[QUOTE=CraigD;235849]Technology, nano or otherwise, involves society, economics, and business as much as engineering. As with many technologies, a “personal fabricator” would run afoul a pricing conundrum I like to call “‘
The Man In The White Suit’ problem” – since it has the potential to eliminate the need for any future thing you might buy, for the collective commercial world to profit from it, they must somehow sell it for as much as the total price of everything it will ever make. This problem becomes really vexing for a fabricator that can fabricate copies of itself.
QUOTE]
Excellent comparison... I have only vague recollections of that show.
What about selling the raw materials for that “personal fabricator”. It would certainly pay to have people able to replicate a machine for you, using materials you sell them, in order for them to allow their friends to also consume raw materials that you sell them. Sounds like a corporations wet dream as the device is not really capable of creating the raw materials used by the device (or care should be taken to engineer a system in that manner)
Perhaps you could use the device to construct a device that would make the raw materials for your device.
