In Damon Knight’s 1959 novel A For Anything – http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1892884011/qid=1135450790/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-9291609-1967151?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 – an inventor creates a device called the “Gizmo,” which, in blithe defiance of the law of conservation of mass-energy, among other things, can instantly create a duplicate at one terminal of anything you attach to the other. Food, cars, money, jewelry – anything. Even people. It can even create more Gizmos. The inventor starts mailing off pairs of Gizmos to people at random, figuring to inaugurate a new age of freedom, peace and plenty. With the basic economic problem of production solved – all you need is one prototype of anything to produce an unlimited supply – what’s left for people to compete for, or fight over? Only, on the very first day of this new world, some individuals decide to view it very differently. The inventor himself meets up with one of them – a shotgun-toting working-class fellow named Krasnow who has already acquired a caravan of prisoners, handcuffed to the steering wheels of their dynamite-laden cars. “Ya gotta have slaves now,” says Krasnow. “Nothin’ else is worth anything.” In the book’s next part, a few generations later, a slavery-based feudalism has taken over the whole world, so far as we can tell.
Suppose we had something like the Gizmo, or the matter-replication technology of Star Trek How would it really change society?
We would adapt , but there probably would be a period of heavy unrest and dictatorial govts.
The replicator is only good if you have the templates to change say lead into gold , other wise is mainly trial and error, you could get around this , if all you had to do was to drop a sample in and let the gizmo scanner read the desired item , and supply you with a list of closest atomically matter.
Like say you wanted plutonium , can you actually get radioactive plutonium if you supply enough matter ?
What about drug cartels
Cig taxes , gone , buh bye
Ilegal drugs , do a homer , want some anti-biotics for the snifffles , done.
Bottom line to me , is that unless the inventor of this gizmo is an idiot , his business model is going to be razor blades , while giving away the razors.
Rather, some people would use these to (very quickly) fabricate space shuttles and escape the inevitable global castrophe that would result.
Setting gizmos to replicate continuously any of conventional explosives, bioweapons, bioaccumulative toxins, plutonium, botulin, or the like. Set up a series of self-replicating gizmos so that you can quickly turn one sample of your nastiness of choice into N samples in log(N) time. Replicate yourself first, so that it will take the global catastrophe you’re starting up to kill all of you.
Militarily countries like the US would still be dominant. Unless an enemy country could steal an ICBM or F22, they’d still be at a significant technological disadvantage.
Assuming we could get past the instability issues, service industries and intellectual property would become the new basis for currency. And many things would still have value, for instance perishable goods would still need to be produced, albeit at a much smaller rate.
Labour would still be needed for many things eg buildings and assembling things inside them, transportation etc etc.
It would be a huge transformation but probably not in the way people think. Society has become remarkably proficient at adapting to pretty huge technological changes.
The physical world would become much like the internet. Services and information ( templates, in this case ) are what are of value. Material goods will be no more valuable than the electrons forming the memory in your computer.
I doubt slaves would be valuable; they’d be of less practical use than they are now, and far more dangerous once some escape and steal a replicator and at least one gun.