In the future, only one person will have money. No one else will be able to sell anything.
Who is this person? One person will get the patent for the uber-nanotech machine - able to take any raw input and, manufacturing at the atomic or even sub-atomic level, provide any finished output. Food, clothing, houses, appliances... all these products can be programmed in and produced. No one else will be able to sell goods because everyone else will be able to produce whatever they want on the UNT (uber-nanotech) machine.
So, this one person will have money from the patent royalties while everything else falls into the category of pirate-ware. The problem is, no one else will be interested in money. They won't need it.
R World (Ron Davison muses aloud)
OK, the material economy will be dead, but what happened then to the knowledge economy? :)
ReplyDeleteThings will cost nothing with this UNT machine, but clearly somebody has to design its products?
How do you price design in an age of pirateware? Once someone has bought one, the design is effectively public domain.
ReplyDeleteSo does the UNT perform R&D so that new products can be developed and then pirated? There's a hole here Ron.
ReplyDelete:)
ReplyDeleteDavid - no hole. In the future, everything will be retro. The designs will all come from the 1950s and 1970s (in the future, people will be oddly disinterested in design from the 1960s and 1980s).
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