[swombat]

Let me get this straight.

We propose a society where scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all physical items can be copied at will, where the idea of "owning" a physical thing is as pointless as the idea of "owning" an idea is, where (as a natural consequence) world hunger is probably a thing of the past, as are poverty, industrial labour, and many other things we take for granted...

And your first question is "How does Ferrari stay in business?"

Worth noting that this is more or less the same thing as what's happening with art at the moment. I could paraphrase it as:

"We propose a society where information scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all information (sound, video, text, etc) can be copied at will and instantly all around the world, where the idea of "owning" a bunch of bytes is as pointless as the idea of owning the shape of a cloud in the sky, where (as a natural consequence) education, art, civilisation and all those things that make mankind worthy of existence are infinitely more powerful than before because of their ubiquity and availability to all, and your first question is... How does Sony Music stay in business?"

[HPBEggo]

The question, I think, is more relevant than you make it appear.

The only factor of production eliminated by the introduction of what is, essentially, automated labor is labor. A similarly important factor of production is not - raw materials.

Just because you have some way to produce something doesn't mean you can create the materials to do so. Regardless of whether or not you can produce something when you have the materials, you still need to purchase or otherwise obtain the materials to do so.

I think the more important question is, "How does Ferrari stay in business, when the only thing that they truly control is the code for producing a Ferrari?" What this essentially does is transform everything into an intellectual property issue, much as the Internet has done for digital media.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

The 3D printer is just a manufacturing method. The scarcity problem will still exist in the form of raw materials -- somebody's got to pay for it.

Information is a completely different animal. If there were actual physical costs to the person downloading copyrighted material illegally, do you think the RIAA and MPAA would be as agitated as they are?

[swombat]

Matter and energy are somewhat interchangeable (with SF technology, anyway, which is what we're talking about).

We (as in, the face of the Earth) receive 1.7E17 J of energy from the sun every second. That's 53.6E23 J of energy per year.

Worldwide energy consumption as of 2008 was 4.74E20 J. It's risen a bit since (thanks China!), but not by more than an order of magnitude. So that means we're receiving enough energy from the sun to power today's civilisation a hundred times over. And that's just the energy which lands on the face of the Earth.

My point is, really, that energy (and hence matter) is quite plentiful if you know how to make efficient use of it. By the time we have cornucopia devices, we'll probably have the technology so that accumulating the energy/matter for making a car is just a question of leaving it outside in the sun/rain/air for long enough and/or dumping a bunch of dirt into it.