What would a post-scarcity society be like?

Great Debates
1

In this thread, we’ve just hijacked it - To The Future!

Opinions seem to be differing on what a post-scarcity society with plentiful power and readily-available fabrication* might be like.

Me, I side with those who say it will follow an Open Source model, meaning no real place for MegaCorps in providing everyday consumer items. The economics of a fabber that can create copies of itself make this inevitable, IMO. Sure, there might be a half-assed attempt at a fabbing DRM-type system by corporate interests, but it won’t work when there are enough people out there with the know-how to duplicate the systems. That, plus fabbing is currently an Open Source-modelled initiative anyway.

I also think it will usher in a status economy based on design savvy. People who are good spec designers will be accorded status, similar to the way software gurus are viewed today in the OS community. Or the way another community I’m peripherally involved in, the Steampunk community, accords elevated status to modders and crafters who produce interesting works, like Jake von Slatt or Datamancer

The big question, to me, is whether this will have a significant political impact. Personally, I think it’d have to wait for post-humanism in toto, not just post-scarcity, but that’s more my distrust of government speaking, not any real intellectual extrapolation.

So, what do people think?

*I’m using fabrication rather than replication to step a little away from the idea we’re talking Star Trek here. More a couple of decades of evolution of the RepRaptechnology.

2

Oddly I don’t think it would change things much at all. I mean, obviously it would change the details but not the big picture. I base that on two observations:

  1. You haven’t eliminated scarcity at all, you’ve just altered what is scarce. This has happened countless times in the past and hasn’t changed things much. Once upon a time food was scarce, but it hasn’t been in the western world for 50+ years. That’s a major change and it didn’t change things at all. Ditto for medicine, education, entertainment and so forth. A person on welfare today is living a life that would have been envied by kings 200 years ago, but society as whole isn’t much different to 200 years ago.

And by not having eliminated scarcity I mean that there are still huge numbers of things of things that are desirable that the replicator can’t make.

It can’t make me a beautiful woman. It might be able to make me a robot, but I’m assuming it can’t make actual humans.

It can’t make a different brain. Education is one of the major expenses on the modern US, and with less of other stuff to spend on it will likely become the number one expenditure. I want my kids to have the best education, I want myself to have the best education. The replicator isn’t going to change that.

It can’t make me a beachfront estate in Malibu. It might conceivably be able to make artificial islands, but massive ecological damage will result if we push that to the point of creating more than about 5% more land than we have now. So while houses may be free land will be just as expensive as today.

It can’t give me all the skills in the world. It can’t make me as software writing, tax lawyering, heavyweight champion of the world. If I want those skills I’m going to have to hire them somehow.

  1. You haven’t changed human nature.. People still want sex. They still want status. They still want a feeling of self worth. They still want security. They still want entertainment and excitement and adventure. They want to socialise. They want privacy. At best you catered for some of the most basic physical needs. Just as importantly you haven’t ended conflict, especially ideological. For example, Libertarians will still oppose Environmentalists, Palestianians will still oppose Israelis. You can’t build your way out of those conflicts. They are ideological.

So let’s look at me as an example. I wake up tomorrow in Fabraria. What do I do? Well I still own my house and I don’t want it broken into for privacy reasons. And I still want to go out to the local pub tonight with some friends, and some drunks will still be obnoxious and violent. So I still need some sort of security force. So I still need to be able to pay the police. Ditto for hiring bartenders and so forth.

So I still need to get paid. So does everyone else. So I still need to trade my skills in research and teaching for money. That’s easy because a fabricator can’t research or teach. And the local cop needs to have his kids educated, so he needs to work for me and the other members of society to get the money to pay me to teach his kids.

And the designers of these fabber blueprints? They need to be educated and they like to go out to bars as well. So they will need to get paid. That means that they will have an incentive to protect their IP, just like software writers of today.

So how have things haven’t changed? This isn’t status based economy. It’s a classic capitalist economy . All we’ve done is switched from a mixed goods/service economy to a primarily service economy. All the fabber has done is devalued goods. Services have retained their value, they still need to be paid for.

3

All in all I fail to see how this technology would change things much. In the real world the rate that technology advances means old “abandonware” has little value and people will still pay for the latest versions. A large amount of the modern economy is based on brand appeal anyway, so knock offs of Coke simply won’t sell. And a large amount of the modern economy is already service based.

All the fabber will do is shift the economy entirely to brand appeal, upgrades and service. That would seem likely to spell the end of small, independent organisations while increasing the market share of giants like Coke, Nokia and Versace. And that seems to be exactly the opposite of what you predict.

Allow me to expand.
Software today isn’t open source. Maybe some current fabber designs are open source, but that’s because there isn’t the market to justify protecting. It’s just a hobby. But when a billion people want a design why would the designer release it OS? The designers till need to pay for services and still want to pay for the latest video games

As for the idea that old OS products will make the newer propriety stuff worthless and drive out the megacorps, I have but two words: cell phones.

IIRC there have been enough cell phones sold in the US in the last 10 years to give every man woman and child at 5 units each. You can buy 5 year old models in pawn shops 20 bucks. But sales of cell phones are increasing, not decreasing. I could draw the same analogy with computer games. You can pick up a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004 for under 20 bucks on ebay. The original C2000 edition for under 10 bucks. The latest release cost $100+ new. There is only minimal difference in function between these products. Yet sales of these games are increasing, not declining.

So why would fabbing be any different? People want the latest and flashest gadgets and toys with all the bells and whistles. The above examples prove that they will happily shell out hundreds of dollars for new products and eschew essentially free products just a few years old. Maybe some things that have seen only cosmetic changes in the last 30 years (eg toasters) would become OS, but there will still be more than enough demand for new, copyrighted designs to keep a very vibrant megacorporation sector running.

The biggest change may be the effort put into DRM technology. I can see designers implanting tracking bugs into the products. I can also see them utilising image recognition software to and smartcards to sound an alarm when they see knockoff technology. Would you wear knock off jeans if every time you walked past a street sign it yelled out that you had stolen them? I can also see many products only being constructable by propriety machines in boutiques. IOW the design for the latest Jeans simply won’t work on a standard unit. Sure you can do knockoffs, but the technology exists for knockoff jeans now, yet a thriving rag trade still exists. The costs of sewing a pair of knockoffs doesn’t quite justify the profit made + the risk of prosecution. I can’t see why the same wouldn’t also apply to fabricator technology.

Really I can’t see this technology changing the overall structure of society much at all. The change swill be less than the invention of the steam engine for example. Probably on par with the invention of electronics I would think. IOW compare 1940s USA with modern USA and that’s probably how much this technology will change society. Not trivial changes to be sure, but I don’t think they would be as great as you imagine they will be .

4

Never thought about it, Blake, but your reasoning makes a lot of sense. The technology suggested here rather expands our already established ability to change the external world, it doesn’t revolutionize our approach.

A game changer would be a technology that allows us to change the internal world, i.e. us, to a degree that creates new species; but that isn’t the topic under discussion.

5

It will increase man’s ability to get off this planet. Fab a launch vehicle? No problem. Fab a plant to create the vehicle’s fuel? No problem. Send a fabber to an asteroid and turn it into habitat? No problem. Create a huge telescope? No problem. Onward to the stars!

6

I disagree about the software/cell phone analogies. The problem in software is that we we don’t yet have a mature software industry. People are still inventing new kinds of applications, and new applications are enough better that people are still willing to pay for them. But this is clearly showing signs of slowing down. Remember back in the 90s when you needed a new computer every other year just so you could run the latest?

But nowadays things have slowed down. Do you really need Office 2007 when you already have Office 2004? Or OpenOffice? What will the office suite business look like 10 years from now? There will still be people making money from it, but is it going to be the cash cow it is now? Same with operating systems. Sure, it’s a cash cow now. But in 10 or 20 years?

I think we’re going to see a move away from creating new applications and towards customization and service for existing applications. So a database software doesn’t cost anything. But somebody’s got to set it up, somebody’s got to figure out the front end, somebody’s got to enter/migrate the data, somebody’s got to figure out what happened when things go to hell, and so on.

Cell phones are a similar case. They aren’t mature technology–just look at the changes from just 15 years ago when people were still using beepers, for crying out loud. And now you’ve got your smart phones which aren’t quite able to replace your desktop or laptop, but that’s the trend. But what happens when the cell phone/smart phone matures? How many more bells and whistles are people willing to pay for? A phone that you can use to access the internet and listen to music and watch movies and take pictures is a far cry from the beepers of the 90s.

So people will pay for the latest and greatest–if the latest and greatest really is better. I take your point that given human ingenuity there will always be something that’s brand new that everyone wants, and the more human ingenuity is spent on coming up with new things rather than subsistence farming or working in a sweatshop factory, the more new things we get.

The trouble as I see it is that there will be lots of people that will be effectively unable to produce anything of much value in the future. Luckily for them, providing the basics of life will be very inexpensive. So inexpensive that it would be more trouble than it’s worth to force them to work for a living, because it would cost more money to make them work than they can provide.

So there’s going to be a society where lots of people have a comfortable living but don’t work and don’t have access to the latest and greatest. And the upper tier will work at jobs that don’t look much different than the jobs they have today. They work hard providing the latest and greatest but the only thing worthwhile for them to buy is the latest and greatest, because nearly free open source goods are there for the taking. And so their work becomes mainly about status, and the money they get for their work isn’t worth much.

People still want to be famous musicians and actors and game designers and writers, but not because of the material comforts those positions provide, but because of the status. And this tends to drive the fees they charge for their creative output down to zero, since they are competing against public domain/pirated stuff. They care about being famous, and it’s more important that 100 million people see their stuff than they get a dollar every time someone sees their stuff, because what good is $100,000,000? What are you going to buy with that that’s better than fame/respect/status?

Modern day entertainment/software fortunes are based on the idea of a million average guys ponying up $8.99 or $14.99 every few months for the latest music or game or movie. But how is that going to work when the average guy doesn’t have a job and doesn’t need a job? You can become rich by being a rock star, but the riches are just part of the status boost.

So I see a situation that isn’t anything like socialism, but where most things including entertainment and education don’t cost anything to the end user. People will work, but much of their work except for the really talented won’t be compensated work. People with an inclination will contribute, like people contribute to Wikipedia. There will be a capitalist economy, but it will be important only for some people. It might b that people will work really hard for goods that seem really esoteric to us. Never underestimate the human need for status. Or they might sit around and watch TV all day. Never underestimate human laziness either. I can’t predict the mixture, but I see most people as pretty lazy. It’s not like they’ll watch TV all day either–they won’t be tied to a particular location by their crappy job. They can do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t cost any real money.

7

Actually, it did; fat is no longer a status symbol. By the same token, I expect a world with replicators is a world where material goods in general ( depending on what can be replicated ) just aren’t considered a sign of status. Someone who tried to accumulate a lot of “stuff” might well be regarded the way we regard some 600 pound guy who needs others to feed him. It also reduced the death toll in bad times among the poor, which is certainly a major change.

An automated economy also increases the range of possible societies; for example, right now, a society that doesn’t pressure people to work in some fashion just isn’t sustainable. This greater social flexibility could be good and bad, since it also means that societies can get a lot ***worse ***without impacting their ability to sustain themselves.

Well, it sure seems different to me. No famines, plagues a rarity, almost no extended families, and so on.

8

True. Perhaps “post-scarcity” isn’t the most accurate term one could use, but it is the term of art, so I used it. Really, what I’m talking about is a post-necessary-labour society, but that doesn’t role off the tongue.

You’ve also catered for any normal consumer good anyone could want. That includes computers, televisions, phones, cars.

The assumption here, of course, is that someone else will want to be a cop or bartender when they don’t have to in order to be materially satisfied…

Only if they want the non-fabbable goods that require money. One does not need money to have sex, or to spend time with friends, or a lot of other things you list. Yes, today we spend money on these things, but who is to say what social mores may develop with the new tech? I don’t agree that we are the same society we were 200 years ago - far from it.

But work like teaching and research are also done today by people who don’t make money off them. So clearly, one does not have to do these things in order to live. One can do them for love of the job. What are you going to do when some guy who can do your job, but doesn’t need more than he can get from any fabber, comes along? When he opens up a free school for all the cops’ kids?

Maybe. Of course, some people live in countries where education is free, so how do you comete with that? And maybe they get their drinks for free 'cos they wrote the glass- and coaster-fabbing routines for the bar. Or they program a mean Stout. How do the people who still want money compete with people like that? Today, OS writers often have day jobs, because they need food, bandwidth, machines. If they didn’t, they’d still write code, because it’s what they do. But past experience says, they’ll continue to give away what they can.

Are you claiming that there is no Open Source and other similarly-licenced software today?

But a service economy that has the server’s needs for material goods removed is not something we’ve ever had under classic capitalism. How is that going to change what values are traded for services? I understand that there will still be money involved at some point, but the question is what that money will ultimately represent to the people living in the society.

9

How can any society be post-scarcity?

Logan’s Run? Or just mandatory family planning?

10

That’s the hard part. We know that some goods and services will still be scarce, because that’s just human nature. But the method for dividing up those scarce goods and services, and what exactly those scarce goods and services will be is a bit murky.

Land has been mentioned over and over again. But what is the use of land? Why do people want it? If you just want a spot where you can have a yard and a fence and not live in a high-rise apartment, such land is not scarce today. What is scarce is land that is in proximity to good jobs, interesting cities, harbors, downtowns, and so on.

If you aren’t tied to a particular location by your job, then you can move anywhere in the world. You can move to the Australian Outback and have hundreds of acres of desert to yourself. Most durable goods you need come out of a fabricator. You’re connected to the internet so your home entertainment needs are taken care of. You can even work at a “job” that just requires typing at a keyboard. You could be a writer, or a designer, or whatever, and your location is irrelevant.

But most people don’t want to live that way. They want their own space, but they also want to be around other people. That’s why people move to New York, and then complain about how crowded it is. So land near other people will be desirable, and it’s desirable simply because other people live there. So you’ll have pull to the desirable areas since you won’t starve if you move to New York, and a pull to wilderness areas since you won’t starve if you move to Antarctica. There won’t be an economic need to live in a particular place, just a social need.

But since most people won’t be economically productive in the sense that no other people would be willing to trade scarce goods and services for any goods and services they would be capable of providing, that means that land and housing prices become unmoored to what we think of as reality. If you own a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, what in the world would you exchange that for? What could someone else offer to give you that you want more? It would have to be something else that can’t be provided by automation. But even if you’re dead broke, you can’t starve in your Manhattan apartment, since consumer goods are (nearly) free. You can live there even if you’ve got no other scarce assets to speak of.

11

Even if you can snap your fingers and have all the materials for an airplane appear, that doesn’t give you any help in actually building a functional airplane. You still need a bunch of engineers to figure out how to put it together so that it works, how to design the control system to respond appropriately to pilot input, how to design the controls to be easy to use, how to optimize the shape and construction of the airplane so as to minimize fuel usage, how to make the instruments work, and a thousand other things that I don’t even know about. Even if there are free schools, the number of people who are capable of being engineers and interested in doing so is still going to be limited (i.e., scarce). If you think we have a hereditary overclass now, just wait until it’s based on something that’s even more inheritable than status and wealth.

12

I feel I should weigh in, and I suspect my presented hypothetical that probably started this hijack.

In my postulated hypothetical world (which I’ve developed for a fiction story), the society is roughly like a capitalist socity where everybody gets welfare payments worth in material terms worth about 35000-40000 modern dollars a year, if spent on goods. This takes into account that fabbed items would be very cheap. They’re not free though; the specs would be essentially copyrighted and protected basically by hardware DRM. (Fabbers read the specs off a card inserted into a slot.) Not uncircumventable, but most wouldn’t bother.

Labor would still cost and pay out; persons who actually manged to carve themselves out jobs of worth to society would basically become fabulously wealthy very fast (after which we rely on fame and status to encourage them to keep working). Everyone else would live comforably on the dole.

Most people life in specatularly tall high-rises, provided by the government. Presumably you could pay for the use of more space, but it hasn’t come up in-story :D. Several nearby planets, moons, and asteroids have at least domed colonies on them.

So yeah - that doesn’t really argue with anything anyone’s said here, I don’t think, but I thought I’d weigh in anyway.

13

I just suspect that in 20-30 years all our attempts at DRM and copyright enforcement will fail. They just won’t work given general purpose computers and networks, and the fact that copying and transmitting information is essentially cost-free.

That might be a bad thing and result in lots of creative people no longer being able to charge money for their creations, and we’ll get fewer desirable creations in the future, but we can’t wave a magic wand and wish that computers never happened.

And so I suspect that long before we reach a society of ubiquitous ultracheap custom fabrication, we’ll have a world where everything that is digitally reproducible will be available to the end user without extra cost. People might pay extra money for internet access that goes into a fund to compensate creators somehow, but the future is every work ever created, available on any device, in any format, anywhere in the world, any time you want, for no extra cost.

So specifications for fabrication units will be no different. By then no one will expect to be able to keep specifications private, unless you keep them secret. You can keep the files on your computer secret from everyone in the whole world, but the second you share that file with one other person then you’ve lost control over it.

Think about it. The only reason to have DRM style protection on fabrication specifications is to be able to charge people money for them. But since most people won’t have any money they won’t be able to buy the specs even if they wanted to. Trying to make them pay is hopeless. They’ll either use pirated specs or public domain specs. The only time it’s worthwhile to try to charge for goods is if you expect only other members of the elite creative class to pay for them. Specs for generic consumer goods are worthless and people will only create them for fun, or as charity, or as welfare, or perhaps they were produced in the hope of making money but are now in the de facto public domain. That might mean we won’t get very many worthwhile new designs for basic goods, but just because that’s suboptimal it doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

So creative people will spend the majority of their efforts producing works to impress other members of the creative class, and the proles on welfare will have to make do with fabulous wealth that isn’t worth anything because it’s yesterday’s fashion.

14

Not necessarily; steps could actually be taken to protect DRM much more voraciously than currently are being taken. It could be protected by hardware, for example - and if the hardware was protecting the data all down the chain, it would be very difficult to crack. A certain set of people would scream bloody murder, of course, but most people would only care if it impeded their use of it. And given that the protesters would all be labeled as hackers and pirates, I think it would be politically possible to distribute fabricators that only ran on hardware cards. (Which would be functionally like those old cartriges for nintendo - a bit of a pain to copy. And you could make the fabbers detect and refuse to fabricate fabber spec cards!)

Now, yes, some people will come up with ways to crack this, but many people won’t bother following their lead unless it seems worth their while. So as long as most things a person wants to fab can be afforded with their fabber allowance (you know, the dole), most people won’t bother trying to crack the fabber cards. If that weren’t the case, if people had a compulsive DRM-defeating mindset, CD and DVD sales would already be completely - completely dead.

(As an added bonus, in my fiction hacking is punished by death, no exceptions, after an incident involving the erasure of most of the world’s data. This would probably serve as an additional deterrent.)

15

And it would; effective security is always inconvenient and inefficient. A setup that heavily protected would probably be about as efficient as the old Soviet economy; everyone would spend all their time waiting to be verified as a legitimate user or clearing up glitches where they are not, somewhere up the chain.

Until someone made even one fabricator that didn’t work that way, and set it to make copies.

And there’s the problem; you’d basically need a tyranny, to enforce artificial rules that exist only to create a kabuki version of an economy. You’d need to force people to only use the crippled version of the fabricators, guard the borders heavily to make sure no free versions are smuggled in, and forbid anyone from giving away any designs for free.

I’m reminded of an old story where it turned out there where there were two basic jobs in the future; screw tighteners, and screw looseners ( who existed to make the first necessary ).

16

Not necessarily. We are willing to use ATMs despite the arduous requirement to enter a PIN number each time. Not ALL secure systems need be grossly inefficient.

At which point you end up with a guy with a large pile of hacked fabricators in his backyard. Remember, you’d need a hacked fabricator to fab a hacked fabricator - you can’t just email out the specs because you need a physical card to run a non-hacked device. So, these things would have to be distributed physically.

And he’d better only distribute them to real close friends, too, because you don’t need a tyranny to send to cops after somebody who is distributing illegal objects that 1) are the size of microwave ovens or larger, and 2) are massively illegal by a government that recognizes that these puppies could destroy all remaining motivation for anyone in the economy to invent anything again. Like if the MPAA ran the police force! And bootleg DVDs were large and hard to hide!

And I’m reminded of the fact that nobody EVER buys a legal DVD in the US, because we can download everything for free.

Oh, wait, you think the US is a tyranny! That’s why the MPAA still breathes!

17

Which would be a good way to undercut support for the whole system. Heavy handed enforcement of victimless crimes like that tends to have that effect.

People still buy them because we still have a scarcity based economy. The artists need to eat, the DVDs need to be manufactured and distributed. And we haven’t had decades more worth of the old scarcity mindsets being eroded. It’s not the law that keeps the system working; it’s that the vast majority of people play along because they think it’s necessary. If people are only playing along because the law makes them, that requires a tyranny to enforce.

18

After a week or so wrestling (mostly fruitlessly) with the open-source CMS Joomla, I’m tempted to conclude that an infoöcracy will be anything but post-scarcity. The infoöcracy will be a meritocracy, and a particularly ruthless one.

The next generation of information mastery, the status, money, power, hot cars and trophy wives, is not going to go to the bloggers or the viral videoists. In fact, it is not even going to make those folks’ lives or work much easier. The future, I suspect, will belong to people who are constantly learning the new systems built on the old codes. Those systems - like Joomla - are open-sourced, sure, but there are new barriers to entry: lousy documentation, assumptions of prior knowledge, assumptions of a certain nameless intuitive understanding of what pushes on what to make things appear onscreen and work when you hit the buttons. Work will get easier and easier for fewer and fewer, and the ticket to join that group will be harder and harder to earn.

Knowledge can make a scarcity economy as airtight as money or any other resource. The knowledge aristocracy will be the people who have the kind of knowledge that has always been rewarded: hard in numbers, hard in difficulty, and highly dependent on mental efficiency and abstraction.

19

Cory Doctorow depicts a hypothetical post-scarcity world in which the currency of choice is Whuffie

You can read the entire book online for free

20

The idea of police in a post-scarcity world intrigues me. There’s definitely going to be a need for them - even if we say property theft is out the window, there are always going to be people who get their jollies from harassing other people. As long as we’re not talking pure anarchy here, there’s gonna be some form of government security needed. So, how exactly do you pay police?

Well, I do think there’s something to the idea of a pure service economy. Even if material goods suddenly dropped in price to 0 (and the raw materials won’t - trust me, I’ve spent a fair amount of money on metal and plastic and what-have-you) and we hypothesized a world with no copyright, there would still be services to sell. For example, anything customized would still be worth something - marketing isn’t something you can just pirate, after all. Living in a city would be worth something, too. You’re still going to need doctors, teachers, lawyers, and you’ll need to pay taxes, so you’re still going to need a job of some sort. So, yeah, money sticks around, and that’s what you use to pay your police - it’s also what you use to pay for all the other services you use.

Basically, as long as there are services that can’t be produced by essentially-free robots with AI, there is going to be an economy, and it’s not going to be too different from, say, a first-world city’s service economy.