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Nanotech, the Future, and the Economy
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Well yeah, I imagined that for a variety of reasons society would not be able to implement that kind of system, but I always did think it neat. You had food and shelter and health guaranteed. Anything else you had to work for. The thing with the car study, I liked how they calculated basically everything that went into all (or most of) the current cars in the American market and came up with values for it. I think it would be an interesting computational problem to keep a database of every product and service, and what it would take to update it when someone refines a process to make something less expensive or polluting.
The federal government has spent a lot of money paying nanotech-related developers to hold back on certain advances, kind of like how they pay farmers not to grow crops. A friend of mine who is a "Good Will Hunting" level mathematician has been paid a pittance to consult with the federal government (of the U.S., that is) on questions much like what the OP posed. Now, granted, they've also spent money on testing ketchup flow and investigations into "remote viewing" and stuff, so that's not proof right there, but it's one reason not to just discount the idea on a knee-jerk level.
And really, it's worth thinking about anyway as a philosophical excercise - we should all want a better world, and the situation posed by the OP certainly seems like a step in that direction, unless your idea of "paradise" or a utopia is still one where there is greed and want and starvation. Even if it's not to be achieved in that precise manner, it's a worthy topic to occupy someone's imagination for a time (or even as a career).
Anyone dissing the OP based on "rawr, it's not teh SCIENZZE, d00d!" can go back a few decades and mock someone for imagining a day in the next few centuries where computers are something available to and useful for the common man, as opposed to being ten times the size and a thousand times more expensive, so that only the ten richest kings in Europe could afford them (I know that's not an exact quote)...
That was only because his "maker" was on drugs. Machines that aren't zonked out on something would make perfectly normal pairs of glasses.
I'm thinking you should learn to read, first of all. The most pointless post I've read so far has been yours. I don't buy into conspiracy bullshit - I just know some easy-to-find-out facts that are public knowledge (the Freedom of Information Act lets us see all the worthless shit the government spends our tax dollars on - it's fun). I just acknowledged that while there's a lot that we don't know about the future of nanotech, it's silly to assume that we're going to be like Star Trek in the next 50 years, and it's silly to dismiss the OPs desire to talk about what it might be like if we were. It's also silly to be a jackass troll - you should try harder to not be like that.
Like what? This is the first I've heard of it.
Why would you want to do that? The question you're essentially asking in the OP and here becomes 'what would we be like if we were godlike', and its kind of a 'duh' answer, that one. Much more interesting to speculate on the actual likely impact of a 'maker' within the constraints other people have pointed out here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty
...then in 2001 about 2.7 billion of the world's people were living on less than US$2/day. Until your "stuff-maker" is efficient enough, and the energy is plentiful enough, to drastically reduce the cost of staple foods, then for people at that end of the scale, what is likely to change is "not much". I think, though, as your hypothetical stuff-maker gets better, and energy becomes more plentiful, you might see a few parallel developments:
1) Reduction of the proportion of people living in absolute poverty. Although there may be perverse effects, Malthusian limitations &c.
2) Relative decrease in the price of material goods compared to immaterial services. Your machine can make whiteboards and stethoscopes but it can't make education or healthcare. So lawyers, doctors, teachers, administrators, &c, are likely to become better off.
3) Changing patterns of environmental problems... this one is a bit complicated... lots of currently useless rubbish can be fed into the stuff-maker as raw materials, right? So many kinds of pollution may be ameliorated by something like this. In fact, if it can take dangerous pollutants and transform them somehow into inert or useful substances, it might allow us to actually reverse certain kinds of environmental damage. OTOH... usually in the past economic growth has been accompanied by rising human populations which has been accompanied by land clearing, pollution, and the destruction of habitat for other animals which then become endangered and/or extinct. My guess would be that this machine wouldn't change that fundamental equation too much.
I disagree.
I think the situation is more dire than just that. With, essential, infinite resources, it wouldn't really pose too much of a problem to provide them with the needed services, if there lack was the actual problem.
I think we would still run into a lot of the same problems we do now. Mainly their governments tend to be: incompetent, corrupt and have interests which are in conflict with large percentages of their populations.
Without resolving that, you would still face all the distribution problems we face today. Items going to waste in warehouses, being stolen from the people by warlords, etc. Sadly a lot of the major barriers to humanitarian efforts... I think they would still be there.
the lack of services is a symptom, of unstable shit governments, and not the actual pathogen.
True, science fiction isn't the same as science- but the good instances are a fantastic way of gaging what the future might become, or at least of gaging our own current society's views of itself.
Why would something designed to create physical objects be debating philosophy with you O_o
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I disagree. In my mind it's not a lack of human resources as much as it is a lack of physical resources that creates poverty. And even the lack of human resources is connected to the lack of physical ones - you don't have good doctors because you don't have the materials to build facilities that will give people the ability to learn the material and educate others. Your doctors suck at emergency procedures because the local hospital was not rich enough to build a practice ER room where they can simulate actual ER situations.
But as far as the services themselves go, they still do exist in extremely poor areas. Just not to the same quality - for reasons I explained - and not to the same extent, because that extent is not necessary. I don't need financial auditors or IT consultants in my area when I have trouble finding food to feed my child.
When you look at parts of the world with advanced service economies, you notice one thing in common: they have considerable material wealth and physical resources, at least to the point where they don't have to worry about lack thereof.
This is why I think a universal constructor or whatever would essentially eliminate poverty.
If I asked for such a proof, I would expect a bunch of sheets of paper with a proof written on them - that's a physical object.
That'd be fine (or it could give me a machine that would render it, which is a physical object, or it could tell me that a Klein bottle can't fully exist in 3 dimensions so it can't create one, which would be fine).
It's not quite the halting problem, but it's along the same lines. It's interesting because I'm asking for something where even having *knowledge* of whether or not it *can* exist would have disastrous implications.
You have to tell them how to build it too.
if you couldn't do that, they wouldn't work.
Unless you want to pretend that they are magic. If they are magic, then they can do your homework for you.
These machines would be just that - machines. Someone would have to tell it exactly how to build a given object, and you'd have to give it the necessary materials. It's not a magic wish box.
Red-headed stepchild, etc.
But...don't we already have those kinds of machines? Like, in factories and stuff?
Not that can create things from the molecular level. This machine would be the general-purpose version of an assembly line - able to build anything from its constituent parts (molecules), but you still need to tell it how to do it.
Ah, ok, that makes a bit more sense than the magic wish-box idea. I remember seeing that link a while back and thinking how cool it was. That's cool, then. However, I'd imagine there'd still be huge issues with time, both in terms of designing the blueprints for what you want as well as how long it'd take for the machine to assemble the molecules correctly from the blueprints. Efficient blueprints (or even better, programs which can design efficient blueprints) would be highly sought-after commodities.
even if it wasn't hard, you'd still need creative people, and their services would have value.
Definitely, presuming they managed to find a way to prevent wide-scale piracy. That's another reason currency would still be useful.
We are already on the verge of creating the first quantum processor using nitrogen vacancy diamond chips, so by the time we are anywhere near the creation of a hadron assembler, room temperature quantum computing will be the norm. Theoretically, complex mathematics won't really stand a chance at that point.
Edit: In fact, Id go as far as to say that quantum computing (or even a step beyond this, going into the hazy realm of Quantum Probability Manipulation) is/are a requirement for this technology to even be considered feasible.
it doesn't matter where the quantum computer is or the conditions it requires, so long as you can still talk to it from wherever.
though that would create another commodity or two.
folks that create stuff still have to set aside time to create it. They would probably like to be reimbursed for their opportunity cost. Their technical skills or sense of style or whatthefuckeverthatmakestheirproductbetter (old Germanic term closely related to talent) are limited resources.
people already want more than they need or could use. It's just human nature. You could the assemblers to fix human nature, but then .01% of people would decide that raping folks for hours on end and then eating them is fun. This is pretty well established science.
On 3D printing, you still need material, and in most cases 3D printers have limited ranges of material design. Plus you have to buy their construction material (ink cartridges v 2.0). Photopolymer (or thermoplastic) 3D printers produce only polymer parts, and metallic systems operate under a different framework.
While I could use my 3D printer to make a plastic part, polymer extrusion or molds will generally kick its ass in terms of cost. 3D printing is probably not cost effective in comparison to old techniques. Maybe if you need micron level detail. I like the demo of the 3" high castle towers with stairs and floors in them. But if those parts required motion, the materials properties of polymers aren't the best option. The technology needs to get much better at integrating multiple types of materials before someone at home can make useful things with a 3D printer. If you look around your house, the amount of items that require assembly is immense. That is probably the sticking point to having a personal universal assembler. The plastic only one would probably kill the market for combs.