Renting factories (was re: Robotic nation)

From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Fri Jul 25 2003 - 23:15:46 MDT

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    --- ABlainey@aol.com wrote:
    > It didnt take much to realise that the only people
    > in the future that would
    > have a job, would be the people that owned the
    > machines. In that, I saw one
    > possible solution for the average Joe worker.
    > If Joe owned a machine. He could supply the services
    > of said machine to a
    > company, rather than his sevices directly. In
    > addition to this, he would be
    > responsible for the maintenance and running of the
    > machine. The company pays for
    > either the hours the machine runs or the amount of
    > work done, for example the
    > quantity of units produced.
    >
    > This may seem like a stupid idea at first and very
    > difficult to manage.
    > However it isn't very far from the system that is
    > already in place in many
    > factories. The machines are rented from one company,
    > The workers stand around watching
    > and feeding and they are also payed a productivity
    > bonus.

    Granted, you said you hadn't worked out the details,
    but this is a possible future others have thought
    about.
    A few nits, for contemplation:

    * Companies, being the businesses they are, will tend
    towards the maximum profit for the minimal investment.
    If ordinary joes can purchase fabricators, then so can
    companies themselves - or, at least, people working
    for
    companies. If there is any profit to be had by
    buying a machine then renting it to a company, then
    why
    would the company not just take that profit itself by
    just buying the machine itself?

    * One possible solution: the relationship is actually
    the inverse. There is one giant factory that can make
    anything, in quantity and fast, but it's so expensive
    that its users can not purchase one. The few owners
    of
    these fabricators would become super-rich, though they
    may well invest part of their wealth into building
    more
    fabricators. (Which works out to everyone's benefit,
    but doesn't provide an easy path for Joe Average to
    get more than his fair share of the wealth.)

    * Another: copyright. Again, assume make-anything
    fabricators, like advanced versions of today's CNC
    machines and 3D printers. Fit 'em all with DRM (yeah,
    I know, eeevil, but hear me out), and have
    manufacturers shell out royalties when they use a
    design. (Problem: the analog hole - one could build
    one copy, measure it in every detail, and create an
    identical or near-identical template file licensed to
    oneself.) Set up a strong tradition of independent
    invention, such that anyone trying to be the RIAA or
    MPAA of this industry would face so much opposition
    from the template file creators themselves as to make
    such monopolization impractical. (Which could be
    enhanced by making it easy to make template files,
    thus
    reducing any advantage the would-be monopoly could
    bring to bear - but this probably exaggerates the
    analog hole.) Money goes back and forth to pay for
    all
    the various templates, along with extras like feed
    stock and power (and taxes) - whose owners (or
    collectors) have to pay for templates too. Joe
    Average
    gets rich (by our standards, anyway) off the extra
    wealth generated in this process, in a classic
    economic
    cycle.

    * Another possibility: the robots provide the services
    themselves, in such overwhelming quantity there is no
    real contention as to whom they serve. They only need
    power and maintenance, which other robots can provide.
    Of course, that assumes one could get Friendly (or
    close to it) AI, and create robots fast enough to
    quickly blast through the phase where the limited
    number of robots makes people concerned about who
    "owns" them or otherwise has rights to their services.
    (No one "owns" air or seawater because there's so much
    of it, relative to how much we use. That used to be
    the case for freshwater, too, until the human
    population expanded enough to start putting a strain
    on
    that resource.)

    ...and I think I just did a walk through the common,
    nearly done-to-death-in-sci-fi, ways this could play
    out, didn't I? ^_^;



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