I recently bought 'Fab' for a buck. Its about the possibility of having desktop personal fabricators just like PC's. The entertaining author says that killer app for this is personalized devices.
One example is the Scream Storer. One girl wanted a device she could scream in when outraged which would not disturb others with the noise, and then she could release the noise of the scream later. So she designed it, and had the fabricating machines at MIT build it.
Someone else wanted to make a device for parrots to use a simplified form of IE so they could get some social interaction that parrots need. Imagine a world in which an owner at work can call home to talk to his parrot.
The author's five year old children when they wanted a new toy would say 'go to MIT' instead of 'go to toy store' because they would have a vision of a toy they wanted to make.
Very interesting book.
Its one answer kinda to MJ's question. Answer: We all become village artisans able to design and build just the tools and things we want for our life. If you decide you need a laptop that is green and solar powered and can walk behind you like a dog on robolegs....well, make it. Or any other bizzarre and highly personal idea you come up with. MJ can build a hunterbot that will 'fido, find my paper on Temporal problems in the TV show Dr. Who.' And fido, a spider like bot that MJ built over the last weekend, walks into MJ's office, scans each piece of paper, picks up each paper, and puts them back down in the position they were in until it finds the notes MJ wanted. It then leaves a text on MJ's cell phone which MJ made so that he could have a stopwatch dice roller fitted into the back of his cell phone.
Now, no one else in the world has a cell phone quite like MJ's, but he has a design for it posted on a design website in case someone wants to copy him. If they do, they perhaps pay MJ a dime, or MJ gets a point in the Useful Ideas to Others Index, and the website emails the design to the personal fab on the other guy's desk. OG's fab builds the new cellphone with no more than a click on a website.
At this point, you're probably wondering what 'Wars of Religion' has to do with this. Well, we're going to wander into Eric Flint and his book series 1632 and so on which alleges that the leadership in Germany was stupid, cowardly, and treacherous. And we'll be comparing Sarah Palin to Martin Luther....and perhaps seeing if the next few decades have a comparison in that rather brutal era in Germany called the Wars of Religion.
I want a personal fabricator. The End.
Would be nice, as long as you were in a world with at least a tech curve of what... twenty four?
Well, then this Earth we're all presumably from has a tech curve of 24.
No, not Star Trek version, but good enough to be useful.
To make a bike...
You need the following...
A PC with a basic CAD program (they found that simple programs to do general stuff and use a wide variety of tools worked better than the current mega expensive, mega unfriendly, mega powerful CAD), an internet link to a tool (laser cutter, water cutter...) and a sheet of acryllic stock. After which you snap together the bicycle and drive it off.
If you didn't want to design, you could download someone else's design.
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Let's compare nowadays to Germany around the 14th and 15th century.
Both ruling classes are arrogant, addicted to credentials (theirs patents of nobility, ours college degrees from the Right Places), corrupt in large bits and small ways as a general lifestyle, not very bright (hard to be smart when your theories multiculturalism and deconstructionism are based around doing away with study and logic respectively.), use money to buy out from moral obligations (indulgences and carbon tax credits) from Popes (RCC popes and the Pope of Gaia, Al Gore.)
Both ruling classes faced a challenge to their authority which ended up focusing on the founding documents (the Bible and the Constitution) by somewhat unexpected people (Martin Luther and Sarah Palin) who had a great deal of natural talent.
Both ruling classes reacted to the challenge in unfortunate ways. As MJ has pointed out, the RCC might have reformed itself and opened up to its critics and avoided the Reformation.
Both ruling classes had information producing systems which got replaced by vastly more effective systems (monks scribing got replaced by the printing press, and the Three Big Channels got replaced by Now.)
With the German example, it led to the Wars of Religion as the dominant in history books Christendom got divided into Lutheran and Catholic. This seems similar to today with also less known groups operating. And then both main groups went at each other and a LOT of people got slaughtered.
Oh, now I see. When I read "personal fabricator," I envisioned a device that uses molecular construction teleporter technology "pattern replication" if you will to create something where nothing once was almost instantly. What it actually seems to be is a larger system requiring resources and not something you could probably lug around from world to world with you until you've got the weight limit to bring a building with you. And to think, I was going to point out that a curve of 24 requires at least a world bias of 14@10.
Not that much of a weight limit in general, but still you might require at least two thousand pounds if you made a light system today (just a guess). Ten more years, and we're probably talking about something that does more and weighs less than a thousand pounds, and it keeps dropping from there.
It is one of the features of the Information Age. Products become more and more information, and less and less matter. Ideas are more important than matter.