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