Assuming you could beam something one place, why couldn’t you beam it two places? In that case we have a replicator, eliminating scarcity and ushering in a whole new version of economic reality.
Double cheeseburgers?
Razors with TWO blades?
We would be limited only by our imagination.
For those interested in this sub-issue, here’s a very recent thread on topic: Teleportation physics question - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
:dubious:
It would probably make such descriptions as “First World” “Third World” obsolete. If you can work in New York and live in New Delhi or live in London and work in Lahore. Outsourcing and the Telecommunication revolution has already made physical distance less meaningful. You won’t have immigrants anymore; just business travellers and commuters.
If these are like star trek transporters (which have a range that appears to be a distance of geosynchronous orbit) then I can imagine satellites acting as transporter relays to reach beyond the limits of site-to-site.
A couple of units in a chain to “beam” to the moon, couple hundred to reach Mars, etc.
Says, exactly, WHO?
If I want a unit to allow me to place any thing in any where, and have the cash, I’m going to have a “Pirate” transporter.
Anybody who can, using current technology, build an ICBM with a 5 megaton bomb on it will have the resources to build “black Box” transporters.
Actually, I hope the technology would make people much more pleasant. 
If you start beaming people all around the world by transponder, I’d say one result is Air Traffic Controllers going crazy.
I don’t know about unanticipated, but I should think that cheap, accurate teleportation would make many earth governments obsolete. With borders becoming largely meaningless an earth government would eventually become necessary to escape the chaos of unlimited migration.
I’d think it would be easy enough to regulate borders IF there had to be a device on either side (like a transfer booth arrangement). You just set them up not to receive from certain places.
If it was Star Trek style, where someone just materializes anywhere straight out of thin air, that might be more problematic.
Anyway, I think time zones would become mostly a thing of the past for a large chunk of the population- there’s no reason someone couldn’t say… sleep from 12 midnight CST to 7 am CST, go to work, get off at 5 CST, and then teleport to Berlin and start straight up with the late-night partying. Or for that matter, teleport to Hawaii and get in some great early-morning fishing or see the sun rise.
A rise in the popularity of facial tattoos…
Just teleport every part of you except your tattoos to work, and then when you get home you can just teleport them back onto your face. Maybe you could even teleport them to different locations on your body, for variety.
There would be a massive world wide confusion of people trying to transpond the spectacles they left somewhere, if only they could remember where.
Fair nitpick - don’t know where I got transponder from … Pity I can’t fix it. As for the rest, I deliberately left the question a little imprecise. But let’s assume the device is available to anyone to go anywhere at any time.
Obviously the social consequences are highly dependent on the cost and exact capabilities of the transporter.
Make it expensive enough and it take the place of private jets. Cheaper and cheaper and it starts to replace jets and trains, and then your car. Cheap enough and you can have “rooms” in your house separated by thousands of miles.
And how does it work? Do you need a transmitter and a receiver? On Star Trek you don’t need a receiver, but they give the impression that without the receiver it’s a lot more dangerous. Fine for ships exploring the galaxy, but not for daily use. And they are energy hogs, so they aren’t used for day to day average travel. You don’t use a transporter to go from your house to your office for work every day, but you might to travel from New York to London. So in Star Trek they take the place of jets and shuttlecraft, but there are still shuttlecraft and people still fly. Although statistically transporters are the safest way to travel, we see a lot a accidents on the show but we don’t see the day in day out boring transporter uses.
Also they can be blocked by shields, so any sensitive area can keep out unwanted transporters. If I had to guess I would say that transporters on Star Trek seem to cost about $100 per use, give or take, and understanding that in the 23rd Century they’ve gone beyond primitive ideas like “money”. Cheap enough that if you really need to get from point A to point B you don’t have to worry about the cost, but expensive enough that you don’t use it unless you actually need it.
Also, the “we take you apart and put you back together” version is a bit different than “we open a doorway from point A to point B and you walk through”. A lot of people are going to have trouble with being ripped apart at the molecular level, and then zero or one or more duplicates of you get constructed at a different location, possibly after being edited. The wormhole version sidesteps all that.
As for things like causing jet lag, well, with near instant transport the whole idea of “jet lag” ceases to exist. Yes, it’s noon in Los Angeles and midnight in Moscow. Nowadays it takes nearly a whole day of travel to get from LA to Moscow, and it will take you just as much time to travel back. You’re not going to go for a few hours, you’re going to be there for days. So you have to adjust to local time. If you transport you’re there in a few seconds, and you might be heading home soon, so who cares about the position of the sun in the local sky? All you care about is whether the people you want to meet and the places you want to go are accessible. If people from all over the world can go to Disneyland in a few seconds, then it doesn’t make sense to run Disneyland by the local clock, Disneyland becomes a 24 hour destination that doesn’t close at local midnight just because the sun is eclipsed by the earth at this particular location.
Things also will get lot weirder if there’s no way to block teleportation. If someone can just teleport into your house, or your bank vault, or your military base and there’s no way to stop them, it seems to me that it’s the end of civilization. If you can just beam a bomb into the President’s office, then anyone can kill anyone and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Terrorists and disgruntled people start beaming bombs everywhere until we reach a point where there are no transporters left in private hands, because we’re living in the burnt out smoking ruins of the planet.
Also highly destabilizing would be the ability to remove objects/people without a transmitter. On Star Trek you can beam people to your ship. How do you prevent kidnappings if you can just kidnap someone anywhere on the planet with a transporter?
One thing not mentioned so far is the spread of pests. When you enter California they check to see if you are carrying anything that can hurt our agriculture. With transporters, invasive species can easily hitch a ride anywhere. Rabbits in Australia are trivial by comparison.
Hence my aside about The Fly. I imagine the potential for disastrous human/animal permutations would be huge.
How about benign human/animal combinations?
(Says the Furry…)
I’d draw the limit at being a centaur.
Who’s to say that if you have the technology to literally teleport something, that you don’t also have the ability to filter what you teleport at the molecular level?
I mean, it could be a new and novel sort of medicine- set the teleporter to teleport everything BUT those pesky beta-amyloid plaques in an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain. Or everything except for the MRSA, or flu viruses, or staphylococcus, or athlete’s foot, etc…