>Imagine a machine that creates gourmet meals out of thin air. It is solar powered, cheap to use, can be manufactured for less than a plasma screen TV. ... Every restaurant in the world goes out of business.
Chefs, waitresses, and dishwashers lose their jobs. The marginal cost of manufacturing goods falls to nearly zero, but if the technology for such a machine remains proprietary, then the replicator’s food is only as free as its designer decides. Our Silicon Valley whizkid, free of competition, charges as much for the food we now make in our kitchens as we might’ve once paid in a five star restaurant.
If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
Furthermore why are we assuming that no other company on Earth will think the food market might be profitable? Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.
That bit also caught my eye, yet I think the point stills hold true given the following constraints.
Even though this food synthesiser is incredibly cheap to produce it needs some sort of source of molecules to produce its goods, think of it as a cartridge.
In the beginning to attain a sizeable market share the cartridge cost can be amortised. Once the goal is achieved the company can sell it for whatever it wants.
It's true that other companies could see an opportunity there, and develop competing synthesisers. But, they could be easily driven out of the market by legal costs when the original company uses its enormous corpus of meaningless patents to sue them.
These constraints can be seen today at play with devastating results for innovators and consumers.
TFA's scary scenario assumes a number of things that just aren't, and empirically won't be, true.
In no industry, ever, has an inventor with however many patents succeeded in permanently keeping substitutions away for more than a very short period of time. You mention cartridges with brings to mind famously uncompetitive coffee and printer toner parallels.
Yet, there is a rich market for third party toner cartridges that the incumbents has totally failed to shut down, and there's a rich market for different brands of printers, which even in the face of uncompetitive cartridges caps the price any one manufacturer can charge. Despite the popularity of printers, HP is NOT a healthy company.
Pretty much the same thing is true for the capsule-coffee-market. There are a ton of different kinds of cartridge/pad/pod/foo systems, and again, it's trivial to find third-party capsules. On top of that, the capsule-coffee-market is under pressure from the non-capsule coffee market: If you feel ripped off by capsules, you have a good number of options to brew beans direct.
The same thing will happen with the magic food machine - people will just cook regular meals. Sure, the 5 star restaurant experience might be hurt , and that's a real shame, but it's not like a silicon valley whizkid can just charge $INF because otherwise humanity starves.
>Subsistence farmers worked far longer hours than their ancestors. They died younger and lived more miserable lives. The sole upside was that farming allowed the same plot of land to feed many more people.
The author misses the upside of not worrying about getting eaten by a lion or trampled by a wildebeest.
As far as I am aware, by every measure hunter-gatherers had better lives than the vast majority of farmers until very recently. They had better nutrition, as evidenced by being taller. They had more equal societies. They worked very little. Contemporary hunter-gatherers generally live only on very marginal land, as more organised societies have taken over the rest, and their lifestyle is not a good reflection of what life was like before civilisation.
If you believe Steven Pinker (and IIRC Jared Diamond) then hunter gatherers had a much higher chance of being brutally murdered. That'd probably be a down-side.
> If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
It's a two-step phase: first acquire a user-base by making the machine extremely cheap and drive all competition out of business, then ramp up prices (relatively slowly ideally).
And of course, if competitors appear you can just locally give away machines.
> Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.
It doesn't prevent independent invention, but the reinventor would most likely need investors (who'd get no ROI as the current monopoly can drive down profits to 0 or close for everybody) and intact kneecaps. So the reinventor has two choices really:
* ask for a payout to not disclose their reinvention (and pray the monopoly holder won't take the "kneecaps" option instead)
* open up the reinvented design and spread it far and wide, completely destroying the market in the process
If the machine costs as much as a five star restaurant per meal then why the fuck did the all the restaurants in the world go out of business‽
Furthermore why are we assuming that no other company on Earth will think the food market might be profitable? Even if a design is propriety that doesn't prevent independent invention.