Scarcity is eliminated in one fell swoop. Unintended consequences in 3...2..1...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Let’s say that at the next DopeFest I eat some bad shrimp and find myself rushing to the bathroom, in such a hurry that I leave the keys to my Burroughs-Libby continua scooter on the table. Naturally, one of you jokers grabs said keys, runs out to the BLCS, and (after making sure the cloaking device and interdimensional-tracking-countermeasures are functional) pops over to the Star Trek universe. The joker spends enough time there to steal a tricorder, a working replicator, and a portable library computer; and as the TrekVerse is on a separate time axis from our world, the scooter’s back in the parking lot and and the keys back on the table before I’m done washing my hands.

Back at home, the joker pores over his stolen bounty. Soon he discovers that our Earth is chock-full of dilithium crystals (one percent of all quartz is misclassified, it seems); just as quickly he learns how to build anti-matter generators and containment units (creating parts with the replicator, natch) and whatever groovy batteries the Enterprise uses. Voila! A power source!

(One thing he DOESN’T figure out is how to get around the no-weapons-clause built into this replicator; no phasers, photon grenades, or so forth are coming out. Likewise, his stolen library computer was from a civilian installation, and it, too, lacks information on such things. Sorry 'bout that.)

Now our joker is careful. He doesn’t start doing stuff ona big scale until he’s certain he knows how to do all this safely; tha takes a good year. He gathers a good number of dilithium crystals (buying them cheap because, hello, everybody thinks they’re just quartz), and then spends a few months building anti-matter containment units, then anti-matter generators, then replicating batteries, then generating anti-matters. Once everything’s in place he starts making pumping out more replicators.

Hallelujah! It’s an end to the most basic problem of humanity: the scarcity of resources. We can turn all our waste products into food, water, penicillin, and anything else anybody needs, and in whatever quantities we desire. the joker is a pure altruist, and a good planner, so he announces this new resource and shares the information in such a quick, dramatic way that no government or business is able to geta monopoly. Paradise has been achieved!

But…

At the first Dopefirst after all this, somebody notices that I (the owner of the continua device that made all this possible) have bugged out on this reality, but ony after leaving one last post that says:

Fool of a Took! You know not what societal forces you have unleashed! But you will learn. Oh, yes–you will learn!

All of which foolishness brings us to the thread question. What would be the unintended consequences fo utterly eliminating scarcity thus?

2

He has antimatter. Maybe the primitive peoples of the 24th Century can’t figure out how to weaponise innocent technologies like containment units and mass annihilation, but I’m sure we could.

3

Well, yeah, that’s the EASY one.

4

Hello global warming!

If you thought things were melting fast now, just wait until every person on earth is dissipating a gigawatt of heat because of the activity of all the toys they replicated. We’d have to get up into space real fast, both to move the remaining replicator-based industrial activity there, and to build a temporary sunshade until the planet cools back down a bit.

5

There would be a few scarcities left:

  1. Scarcity (or conservation) of mass and energy
  2. Scarcity of (human life)time
  3. Scarcity of hand-crafted bespoke items
  4. Scarcity of weapons

For the first one, stolen mass would be untraceable - you could break the mirror off of a car, or grab someone’s dog, or even steal a rare Picasso - and turn it into a steak dinner. Mass would also be one of the few things you could use as currency, but it would be debased very quickly. You’d speak of people being worth kilotons or megatons. Physical currency might be a slab of tungsten or depleted uranium; you take it to a replicator shop and get back your change in an equivalent-sized slab of a less-dense material.

For the second, fast transport and slots for takeoff at existing airports would be worth a lot more in the very near term. With nobody inclined to work (why work when you can just grab a chunk of steel or concrete, take it to a replicator, and eat for weeks - months if you re-recycle, and I think you know what I mean) it would be a while before aircraft and airports were fabbed from replicator-sized parts so that Des Moines Community International Supersonic Airfield could be created. Even when the airport was created, who would staff it? Who would do maintenance on the jets?

Ahhhh, then you come to the third thing. Scarcity of bespoke. If the best crafters in the world could dedicate themselves to hand-crafting things instead of replicating them, some people might attach value to those things. It might turn out that with (3) and (4) together a hand-crafted pistol might be extremely valuable because it was made by a person and was demonstrably impossible to replicate. It would be the ultimate status symbol. The other valuable industry would be the people who would design and build robots that used replicators to do things like patch highways – doing the jobs people won’t do.

So you’d have a world where theft of (replicated) property was simple and untraceable, work is uncommon, and weapons / fast travel / intellectual work / handcrafted items are expensive and valuable.

I see an upper class comprised of people with intellectual or artistic gifts, and a vast rabble of unethical and generally apathetic (possibly illiterate) hooligans.

6

Why bother? Even without harvesting other planets for mass, you don’t need to harvest things that already have value when there are gigatons of worthless rock per person just lying around.

7

The real estate market would change. With replicators, you could create as much water as you want, and make the deserts bloom. Water shortage is no longer a problem. Predictable weather is a bonus. So the deserts would become very desirable real estate.

You could replicate a mansion, but would you be able to get anyone to maintain it? You could replicate a yacht, but would you be able to get a crew? I predict a lot of small-scale luxuries. Everyone would have a comfortable house, but you would have to mow your own yard. It would look a lot like a 1950s TV show.

With a replicator, a serial killer could easily dispose of the bodies. After a few high-profile cases, people might sacrifice privacy for safety. I have heard that in Israel, most people carry cell phones, and constantly keep their friends and relatives updated on their locations, so that if there is a bombing, their friends will know whether or not to start searching for the body. You might see something similar develop here.

You said “no weapons”, but you did not say “no drugs”. Suddenly, teenagers can get any drugs they want, in any quantities they want. I predict a rash of fatal overdoses. However, since they don’t have to turn to crime to maintain their addictions, nobody gets hurt except their next-of-kin. After watching their friends die, perhaps our youth culture will finally stop glamorizing intoxication. A bit rough on the parents, but in the long run, it might be good for society as a whole.

8

Wait, I’m missing something: how do replicators make for predictable weather? I can’t imagine them doing anything to stop hurricanes (other than making it easier to build shelters).

Now this is I entirely agree with. Replicators are going to slow the growth of other technologies, because a lot of people who go into engineering and the sciences are simply not going to bother any more.

9

Deserts have predictable weather to begin with (i.e., sunny and dry 99% of the time). You generally have at least one mountain range between you and the nearest ocean. So you have much less weather of all kinds. This has traditionally been bad for agriculture, so deserts were considered bad places to live. If you can replicate your own food and water, then your biggest issue is to find a place that is least prone to natural disasters.

10

The entertainment industries would boom though, even if it were volunteer work for the most part. People would still want their movies and computer games and stuff in order to make all that idle time pass.

11

While he didn’t say no drugs, Star Trek replicators have been shown to be unable to replicate alcohol, so I think that other drugs would be similarly banned. I mean, even the most unscrupulous characters seem to have to get alcohol in another way.

12

Just off the top of my head, I bet you could use the waste heat to heat up a hunk of metal to red-hot… and then convert that matter into energy and for storage in your battery. If the matter/energy conversion system is able to handle the energy released by good ol’ MC^2, I’m bettin’ it can handle the paltry amount of waste heat you stored in that matter.

13

You ever read the comic “Transmetropolitan” ? That’s what happens.

14

Actually that’s not true. The default setting on the Enterprise-D food replicators was to provide beer, wine, whiskey, and so forth hat included synthehol rather than alcohol–synthehol being a variant which you supposedly could not get addicted to and whose intoxiciating effects could be dispelled by simple concentration or suggestion. But you could get real intoxicants by specifying; Wof did once. That’s not a limit of the replicator; that’s a sensible programming lockout.

(Logically, of course, you’d expect that, on a starship, the latter would only be available in Ten-Forward and only behind the bar.)

15

With virtually free energy and matter transformation, you’d have an economy based on the things that are still scarce: real estate (taking into account the developement of currently unusable land); human labor; and human creativity.

Most people would be on the dole; all of their basic needs would be free. If you wanted more, you’d get a job: salesclerks, butlers, secretaries, policemen, bureaucrats, teachers, lawyers, doctors, etc would all still have viable professions. Or you might try to sell some form of art or entertainment if you’ve got those talents. If you managed to accumulate wealth, you’d store it by buying land, which would essentially be the only durable good left.