Was reading this article and found myself thinking again about programming matter – you know, hammering out some code in a custom programming language, popping the code into a matter compiler (first read about this in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age) and, voila, ten hours later you’ve got a new wardrobe. The best example of this sort of tech being currently utilized is 3-D Printing.
Here’s a what-if scenario: What happens when these matter compilers are on every other street corner and instead of the purchasing cycle beginning with the material resource as the commodity, the matter becomes the commodity and the code becomes the actual product that gets marked up. The better quality the code, the higher the price and profit. You insert the code (soft) into the matter compiler and out comes something tangible (hard). You get charged flat fees from the matter compiling machine based on elements used, difficulty of element pairings, and overall usage (mass).
You could even have reusable codes, things you always kept on you, like the code for an orange or cookie, in the event you need a snack. Stick the code on a flash drive and keep it on you at all times. Hunger solved.
What this does, invariably, is foul up all the existing economic models. All that money that gets funneled into a thousand different industries (all of whom make and sell a physical product – from bikes, to clothes, to cars, to toys, to food) first goes to coders. But with an already thoroughly networked globe, the advent of sharing is immediately and irrevocably built-in this particular industry. Coders/designers, really good ones, can command high fees for their custom codes/products, but once the design is complete and distributed to the buyer, it’s out in the public domain – inevitably, that code will be found, disseminated, shared.
So from that point, the only way to really make money is to be the person that owns the matter compiling machines. You would have to harvest resources in order to have a steady supply, but you would also build in a recycling system, where people can bring their trash and even their old, unused items and get either money back or a credit to their account (for a discount on their next use of the compiler). The compiler would break the items down and re-use their constituent elements.
This must, inevitably, lead to my ruminations on what constitutes life (to be continued…).
A potential tangent to this conversation – how does the ‘free goods and services to up-sell’ model fit in to this? A certain quota of free matter per month? Premium service plans include more matter, usage and even programming services.