Replication and Impact

Replication and Impact

This text file will try to address the issues that might come up in the future due to the effects of matter replication, and the impact on economy and production.

First concern.
With replication people will not need to buy things, they just need energy to replicate things.

Second concern.
If people don't buy things they will not need money.

Third concern.
If people don't need money they will have no drive to work.

Fourth.
If people don't work, productivity drops to near nil.

Basically when matter replication becomes a reality, the effect on the world will be great, many jobs will be disbanded instantly, all production manufacturing, and subsequent factories will be eliminated. Now with replicated consumers can directly create the things they need with energy and common matter. No need for mass production. There is a good that comes from this, first there is no need for waste people create what they want and use it.. when they don't want it they recycle it back into matter. Second distribution of new technologies will be instantaneous. We would be able to download a file of the molecular mapping of the thing you want, and then you can have it instantaneously. The good thing is that pollution will drop from the decreased factories, more land would open up to residential purposes.

A question is if the technology will be able to render previously inorganic matter completely enough to be eaten and digested and will give biological beings the nutritional value it's grown counterpart has. Could the technology also render the replicated portions identical in taste and satisfactional value? If the technology can replicate matter down to the molecule if not atom, then I don't see why it wouldn't be able to copy exactly. But the problem of having orange juice taste exactly the same every time you drink it might get a little annoying... but I am sure that future innovative people can integrate some randomness into the program parameters and vary the tangyness or sweetness or temperature of the drink or whatever else we are replicating. So I believe replicated food can fully replace traditional food with near zero reprecussions, save for the people that will insist on traditional foods. And traditional ways of preparing them. "Don't trust machines"... So this would be solved by introducing the replicator and having people use it to create food of convience, like fast food.. and slowly stopping from eating traditional food. Thus replicated food will become norm and normal food will be phased out.
But it is extremely dangerous to completely phase out normal food because what happens if one day a distortion wave passes through the world and disrupts all electrical equiptment.. and we have no food. That would be dangerous. So we should definately keep a world supply of food. enough to feed everyone for long enough time until we can recreate replicating machines. Hard copies are recommended for everything.

But normal food need to be kept around still. There are always unforseen circumstances in which we might need traditional forms of food. Never eliminate something just because something better can take it's place. I still have dos 5 on disk somewhere.

Now about the fact that when replication is available immediately people will stop buying stuff and start replicating... generally technology will make initial replication prohibitively expensive, and increasing in energy expense the larger the item replicated. So at first only small things expensive things would offset the cost of the replication. So the ideal target for replication would be microchips, and technology devices. Replicate as small as you want, and it will cost less energy the smaller it is and the miniturization factor will do wonders. perfect way to create the famed nanites from the startrek genre.

But as technology grows, it will take less and less relative energy to replicate. I am sure that it will take a constant amount of joules to move electrons in atoms to form molecules and such, but we will discover ways of creating vast amounts of electricity that the replication energies will be insignificant. Development of prototypes will probably take on the form of create by hand.. and then scan into the system when it is ready to be distributed to the consumers.

Now aside from the little electron confinement problem that I was stuck on for a moment to help with making atomic energy safe. Because we would need nuclear energies to modify atoms. maybe we would just have pools of all the elements and create molecules form that.. doesn't take as much energy. Then we wouldn't need nuclear energies.

Now concerning ourself with the problem again. People will stop buying stuff. it will phase out slowly as will production companies and those will phase out as well. So it wouldn't be as large of a problem as we have thought.

People will stop using money. Obviously if we can replicate anything we want we wouldn't need to buy it. what would we have to use money for? to buy energy if anything... we pay electricity bills today.. we will pay them in the future... and if we can't pay we can't replicate and people can starve still... But now that we still have money, how will we all stay alive if a majority of the jobs have been eliminated because production and manufacturing doesn't exists anymore? We do need people to man the energy plants.... We still need janitorial staff, we still need service staff... we still need maintainance for the replicators. And we need designers to create new things. we need people to manage... people to lead.. and people to research. Transportation is still needed. And security... fire, medical, police.. many jobs will still exists... we just happen to get a influx of minimally skilled laborors who will all need to find new jobs... but this should slowly take place as I explained earlier that because of the inhibitive costs replication will start out slow and small.. and then grow slowly as more energy can be created.

Just a slow change over of workers which we have seen in the industrial revolutions where the skilled laborers were replaced by assembly lines, and then the automative revolution where unskilled workers in america was replaced by machines or sent to be done overseas where labor was cheaper. This will just be another change to where all who work will be service orientated, or creation based.

How will this effect the people in poverty? One thing is the slow increase in standard of living. I'm sure with this increase the government may be able to find themselves with enough means to replicate food or give poor people food replication rations. Places to live? with factories dissapearing.. more places to live will open up...

This is the physical manifest of the situation in the internet world. Things are free and copies can be made without cost. All that is used is bandwidth... which given the infinite state of time is not all that big of a deal. A society where anything and everything needed can be made at no cost except for some energy bills, some hard drive space, and bandwidth and online time. it parallels the idea of replication where with energy you can have all you want.

So for all you commercial people wanting to somehow protect copyrights, patents and etc... when you make these replicating machines, create it so it can make things and not scan things. Oh sure inventors and such can create things, people can't archive diaries... maybe scanning can be made possible, but that is a good stump... They need to keep the files in a central database and the only way to get a copy is from the central bank, and individual machines can not upload to other machines... With scanning, for inventors, they would have to upload their scanned things to the central base. I suppose that inventors have the right to scan and keep it locally and duplicate and then sell for profit so people have to buy it directly from him.. or he can upload it to central database and get a royalty for each download another person makes...
people will obviously have to pay to buy these products.. and it is basically paying for the development of this device... it contradict the original intention I had of having this replication in the first place... it was so people would be able to have stuff without paying a fee for it. But I guess that won't happen.. maybe if people start to have upload / download credits.. but who decides what gets more credits... I guess the most useful item, most downloaded will give the creator more credits.. and with credits it is like money.. or maybe make it money instead of credits.

Thoses are thoughts that others will have to ponder when the technology seems more viable.
For now I still haven't answered the question of thing ripping that will obviously happen if people can scan and replicate. One easy way is to abolish the credit idea... but new creations have to be made and then sold otherwise it wouldn't be made.. communism didn't work. Or maybe research and development could be government funded. Government collect taxes, and pays people who submit new designs that are downloaded and used widely money based on how much their design is downloaded and used. Hmmm I would guess that someone must have all the databases in on area. and have a tab on who uses what... I guess this is the best idea of distributing that I've came up with so far...

ok gotta jet to class... this will be taken up later.

On a last note how is replication possible? If we knew the molecular structure of stuff atom by atom.. we would be able to peice together the original, easily. But this will require massive data as we would have to scan down to the atomic level and store it. Of course creating molecular peices would be even harder. We would need to direct each indvidual atoms to form molecules, and put them together and create things. How can we control these little atoms? Certainly we need to control each individual atom separately without effecting other atoms. One method might be to use mechanical means to bring these atoms together and stuff with nanite like machines. Another method is to use forces, we know what atoms are affected by gravity, the strong force, and the weak force. It does not seem possible at the time of the writing to use forces to individually affect atoms.