assemblers

Trope-a-Day: Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap

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Only Electric Sheep Are Cheap: …sort of.  Hydroponically grown food and meat out of the carniculture vats is cheaper, for example, yes.  That’s what mass production is for.

But it’s not like anyone’s going to go broke buying a nat-steak dinner.  Sure, people aren’t going to be eating nat-steak every night, but it’s not like a night out at the Natural Foods Restaurant (“Don’t Eat Vat!“, et. al.) now and again is going to be out of reach of anyone with, well, an income.  Because the difference here isn’t that natural foods became more expensive due to environmental degradation, or whatever, it’s that vatfood became dirt cheap.

(Slight exception: well, okay, you can’t fit that many cows into a space station.)

Played straight in most other areas: after all, in near-post-scarcity economics, Baumol’s Cost Disease is in full play.  Cornucopias can make pretty much anything made of common elements of regular matter for trivial amounts of money; people’s time, on the other hand, is expensive.

Which leads to counterintuitive results: diamond, for example, is a practically worthless structural material – and not even a good structural material, being too flammable – because even the simplest assemblers can produce arbitrarily large amounts of carbon-crystal in short order.  Gold is cheap due to automated belt mining.  Anyone can afford to parade around in diamond-encrusted cloth-of-gold pants.  On the other hand, that hand-sewn, hand-embroidered shirt of what, to our eyes, are much humbler materials was orders of magnitude more expensive.  Hand-made goods are practically the definition of luxury.

Valuematic Vending

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“Valuematic Vending Technical Services. Could I have your name, service contract reference, and planet of installation, please?”

“Certainly, I can answer a few general questions, yes.”

“Yes, our system is designed to be programmable by the customer.”

“The model 4400v nanofac is capable of assembling essentially any carbon compound, yes. Within the bounds of the usual run of carbon chemistry, anyway, as certain exotic bond types are only available in more advanced models, but I can assure you that the 4400v is fully capable of producing all commonly used plastics, fabrics, foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals –”

“You want it not to be able to produce pharmaceuticals? Sir, have you considered not entering requests for –”

“If you could supply us with a list of all the chemical structures you wish to lock out –”

“I’m afraid we don’t maintain a list of which chemical structures are psychoactive in your species, sir, but as I said, if you could provide us with such a list, I can supply you with a routine to lock out those structures through your policy server.”

“Well, if you have them configured stand-alone, you can apply the routine individually to each 4400v. Do you have physical access to each machine?”

“Ah, that may be a problem. Could I ask again who you represent, sir?”

“I’m afraid we don’t actually support that level of hierarchical control on our JITPOS systems, sir, and I regret to say that corporate policy is not to provide superuser ackles on any system to anyone other than the registered owner.”

“Sir, before I answer that, you are aware that a 4400v-series is capable of manufacturing carbon-compound synthesizers, as well as the carbon compounds themselves?”

“Oh, any source of CHON atoms should do. Most oxygen-breather – you are oxygen-breathers? – planetary atmospheres would contain everything it needed.”

“Sir? Are you still there?”

…

“Valuematic Vending Technical Services. Could I have your name, service contract reference, and planet of installation, please?”

“Yes, our model 4400v nanofac is capable of manufacturing a wide range of organic explosives and other accelerants…”