Monday, 4 January 2021

Photocopying food and organs

 Hi all,

One of the more cutting edge technology is that of 3d printing, which taken to a logical conclusion many years hence, say 50 to 100 years,  would mean us being able to print and then replicate (think something similar to a photocopier which churns out whatever you want)   :

1) Bodily organs (it's been done for the bladder) as they wear out, thus increasing life expectancy and that would hopefully mean that the ageing workforce of the west will be able to go on and still have a decent retirement, even when they've put the limit up to the early to mid seventies (to let both the state and life assurance companies wriggle out of all those pension and annuity liabilities) . 

2) Food and water , which would help with both the environment and starvation. If you could replicate water than this would avoid a great deal of future conflicts, as water scarcity is one of those things that is likely to cause wars in the future. Of course you may think that this would put farmers out of business and for that matter things like breweries etc. Maybe the big breweries would just 'photocopy' their beers and make it cheap. And maybe photocopied food would be on the supermarket shelf. But I suspect that alongside the cheap and cheerful brew, they'd still be craft ales 'made by hand' sort of thing and even today there is a big and growing market for microbreweries alongside the national and multinational conglomerates . Like wise I think that you would still get 'organic' food, because some people will want to put a premium upon it, just like chefs and others today sneer at microwave food - it has its market -and so do places that sell or prepare /cook less processed food. Or put it another way China today makes millions of cheap watches, but that hasn't stopped Switzerland from making upmarket and expensive watches in response. 

3) Manufactured goods,? Maybe but then you'd have to consider exactly what would fill this void. I'm not thinking that the world would actually cope with millions of under employed people living on a basic income. Or maybe there is a limit to this process and some basic items will be able to replicated and others manufactured in a traditional way? 


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