KurzweilAI.net featured an interesting article about the economic impact that the abudance from molecular manufacturing coupled with AI - the "personal manufacturing" revolution - could bring about.

As Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine says, "My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw's otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn't mention the word abundance. And for good reason: If you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up."

To date, all our technological and economic progress has produced a world at war and in poverty. War is largely fought over scarce resources. Widespread wealth (through universal distribution of PNs) would remove the apparent fuel for most wars.

The World Bank estimates that 2.7 billion humans live below a level necessary to meet basic needs. The organization says that this kind of poverty includes hunger, lack of shelter, no access to medicines, and losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water. Few would argue that human misery is desirable. PNs could be programmed to provide basic building supplies, medicine, foodstuffs, and clean water.

Over hundreds of years, we have developed the skills of how to allocate things in short supply. For widespread abundance, we have no experience, no projections, and no economic calculations. Abundance, paradoxically, could be highly disruptive. It is time to design a new economics of abundance, so that abundance can be enjoyed in a society that is prepared for it.