Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!nanotech From: Jim_Day.XSIS@xerox.com Newsgroups: sci.nanotech Subject: Re: Nanotech Economy Message-ID: Date: 6 Nov 90 18:27:50 GMT Sender: nanotech@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 32 Approved: nanotech@aramis.rutgers.edu If nanotechnology eventually makes the production of material goods so easy that production costs are essentially nil, will that mean that everything will be free? Not likely. Software can be replicated now for next to nothing, but I haven't noticed the price of commercial software dropping much as a result. Even if material goods were available without cost, people would still have to pay for many other things. There will always be a market for motion pictures, music, sporting events, and other forms of entertainment, and it seems unlikely that public utilities and services will ever be provided free of charge. As the global population continues to increase, we may have to pay substantial amounts for things that now cost little or nothing. For example, if the population of California increases tenfold, as it may, everyone won't be able to go to the beach at once. We may have to pay $100 apiece to spend a day at the beach, and everyone won't be able to camp at Yosemite, Yellowstone, or Lake Tahoe at the same time either, so the cost of admission to popular recreational areas could increase by an order of magnitude. In short, there are countless ways of extracting money from people, and I'm confident that enterprising individuals in the age of nanotechnology will find all of them. [This is quite true but on the other hand if material goods are available without cost, the person from whom the money has been extracted won't be so badly off as he would have been before. I would personally pay $100 to *avoid* spending a day at the beach--it's not a necessity of life. It would be really interesting for people on this newsgroup to design the nanotech gadgets necessary for self-sufficiency or see how close we can come. Unfortunately I'll be away for a month, as I mentioned before, so work the ideas over for a while... --JoSH]