I’m pretty sure Raphael was around before the Louvre Museum…
Yeah, we do that now… people still litter.
Because of paid cleaners.
Just a band-aid. The real cleanup work is done by the council/municipality/county.
Why? As has been pointed out, replicators aren’t building real estate. And who is laying the utilities for new suburbs? More volunteers?
Septic tanks will go away very quickly in replicator-land. The sewage itself would just go straight into a dedicated waste replicator and be converted to energy or clean water.
You overestimate the level of maintenance park boards are generally capable of. Central Park or the National Mall are one thing, but your everyday city or suburban park gets an occasional fly-through by the lawn cutting crew and a pass by the regular neighborhood garbage collectors to empty the bins. They’re not sweeping up litter with brooms and buckets because for the most part they don’t have to. In a downtown plaza sure, but that person usually has other duties too.
I live in a city neighborhood and my street only gets swept once a year. The single-family home residents clean up their own yard, and the apartment/condo management cleans up theirs, and that takes care of what little litter shows up due to wind storms or raccoons. The street only needs sweeping because of things like gravel or fall leaves. If the storm drain is blocked with leaves, I will unblock it myself because I don’t want my car to flood. This really isn’t hard.
Where I see a replicator based post scarcity society weakness is where it comes to innovation.
Computer. Make me an iPhone 97.
Error. Template not available.
Because no one has invented it yet. And there are too few people who have subjected themselves to the advanced education needed to design the product.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, novel templates of all sorts would be hot items.
However, cellphones specifically would require changes in network operation for replicated ones to work. Either the replicators would have to be networked so they could update the unique identifiers for each device made, or the network would have to be somehow redesigned not to need the identifiers. Same goes for network adapters, or any other device that needs to be able to identify itself to other machines.
Throughout all human history, scientists and philosophers and inventors and artists have more often than not been members of the upper class - people with an excess of time and resources. Even today, the obscenely wealthy receive the best educations whether or not they’re being groomed to take over the family business.
Shelter and sustenance are at the very bottom of the hierarchy of needs. Fulfilling those needs gives more room for things like innovation and education. Society isn’t going to grind to a halt just because people are happy and have lots of free time.
So, city-paid cleaners…
Hastur, and I thought I lived in the developing world… ours gets swept once a month or so.
Who don’t clean anything. We’ve already talked about replicator/dematerializer bins that wouldn’t need emptying. Heck in some parts of the world they already have vacuum-operated trash collection, though I don’t know if it’s used in that way rather than as a replacement for home/business bins. The point, which you seem to be deliberately ignoring, is that those garbagemen don’t clean up litter because that’s not their job, and for the most part there isn’t litter to be cleaned up.
There’s little point in sweeping streets that don’t need it. I think downtown streets are swept nightly, which sounds a bit excessive. Other main streets get swept weekly at most. Even if they’re swept less often, a weekly schedule makes parking restrictions easier (no parking Tuesdays from 1:00am to 5:00am etc). For all the other streets, there’s just not enough need for sweeping, and too many parked cars. Now here’s a thought. Instead of parking your car, what if you could dematerialize it and rematerialize it as-needed? Just don’t leave the dog in there.
So far the most poignant economic observations apparent to me, are that while goods may become more or less ‘free,’ things like real estate and services would still bear societal costs.
I found it interesting that Star ship crew didn’t have a lot of items in their quarters. That’s partially because they’re stationed on a ship with limited space.
But, the replicator makes it unnecessary to hang onto stuff. There’s no need for a closet full of clothes. A person’s favorite outfit can be produced whenever it’s needed.
A few things used daily are kept. Riker’s trombone for example is kept available whenever he wants to practice. He probably values the marks on it from regular use.
It used to be that people only had a few prized possessions that were passed down in the family. Great-great grandma may have only owned three or four nice pieces of jewelry.
That could return with replicators. People will always have a few treasured items they enjoy and pass down.
In The Diamond Age the illiterate slum-dwellers could get simple items like food and mattresses out of the public replicators, but selection was limited and so was bandwidth so you had to wait for hours while it 3D-printed anything bulky. This was not a problem for elites. There was something vaguely like that in Transmetropolitan as well, with people who could not afford anything better scavenging for trash to use as raw material. And, speaking of Star Trek, even within Starfleet, there was a line in Lower Decks explaining that junior officers did not have access to the “good” replicators which served tasty food.
That may be “canon” but it’s not particularly good writing IMO.
Food recipes aren’t under copyright NOW. Why would they be restricted in the future? Presumably everyone in Starfleet knows something of civilian life. People in civilian life will have all of this available to them. Lord knows I can look up a ton of recipes on the Internet, for free, or at best the cost of my devices and Internet access. This is all going to exist in the future, I presume. So the base level will be a wide variety of knowledge for anyone WHO CHOOSES TO USE IT. And many of these people will NOT have particularly high status, however that is determined in this post scarcity world.
There may be select media or innovations that someone comes up with on their own that they are willing to trade for credits or whatever, but I really don’t know how that would be bound by class. And a lot would be freely available at no cost, and again the determination to use it would be the separating point, not class. And again, food recipes are ALREADY basically public domain.
So unless Trek is supposed to be some sort of secret dystopia, that’s just bad writing.
The implication is that the replicators on the ship have a set menu, and ensigns are restricted to a subset of that menu. The subset still appears to be pretty broad, though.
There’s nothing particularly dystopian about giving officers in a military environment slightly nicer things than the ensigns get.
It’s like restricting access to the library or Internet or being able to code. Based on class. It costs nothing materially, we just won’t let you. Because class.
Cooking a good meal for yourself is not particularly a luxury item NOW. Unless you need a rare ingredient. But it’s a replicator, so that doesn’t matter any more. But we won’t let you do that. Because class.
Dystopia.
Okay.
It’s not that they restrict access to the low-ranking personnel. It’s that they make an effort to get difficult-to-acquire stuff for the high-ranking personnel.
But what’s difficult-to-acquire for a replicator? Recipes seem like one of the easiest things to do. Or maybe not recipes per se, but if the filet mignon and lobster tail has already been scanned in and programmed, why restrict it other than to create artificial scarcity? I just think it makes more sense to give higher-ranking personnel more holodeck time or other perks, and not restrict the ensigns to eating bachelor chow (now with flavor!). It’s the same objection I have to software locking out your car’s heated seats, or requiring a paid upgrade to increase the artificially-reduced speed of your printer.
That said, there are some (I think) strange limitations imposed on replicators in the Star Trek Universe. Especially in DS9 there’s claims that the food doesn’t taste as good, but it makes no sense why that would be. Same in VOY where Captain Janeway has somehow managed to replicate burned roasts, on more than one occasion, in her attempt to cook with the replicator.
That’s fine, but that’s not post-scarcity.
Maybe a chicken egg is better than a replicator egg. But computers are computers. I have to assume replicator eggs are effectively ubiquitous and basically free. Basically like decide which video to watch on YouTube. Is there a cost there?
It’s a computer. If it can actually do replication, it’s all going to be effectively free and more or less instantaneous. For civilians as well as Starfleet. It’s going to be like breathing. Putting on restrictions in that sort of society would make absolutely no sense.
Can a replicator self replicate? If I do not own a replicator can my friend replicate me one free of charge?
Recipes. Some people will share their new templates for nothing more than personal satisfaction, or civic duty, or other non-gain-oriented motive, sure. Others will want something in return. Maybe a one-time favor, another template in return, or some kind of deal where they get ongoing access to a service or activity. In other words, there will still be IP licensing deals, and some of those deals may include how many replicators the licensee is allowed to load the template on. The licensee will have to prioritize use of the templates according to their own protocols.
Here’s an example:
An NPC I created for Eclipse Phase is a chef, who is also a retired biochemist and engineer. His specialty is not just creating templates for new dishes, but creating new ingredients. He researches the tastes of individuals, builds a profile, and creates templates for foodstuffs that have never existed before. Then he invites them to dinner to evaluate the result. (E.g., he profiles someone who loves surf-and-turf. For them, he creates a template for a steak richly marbled with fat that tastes like lobster and garlic butter.)
When he hits something that seems like it will be popular beyond the person it was created for, he licenses it exclusively to one of a number of socialites known for hosting novelty dinners in exchange for access to some service they operate (usually travel-related). The licensee gets a dish to serve that is only available at their parties, which elevates their rep and draws in people they can call on for favors in turn, and the chef gets a nice place to stay and various other conveniences when he visits their area. It’s a formalized way of trading and calling in favors. “You know that floral-scented sushi you loved at my last party? The chef who created it is visiting town next month and would love to stay at your little bed & breakfast.”
(In practice, that gets abstracted a bit in the setting, with the use of rep within specialized, interlinked social networks as a sort of currency. I’m in the “currency will not go away” camp, so I figure we’d just use money to handle this stuff.)
How are you going to enforce compliance of the licence. If it does get out, how do you punish copyright violators?