Post-scarcity is interesting from the point of view of the necessities of life being so close to free as to make no difference. But it's a long way to go before we truly will have more resources than we know what to do with. Our desires show a clear trend of scaling with our resources; we already have more wealth than any Mesopotamian farm peasant could ever dream of, and most of us could probably easily figure out what to do with another $100,000.
We could be there right now, but (here it comes) 1% of people have the majority of the resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector...
Edit: That wasn't sarcasm. I appreciated the link. No need for downvoting.
You'd still need to pay for the energy/raw materials to run them though. Maybe if LFTR works out, energy will be next-to-free also.
Check out the RepRap project. They're trying to design a cheap, open source 3D printer that can print itself: http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
See the BOM of non-printed parts: http://reprap.org/wiki/Prusa_Mendel#Non-Printed_Parts_.28.22...
Indeed. Replicators are at roughly the same point today that personal computers were in 1975. So expect that in a few decades everyone will have one in their house, able to make a very wide range of objects.
Video: http://www.markuskayser.com/
Text with photos: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a...
Even if you had a printer that could machine whatever you wanted, and the plans were available for free (and not licensed to the printer as software,) then you'd still need to pay for a rather large amount of steel, plastic, rubber, copper and all the other materials that go into the manufacture of a car.
The printing machines can only print from plans. People who create those plans may sell them, and those plans may be pirated, but there's still industry. There's still supply and demand.
If nobody is compensated for the manufacture of the plans, you're either on your own to create them or perhaps they'll be donated. Given the state of charity in the world, one can assume that they won't be donated, but given the state of open source, one might assume that they will. Regardless, the plans aren't self-creating and/or limitless.
Why would the governments supply the raw materials for you to purchase a car? If they aren't currently motivated to just buy you a car, why would they be suddenly motivated to pay for all the materials that go into a car's manufacture, even if the labor cost is reduced? If the materials were free, what's to stop everyone from printing out 20 different types of cars and luxury mansions?
Based on the current trend, however, I doubt we'd ever see a post scarcity world: oil, rare-earth metals, gold, silver, and even wood and stone are all scarce at scale. Sunlight may be one of the only things available on earth that humans can't destructively consume.
Haha, yeah that would definitely have to be done by robots. Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
Anything that makes more stuff with fewer input resources (especially in terms of human time and effort) moves us closer to a post-scarcity world.
Implicit in all of the treatments of a post-scarcity world I've ever seen, though, is the idea that humans will be only doing the jobs that only humans can do, such as acting, painting, programming, advanced mathematics, governing, and so on. Robots certainly help us move towards that.
Specifically, raw material scarcity will actually have a larger impact on price and availability of items than it does at the moment, even though the majority of items will be generally more available as a result of less constraining factors.