Seems to me that if someone invented a Star Trek style replicator and was able to give humanity the ability to re-arrange essentially worthless matter (e.g. a pile of poo or a bunch of worthless rocks) into any new matrix a user deems useful, the role of money in the world’s economy would quickly become obsolete. After all, what object can money buy that can’t simply be programmed into a replicator, and what is ‘wealth’ under such circumstances? Maybe I’m thinking about this too simplistically, though?
Art (or anything) produced by hand. Pretty much for the cachet.
Wouldn’t everyone’s walls be adorned with Mona Lisa’s and the world’s most famous paintings? And not just prints but actual paintings that are indistinguishable from the originals on a molecular level. I suspect the value of art will change too (heck, isn’t AI already making inroads here?)
This is why we need gold pressed latinum.
Of course, if physical money is obsolete, non-physical money needn’t be. I can have a replicator make a gold bar, but I can’t have it add a few zeroes to my bank balance.
We are also going to need people to program the replicators, and for people to do things with the material objects the replicator makes.
I can order “Pail of Roofing Tar, hot” but someone’s got to spread that stuff on my leaking roof, and that person is going to want something in return, something a replicator can’t give them.
Would it be possible to transport the tar in place?
As far as having the Mona Lisa, there would still be a perceived value in a copy painted by hand rather than replicated.
Same for cooking actual (not replicated) food or a play with actual actors rather than a holodeck recreation.
Or why not just replicate a whole new house in situ and dispense with repairs? I guess some of this hypothetical depends on other technological considerations.
And what happens to the old house? AFAIR, nothing about Trek replicator technology disintegrates anything that’s in the way.
In this hypothetical, are replicators freely available or are they restricted by the government? Can they be freely programmed or are their recipes paywalled or otherwise limited? Have we also cracked the unlimited energy we need for unlimited replication?
Basically, are we a truly post-scarcity society or have we just changed the chokepoints for wealth flow?
The Eclipse Phase RPG setting digs into this far more deeply than Trek. Effectively everyone has a machine in their home that can produce any object you have a template for, so long as it has raw material and power to run it.
So the hot new product is the templates. Novelty has value–people who are good at making up new things for the machines to produce earn a lot of clout. Services, entertainment, and unique information are also valued, and there’s a lot of swapping of new templates and favors on social networks where your reputation is basically your currency. Participants who are helpful and produce things that others like can call in favors related to their shared interests. Eventually, I think this would shake out into a form of para-currency to streamline the bartering, with exchange rates between various networks, but the situation is still fairly new in the EP setting.
Ultimately, there will still be things people want that they can’t make with a replicator, and there will still be a need to power the replicators. Consequently, some form of trade will continue to exist, and trade on any large scale is facilitated by having currency, so I don’t think money would become obsolete.
Not necessarily. Star Trek replicators are powered by whatever source of energy is provided around the ship/station, but they have been shown or described as de-materializing dirty dishes and presumably injecting that power back into the grid. So theoretically if it’s a completely two-way operation, you just need to load up the device with enough mass of raw material to equal the mass of whatever you want to replicate. That could be as simple as a vat of water, but it could also be a clod of dirt, toxic waste, or as the OP said, a pile of poo or rocks.
I think the bigger question is the source of patterns for things to be replicated. If you already have an iPhone or laptop or car engine or bar of gold that you can put in the thing to scan, then it would be like using a Xerox/copy machine. If you don’t have those physical items then you need to download their patterns, which more like a scan-to-file and then email the scan to another printer scenario. How much data would that be? Would there be DRM built-in to some physical items or their patterns? How easy or hard would it be to tinker with those patterns to make a novel new device? Might there be tiers of machines such that some are fine replicating food and simple electronics but don’t have the “resolution” for computer chips? At first the replicators would be too few and far between to satisfy demand, so they’d be used in industrial settings churning out products for near zero cost, but they still need to be shipped and retailed and (ugh) advertised.
If it gets to the point of replicator-replicating replicators replicating replicator-replicating replicators so everyone on Earth can have one, then that does raise the post-scarcity questions Star Trek brings up. Material needs would be satisfied, but there’s still service jobs to be done. If even that is no longer needed, for whatever reason, people would turn to the things they like to do as a means to achieve acclaim, fame, pleasure, personal satisfaction, or what have you. At least I hope.
That’s oddly specific. Maybe some folk would, but most people don’t care about that. I do think they would fill their home with what was previously considered a luxury, but that would lose its appeal pretty quickly and then just reduce to leisure items.
Replicator Manufacture and Repair would still need to be a job, I guess. Unless they are self-replicating, I suppose.
Please, please. I want one. I’ll be responsible. I promise. Pleeeeease.
(I said the same thing when I ask my Daddy for a credit card at age 16, still waiting…)
Jeez, how many MORE Rikers do you people need?
Keep 'em coming, Riker’s Island isn’t full yet!
You’d have to rename it Rikers’ Island, in that case.
I’ve heard numerous times that the transporters and the replicators are basically the same technology. Could I be transported to the replicator and re-assembled as a (maybe sentient) ham sandwich? With cheese? And spicy brown mustard? Damn, I’d be delicious!
post-scarcity is where I was ultimately headed with the hypothetical, but knowing the Dope like I do, entertained no illusions that’s where this thread would actually go. Carry on.
It’s inherent in the Universe that destruction is always easier than creation. So if you can build a house with a wave of a hand, you can deconstruct it as well.
I think the critical thing is - if everyone has one of these, you remove the need for the lower tiers of hierarchical society to work the shittest jobs merely to survive. That will definitely shake things up - think the recent Great Resignation but orders of magnitude larger and not so confined to the US.
Also, since the Start Trek style replicator actually creates matter, a lot of international commodities trade just goes poof.
You could replicate a mansion, but could you find servants to take care of it?
You could replicate a yacht, but could you find sailors to crew it?
I think you would end up with a suburban culture, where everyone would have a lot of small-scale luxuries, but you would have to mow your own lawn and do your own household repairs.
I am concerned about the professions. On one hand, poverty would no longer be any obstacle to pursuing higher education. On the other hand, without the promise of money and status, there would be no incentive to stick with it through the harder classes.
There are people who study mathematics for pleasure. Are there enough of them to keep the space program running?
There are people who study medicine out of sheer altruism. Are there enough of them to control the quacks? It will always be easier to get a degree in homeopathy, than a degree in real medicine.