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A good recent book on this is "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution"
I believe there is a slow automation revolution happening, but I'm not sure if 3D printing will play a huge role. I think so.
If technology ever makes the cost of production trivial, we'll need a new law for rightwing ideologues: "Any sufficiently complicated form of schadenfraude is indistinguishable from defending freedom."
If we must shoehorn this issue into left/right, we could say what Seth Godin (a top author on marketing online) says in Linchpin: Karl Marx was right that a free market for labor would never distribute things produced to those who do the work of producing them, but maybe new technologies will result in a fairer distribution by lower the cost of the means of production. '
http://www.element14.com/community/commu...
the actual "cost" for feeding the poor should be quite low in the first place. The point never was do we have the technology to distribute and feed the starving, house the poor or heal the sick. We get exponentially more advanced at this all the time. Then why doesn't the number of people in poverty go DOWN exponentially as well? No, instead it increases. 1. governments poor policies, graft and gratuity 2. government's inefficient distribution 3. people who want some things for nothing
The idea that technology will give us the solutions to these problems at some future date completely ignores that technology has far surpassed these problems NOW. Where might technology be TODAY if we had not focused on a welfare state. If we didn't just believe food grew on trees but actually planted the orchards, watered the trees, maintained their health, harvested the fruit, distributed the fruit efficiently, ensured storing the fruit properly. NO! it's whole society's yelling Give me the fruit! I need it! I shouldn't have to pay for it! vote for me-You shouldn't have to pay for it! if all of this upside down thinking were gone we would have had 10 things like the power of the internet and personal computers over the last decade! we'd all be flying to work instead of scratching our heads over why the interstate infrastructure is crumbling. Millions would survive cancer. but no. we have to nit pick around with bumbling idiots administrating every aspect of our lives and taking our money which could have been invested a thousand times more soundly.
you go ahead and wish for 3D capabilities for butter-I'm sticking with the 3D guns
"The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs,
nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,
by the grace of God."
Technology will not overcome anti-reason. If you say "people should do something to help the needy," and half the people perceive themselves as needy, that's a problem. I don't know how it was years ago, but I imagine most people would hear that and disagree about how/whether to help the needy. If most people think they're needy, no technology in the world will solve the problems.
Give kids the basic education for taking care of themselves, and as adults fewer of them will need from others, and those who do will need less.
As regards this thread, I'm not sure that the points being made really reflect the fallacies of the ST vs ASE analogy. Picard's explanation misses the point of someone having to design and build the Star Ship, the replicators, and input some type of energy and materials. Picard also seems to forget, conveniently, that his own brother owns and operates a vineyard.
For our actual world, 3D printers are going to change everybody's lives. We're not at the atomic or molecular level of ST replicators nor anywhere close yet, but the recent advances in the growth of specific organ and body materials on designed matrices will be combined with 3D printers for replacement organs and limbs. We've even progressed to growing brain cells that are functioning, from manipulated stem cells on a matrix. The advances and progressions beyond today staggers the imagination.
But with all of that said, capitalism and AR's objectivism will remain active, more vital, and more necessary for continued advancements. Can you picture the difficulties the Human race will face at that point, between the makers, the takers, and the communitarian equalizers? Think of the pure terror in the hearts of the control freaks of the bureaucracies trying to satisfy the needs of their defined poors with those types of technologies spreading like tsunamis throughout their constructed equal realities based on some concept of a human right to food, housing, health care, a cell phone, internet connectivity, a living wage (whether earned or not) cable TV, transportation, on and on. I'm sure that they'll try to control it. If they can't figure out how to give it to everyone, through their collectivist control, they'll try to deny it to those that can obtain it. They're already discussing the controls they'd like to implement. 3D printer technology truly frightens the collectivist.
Thinking of why the number of 'poor' not only doesn't go down, but actually increases as our technical advances make it more and more obvious that we can feed the approximate 6.5 billion gaping maws of our world really points out even greater fallacies in the ST economy. It's not really about feeding the disadvantaged (through luck of birth place or abilities), it's about growing a more and more dependent populace while decreasing the productive individualist. In the last 50 years, we've set African Americans and Latinos back generations through program after program and concentrating those programs into urban areas that leads to soon overwhelming the available tax base, and have now gone after the rest of the population. That's not only the US, but more-so Europe, those Europe has chosen as their own minorities to start with.
I can't find the link today, but within the last two weeks an article discussed recent findings that we have just passed the tipping point of the number of Americans working vs. those receiving some form of government support. The sad issue is that I haven't found a 'Galt's Gulch' yet. I fear that it may not exist or even be possible on our world today. Maybe that echoes the 3D gun reliance. It really is a frightening world we find ourselves in, isn't it?
KYFHO
Long ago, I posted several essays about Star Trek and Economics on the old WELL: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (now owned by Salon). The only capitalists are the Ferengi. (Quark of Deep Space Nine was played by Armin Shimerman, Dr. Ferris in Atlas 1. He is a bit of a Rand fan.) In ST:NG, Picard's crew rescues some 20th century humans frozen in a spaceship including a "businessman." Picard has to explain that we no longer pursue the acquisition of -things-, but work to improve -ourselves-. The Ferengi use "gold-pressed latinum" for money, but never in any series does any Federation Starfleet person actually buy anything.
The disconnect is with that set of Hollywood writers who never learned economics. The Star Wars franchise has the same sort of problem. At least on Battlestar Galactica, they did have their cubits and the collectible coins and notes stage props can be found for sale in the fan after-markets.
But as for Star Trek, even when the warp core has to be ejected, they never lose their replicators. It's magic. A couple of times, I have seen people put unused food and dishes back into the replicator. But no one every puts energy into it.
One final point, I think that k is factually wrong about the number people in poverty increasing exponentially.In truth, poverty is evaporating. Billions live better now than anyone could have 200 years ago.
On another Objectivist board some of the codgers were waxing nostalgic for the outhouses of their childhoods. I could not get them to see the link between outhouses and typhoid. They denied it with scoffing. Just to say, we live in a world where millions and billions have indoor plumbing thanks to capitalism and its prototype "replicators" the factory ... financed by people with excess wealth seeking to increase that wealth.