This is not an impossible dream. its a real technological device that scientists think is within the grasp of at least some of the people alive today.
A steak is made of carbon, water and a few other readily available elements arranged in a certain way. A potato is made of the same material as a steak. You could put a potato into this machine and have it "print" a steak for you using the spud as raw material.
You could put an old bit of wet car tyre into the machine and ask it to "print" a steak and a potato using the rubber as a source for the carbon. You could also ask the machine to "print" a knife and fork taken from the bits of old metal wire in the tyre so, from a lump of rubbish, you get steak, potato and a knife and fork. Why would you need to go to a shop? Why would you ever need to have a factory in Sheffield or Solingen make a knife and fork for you and ship it across country in a truck? All you need is the pattern of the potato, steak, knife and fork and you dine on steak forever!
The pattern of a steak is data. Data is what you get in an e-mail. Data is a picture or a film or a music track. We can send these things to one another easily today. Tomorrow I will be able to e-mail you a steak!
The only thing you would have to have near to you would be a supply of electricity and some chemicals like carbon, sulphur, iron, oxygen, hydrogen etc. In fact, just the stuff that is already lying around in the millions of tons all over the planet and readily available to all of us, pretty much for free. Pick some up, shove it in this machine and print new shoes, a wrench, a hat, lunch, a book, a new computer... Where would world commerce go?
A cynic might say that such technology would be suppressed by the people who wanted to maintain the world economy just how it is because gathering up money means gathering up power. However, given the rise of the open-source movement and the fact that information has a habit of getting shared, it won't be long before a machine gets placed in the hands of someone who will use the machine to replicate new machines for all their family, who will replicate one for their friends, who will replicate one for their next-door-neighbor and soon the power will whiffle away into the hands of everyone.
What would happen to the world economy? Why would anyone need a bank? Why would anyone need an insurance company? Banks and insurance companies are an unbelievably vast drain on the resources of the human race. We have to have them _in our current society_ but about three weeks after the first replicator gets built we won't ever need them again! They will disappear! Lloyds will never insure another cargo vessel again because there will be no cargo, just patterns of objects freely available and sent over the internet by e-mail. A bank will never have to lend money to mortgage a house because the house could be built for free with a replicator unit and a couple of solar panels that you can ask you pal down the road to replicate up for you anyway. That is why Singularity is hard to grasp. The thoughts and expectations of contemporary people are too entrenched in the ways of the past to understand what happens once the curve of technological advancement goes vertical.
My wife, my sister and probably you think I'm a raving nut-case and that this is some sort of pseudo religious mid-life zeal that has overtaken me in my old age. I say that I've spent my entire career working with the resolution of logical certainties in software programming. The progression of science and technology has to go this way or our race will stagnate. To stop Singularity from happening we would all have to become Amish. When Singularity occurs, the only logical next steps are incredibly, phenomenally, unbelievably life changing for the entire population of the world.
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