Had a nap, had a dream
Aug. 19th, 2020 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethDream started as the usual domestic chaos, this time with kitchen plumbing incidents, and suddenly all is spurting water that more resembles gravy. No lights, no electric, it hasn't just gone a bit wrong, it's all all wrong.
So dream me went to get the landlords, who were Luthors who lived waaaaaay up the building. But they were weirdly easy to find, cause they were carting their stuff out of the building. Flat screwed up? Go ahead, try upstairs. Flat only a quarter of the building? Take a whole floor!
Just help with moving this stuff first.
So we go in the room they're emptying and it is like high school computer lab and at first glance full of ancient computers, but then one of the people in there tells one to backup, and it prints a whole Thing out the front. Looks a little like a remote control, a little like a shaver, one of those things so ergonomic they all end up looking the same because human hands do. There was a light all scanning along the area, and tada, there's a Thing. And apparently it contains all the data. So the person that ordered it takes it and skedaddles before Luthors get back.
Luthor's seem only moldly perturbed, and that isnt like them at all.
All they want are these big blocky computers, taken to slot in to a bigger array.
The computers feel weirdly smooth and like they should squish without mostly any squishing. No empty space, just lots of light inside. Room temperature and somehow surprising about it. And once they're all arrayed together the Luthor's take one of those handheld Things, scan the whole array, point at an empty space, and print out a whole new one, identical.
So we get out of there because this is a game changer and one of ours has pocketed one of them.
So first they scan a jewellers and print a bunch of pretty, and that's money taken care of. One of ours just went direct to cash, but that's illegal even if they're indistinguishable on a quantum level. Identical rubies are just weird lab rubies.
But I woke up brainstorming about longer term implications. The jewellery market is going to crash as soon as anyone hears about this. The *everything* market is. Art fraud just got too easy to be fun any more. We just went post scarcity, as fast as we can print the weird array blocks.
The only things that will remain scarce are the weird computers that do this, whatever they use for power, and real estate to store them.
And people? I do not like to speculate on how or why, but the guy who pocketed a handset is entirely certain that it can copy people. And every handset can print another ha dsrt with all the patterns it already knows. We dont know its storage capacity but presumably not enough for Luthor purposes. And what are they even going to do with all that? We might want to get as far away as possible before they start. Or, we mighr want to watch them for their plan. They'll have though about the limitations first. Maybe they'll start printing valuable employees. Maybe that's why they didnt mind them running away.
But you'd have a problem keeping them, because post scarcity in your hand makes all forms of control a teensy bit harder, especially if you can back yourself up.
They might try reimposing scarcity. Imposing instability could change the whole nature of the game again. Planned obsolescence, except this is your boss printing you out for work every day.
But that's actually harder, that's editing, not just printing.
If they can edit they're going to want to perfect upgraded humans first. There mighr be an image rights problem for particularly attractive actors. Or some way of licencing scans of olympic athletes. Put your mind in their bidy and see how it works out. Sure there's now two of you but there's a lot of that going around.
We are so going to have a population problem. Not in the malthusian sense, just, people are going to want to dupe a lot of the population. But not all of it.
Maybe governments will back up their countries, wipe them, and start over. Sure that's a radical response to something that's still handset size, but think of the anarchy of property rights when you can't prove which one is the original. Even the remaining scarcity, land, it's going to be so highly contested, and you'll be trying to prove wills and contracts were written and signed by edited dupes... what could they even do a out that?
Which is all getting ahead of ourselves.
We just woke up in a crappy flat and got offered far better ones. Do we move in now or after we scan a few shops first?
Except, wait.
Real estate is scarce, but buildings wont be. We can scan and print entire buildings for ourselves. No wonder Lithor's didnt want theirs, why do maintenance when you can scan the best architecture around?
But connecting to the local supplies isnt as simple as a print out. Without hookups you would be...
... oh.
Ooooooh...
You would be standing in the dark with plumbing gone all kerploey, no outlet for the dirty water, lower levels getting the 'benefit' of all the backwash.
Our building already got scanned.
And all of us who were in there at that time of day just got scanned with it.
We're already the dupes.
... thanks subconscious, waking up to that is just... *mind blown*
So dream me went to get the landlords, who were Luthors who lived waaaaaay up the building. But they were weirdly easy to find, cause they were carting their stuff out of the building. Flat screwed up? Go ahead, try upstairs. Flat only a quarter of the building? Take a whole floor!
Just help with moving this stuff first.
So we go in the room they're emptying and it is like high school computer lab and at first glance full of ancient computers, but then one of the people in there tells one to backup, and it prints a whole Thing out the front. Looks a little like a remote control, a little like a shaver, one of those things so ergonomic they all end up looking the same because human hands do. There was a light all scanning along the area, and tada, there's a Thing. And apparently it contains all the data. So the person that ordered it takes it and skedaddles before Luthors get back.
Luthor's seem only moldly perturbed, and that isnt like them at all.
All they want are these big blocky computers, taken to slot in to a bigger array.
The computers feel weirdly smooth and like they should squish without mostly any squishing. No empty space, just lots of light inside. Room temperature and somehow surprising about it. And once they're all arrayed together the Luthor's take one of those handheld Things, scan the whole array, point at an empty space, and print out a whole new one, identical.
So we get out of there because this is a game changer and one of ours has pocketed one of them.
So first they scan a jewellers and print a bunch of pretty, and that's money taken care of. One of ours just went direct to cash, but that's illegal even if they're indistinguishable on a quantum level. Identical rubies are just weird lab rubies.
But I woke up brainstorming about longer term implications. The jewellery market is going to crash as soon as anyone hears about this. The *everything* market is. Art fraud just got too easy to be fun any more. We just went post scarcity, as fast as we can print the weird array blocks.
The only things that will remain scarce are the weird computers that do this, whatever they use for power, and real estate to store them.
And people? I do not like to speculate on how or why, but the guy who pocketed a handset is entirely certain that it can copy people. And every handset can print another ha dsrt with all the patterns it already knows. We dont know its storage capacity but presumably not enough for Luthor purposes. And what are they even going to do with all that? We might want to get as far away as possible before they start. Or, we mighr want to watch them for their plan. They'll have though about the limitations first. Maybe they'll start printing valuable employees. Maybe that's why they didnt mind them running away.
But you'd have a problem keeping them, because post scarcity in your hand makes all forms of control a teensy bit harder, especially if you can back yourself up.
They might try reimposing scarcity. Imposing instability could change the whole nature of the game again. Planned obsolescence, except this is your boss printing you out for work every day.
But that's actually harder, that's editing, not just printing.
If they can edit they're going to want to perfect upgraded humans first. There mighr be an image rights problem for particularly attractive actors. Or some way of licencing scans of olympic athletes. Put your mind in their bidy and see how it works out. Sure there's now two of you but there's a lot of that going around.
We are so going to have a population problem. Not in the malthusian sense, just, people are going to want to dupe a lot of the population. But not all of it.
Maybe governments will back up their countries, wipe them, and start over. Sure that's a radical response to something that's still handset size, but think of the anarchy of property rights when you can't prove which one is the original. Even the remaining scarcity, land, it's going to be so highly contested, and you'll be trying to prove wills and contracts were written and signed by edited dupes... what could they even do a out that?
Which is all getting ahead of ourselves.
We just woke up in a crappy flat and got offered far better ones. Do we move in now or after we scan a few shops first?
Except, wait.
Real estate is scarce, but buildings wont be. We can scan and print entire buildings for ourselves. No wonder Lithor's didnt want theirs, why do maintenance when you can scan the best architecture around?
But connecting to the local supplies isnt as simple as a print out. Without hookups you would be...
... oh.
Ooooooh...
You would be standing in the dark with plumbing gone all kerploey, no outlet for the dirty water, lower levels getting the 'benefit' of all the backwash.
Our building already got scanned.
And all of us who were in there at that time of day just got scanned with it.
We're already the dupes.
... thanks subconscious, waking up to that is just... *mind blown*
no subject
Date: 2020-08-19 07:27 pm (UTC)Or maybe they were, they needed to max their computer capacity for something.
If these Things seem to be able to print something out of nothing
and real estate is a predictable limit...?
... I'm going to need someone who can figure orbital mechanics.
Planet X behind the sun, ringwold, or dyson sphere?
Depends how fast we figure out the edits...
no subject
Date: 2020-08-20 02:58 pm (UTC)Where the material for the printing comes from, I wonder.
Irl, 3d printers have become a game changer in all sorts of ways, but the material for the printing process comes from somewhere and has specific properties and finite quantity. Whihc is of course too realistic for your scenario, but the questions are there.
If this thing replicating all material according to it's scanned specs, that's a huge variety of materials. Out of nowehere or somehow sourced from somewhere else?
[There's probably tons of discussion that I'm not going to read about how the Trek replicators work, that would touch on various aspects of something like this.]
And suddenly I'm thinking of the proliferation in Ionesco's work (The Chairs comes to mind)
Also, any copying process would have errors. The error and mutation potentials on this scale boggle the mind.