From: Chris Fedeli (cafedeli@erols.com)
Date: Thu Oct 14 1999 - 01:39:16 MDT
Alexander Chislenko wrote:
>
> If you don't work for a few hundred thousand years, then your
> standard of living will no longer be reasonable.
> Or for a few days, in a society where productive work will
> double the standard of living, and personal features, fast enough.
I agree that the future economy will see rapid exapansions. But in a
nanotech economy, when almost all the value is in intellectual property
(the software telling the nanobots what to build), it will also become
harder to prevent the created wealth from filtering out to everyone.
A lot of this depends on your take on the future of intellectual
property law. In the current situation piracy is rampant. The free
software movement aims to abolish proprietary rights to intellectual
creation, making it impossible for anyone to gain an economic advantage
through creation of software. Once I write a program for the
nano-creation of a new gadget, everyone will email it to their freinds
until the whole world has it. Everyone receives the wealth beneifts of
my work.
One alternative to the free software program would be the drastic
imposition of strict intellectual property rights enforcement. Under
such a regime, anyone who wanted to use software created by someone else
would have to sign a "Bill Gates from Hell" Agreement:
"The agreement prohibits the contractee from letting anyone else view
the copyrighted material. If problems surface, the agreement authorizes
private police officers to descend on users' houses to check for illicit
printouts and copies. Should search victims whine about unwarranted
search and seizure, the courts reply that they freely signed away those
Fourth Amendment rights by clicking the "OK" button."
http://www.atlanticunbound.com/issues/98sep/copy3.htm
Of course there are probably middle roads too. Individuals or
corporations could try protect their creations through encryption. This
would still leave the possibility of decryption and piracy, or the
possibility that someone else who cares not whether he gets richer than
his neighbour will do the same work and release it to the public
domain.
Chris
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