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Bill Gates says a 3-day work week where 'machines can make all the food and stuff' isn't a bad idea
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Sometimes I wonder what they would do if you could make endless perfect copies of objects like you can mp3s.
Dududdo you wouldn't copy a car. You wouldn't copy a cheeseburger Copying is a crime.
Like remember it's only been recently that it became possible to make endless copies of media at effectively no cost.
Can I introduce you to Star Trek?
In The Orville (Seth MacFarlane Star Trek-like show) they actually have a brief discussion about how if that technology was plonked into a world like we have today, it would not be used to make life better for everyone. It would be capitalised on.
Imagine if you could create food at no cost. You think everyone is getting fed, or do you think one company is going to have massive profit margins selling food that it costs nothing to produce?
I don't remember that bit but I think I only watched the first season of the Orville and that was years ago.
But yeah really depends on how difficult the equipment itself is to replicate.
If it's some massive machine the size of a room it's going to make some company extremely rich, they'd sell product for slightly less than normal market value taking over the market with perfectly consistent product and insane margins allowing legal capture.
Why feed everyone when you can almost literally print money?
If it's something small that can be easily transported and duplicated? Piracy. Nobody will give AF about patents and everyone will have them within a couple years no matter what laws they try to implement or how they try and prevent it.
This has actually already happened with media and this is exactly how it has played out and a lot of people still seem to be in denial.
They can complain and sick lawyers on as many people as they want but they can still make a million copies of something that cost 400 million to make for less than than the cost of a gumball.
The law surrounding it is completely broken and it's crazy that so many industries are trying to continue on like nothing has changed.
I think it was a 30 second part of the last episode in season 3, I watched it (for the first time) recently so remember it.
I guess it depends who develops it. If Apple invent it then you can be sure they aren't selling them to anyone else, it will just be secretly used to print iPhones and no one else will have access to one, so no piracy of iPhones.
If a third party company invents it then starts trying to sell them to other companies, then maybe that outcome will be better.
If it's room sized and sold to other companies it will rapidly be in multiple countries.
There wouldn't be any way to keep it to one company with it being public knowledge.
Like realistically I'd think any country would ignore whatever laws on the books and just outright sieze the tech as a matter of national security and duplicate it for their own use if they found out a company was hiding such a thing.
From there it'd again leak to all other major countries in short order.
If it's small and easy to duplicate, (can it replicate itself?) It would spread like wildfire and would like piracy be completely uncontainable.
I don't think there is anyway the tech could be either contained or kept secret any real length of time.
Hmm you make a good point. I was assuming Apple would just claim a sort of trade secret, I hadn't thought that governments may seize it.
The other thing is that technology doesn't really go nothing->machine that replicates anything
Most likely it will start with a machine that can 3d print edible apples from shelf stable source material or something like that. Then someone improves it to be able to do any fruit from the same source material. Then someone improves it so if you feed in a range of different source materials (say, a bunch of metals, glass, and plastic) you can print usable electronics or something. Then someone improves it so it can do the same thing but with one mix of materials instead of separate ones. And so one and so one until you can make almost anything.
At the print 3d apples stage, it will probably get sold to the army for supply rations. Then the maker will look for other places to sell it, then when technology advances people will get updated versions. There probably wouldn't be a benefit to a company hiding it because at any point the difference from the publically available one is not that big.
If you look back at any major invention, lightbulb, radio, etc. You find that in fact these things predated their supposed invention, there was just some small change that made it commercially viable from the previous version.
I've always envisioned this type of utopia to be robot based, with a few machines thrown in for sure. I've thought if you can robots plant, grow and harvest the raw food. Then have autonomous trucks drive that food to processing plants that then have robots and machines processing it. You then again have autonomous trucks drive it to the grocery "store" that then have robots placing the product you could in theory make all food free*. (add a billion asterisks to that last statement) Making the food free would probably require the entire economy to migrate to robot workers as much as possible or at least have it be where the robots make other robots so at least they are low cost/free to make. It'll never happen, we're totally destined for a Cyberpunk future instead of Star Trek future, but it's at least fun to think about.
Unfortunately the Star Trek future had some pretty nasty stuff happen between now and hundreds of years in the future when most of it is set. Pretty sure we are only a few decades away from a global nuclear war in the Star Trek timeline.
Don't we need transhumans before the nuclear wars?
They would figure it out some way to enforce artificial scarcity. Can't have poor people getting free stuff without being worthy.