines, water gives us hydro energy, wind gives us energy.  As long as we are capable of living on this planet we will have energy.  Whether it is enough energy for our needs...who knows.  We will find more efficient ways to harness these energies in the future.  When we can manipulate matter at a molecular level, we may be able to create new, more efficient fuels out of common materials.</blockquote>

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