I found, via TV Tropes (be careful following that link), a rather interesting diatribe on the dangers of not respecting science in science fiction.
(Aside: Note that within it, Ken Burnside makes some sensible remarks. That name sounded familiar to me. He is a regular commenter at Armed and Dangerous. This makes me think that a) the bit of the Internet I browse is small and b) I should probably check out some of his games.)
One important consideration is that if you change the laws of physics, there will be unintended consequences:
if you broke the Second Law of Thermodynamics in order to obtain stealth in space, a major unintended consequence is that you simultaneously have allowed perpetual motion machines of the first kind, infinite free energy from nowhere, and all the secondary unintended ripple effects.
However, as an example, replicators are used. And I disagree with the author about the consequences of replicators.
In the sphere of economics, there is the havoc created by the unintended consequences of the Star Trek Replicator.
The producers saw one problem right off the bat, and quickly handwaved a reason which prevented using a replicator to make multiple clones of a person. But they passed over small matter of replicator technology irrevocably causing the collapse of the global economy.
Whoah there! Something that makes everyone inordinately wealthy could “collapse” the economy? At the very least we have some semantic problems here. The way I call it, if everyone has vast to unlimited material wealth, “the global economy” is doing pretty good! An invention that could bring this about would be good for the economy.
The businessman [in George O. Smith's "Pandora's Millions"] says it is too late to suppress the invention, but if the engineers want to prevent it from being a complete and utter disaster, they had better go and invent some substance that cannot be replicated ASAP. Lacking that, there is no way to prevent either currency or cheques from being counterfeited. Counterfeits so good they cannot be distinguished from genuine money.
This supposes that money is represented by some physical commodity that can be replicated. In the case of gold, fair enough. In the case of fiat money represented by paper, then yes, the paper can be perfectly counterfeited and that would be a problem for that currency. But fiat money is just invented by central banks anyway, so there’s no reason you can’t invent some other kind of fiat money.
Allow me to introduce my new currency, RobDollars. The point about money is that is has to be a scarce resource, so for now there will only be three RobDollars in existence. Instead of something easily counterfeit like paper, RobDollars are represented by this table on this web page:
RobDollar1: Bill
RobDollar2: Ted
RobDollar3: Rob
If Bill sells something to Ted for one RobDollar, all he has to do is email me and I’ll update the table by replacing Ted’s name with Bill’s in the RobDollar2 entry. The RobDollars have value because they are scarce, and me and Bill and Ted agree that they have value, and everyone trusts me not to inflate the currency by creating lots more RobDollars. This is no different to how GB Pounds or US Dollars work. But with RobDollars there is no possibility of counterfeiting, and a replicator with be of no use to you for creating money out of thin air, because I am the central authority on who owns each RobDollar.
For a similar approach but with no central authority, see Bitcoin, which uses cryptographic techniques to create unique coins.
So that’s the problem of money easily dispensed with.
With a replicator, everybody can pave their driveway with gold bricks, eat caviar and filet mignon every day, and wallpaper every room in the house with Mona Lisas. Which basically means all these formerly expensive items are now worthless, that is, valueless in the sense of being free.
To which I say, so what? Everyone is richer. This is a good thing. If caviar has value, it’s not because it costs lots of money, it’s because it tastes good. The value of caviar is not reduced because everyone can have it, unless you are serving caviar simply to show off. But there will be other ways to show off, perhaps such as owning the real original Mona Lisa, instead of a perfect replica. Or by throwing a particularly stylish and fashionable party, which you might achieve by hiring a top party organiser.
Of course, if your monetary units are based on gold or something physical, they are now valueless as well. As are any investments, savings, or retirement nest eggs made with such money.
The transition might be uncomfortable, but who cares about losing their retirement nest egg when all their material needs are met for free?
Factories will close sending millions out of work. Who needs the goods manufactured by the factory when all you need is a replicator and a recording of the desired item?
Again, out of work but having all your material needs met for free isn’t really a problem. Idleness might be a problem, but anyone with any amount of imagination should be able to find something to occupy their time. To say that doing a repetetive job in a factory is the only thing keeping large numbers of people happy is to ignore what people who work in factories think about it. A hundred times the wealth without actually having to do the work? Yes please! The kinds of people who are likely to become habitually idle and miserable about it are probably *already* habitually idle and miserable on state welfare anyway.
And it is not as if there will be no work at all to do. Assuming there is no AI, there will be plenty of creative and intelligent work to do. This is exactly the kind of work humans get most enjoyment from, anyway. Manufacturing objects is a waste of human effort as long as there is a possibility of automating it. Working to free people from this is a good thing.
Instead, people can spend their time designing objects. The richest people will be able to afford objects from the best designers, or go and see the best plays, or stay in the finest resorts with the best service. There will be jobs providing all these things.
The stocks and bonds of the companies who own the factories will plummet in value.
Again, so what? No doubt the stocks and bonds of passenger ship companies plummeted when air travel became mainstream. But now relatively poor people can travel the world. This is a good thing.
About the only thing that will still have value will be services. A replicator will not help you if you need a cavity filled or an appendix removed.
Everything will have value, it’s just that everyone will be extremely rich. Services are likely to remain expensive relative to people’s wealth because they will be relatively more scarce.
Some kind of barter system will replace a monetary economy.
I’ve already shown that there is no problem using virtual tokens to keep track of who owns what.
In summary, people will always trade as long as there is a scarcity of something. And replicators, as they appear in Star Trek, only solve the problem of the scarcity of material things. There are plenty of other things that are likely to remain scarce after the invention of replicators, such as services, energy, original artworks and beach-side properties. So there will still be an economy. But yes it will look different and yes you will need to think about what it will look like when you write your science fiction story with replicators in it.
A further interesting question is: what will the world look like with a combination of AI and replicators? The AI can design the object you describe, or generate a movie, novel or computer game according to your preferences. There will be fewer things exclusively the preserve of humans.
Taken to extremes, and assuming people do not value things simply because they were made by real humans instead of AI, and assuming there is enough real-estate (perhaps because of cheap interstellar travel) *then* you might have a situation where nobody trades and there is no economy. The only reason to interact with other humans will be to socialise. But everyone will be living in a paradise of their own design. Sounds good to me, but a long way off.
