We will, in about 40 years time…be able to produce anything we need for virtually nothing. That will destroy the present social, economic and political system…
We have spent the last 150,000 years dealing with the problem of scarcity. Every institution, every value system, every aspect of our life has been dictated by the need to share out, to some extent, what there wasn’t enough of for everybody. After the nanofactory does its thing, we will then face the problem of abundance….there will be no need for any of the social institutions; they’re all based on some aspect or another of scarcity.
James Burke