The world in 2076: Now we can easily make whatever we want!

Aaron Tilley/Getty

By Sally Adee

It’s surprisingly hard to imagine a world without scarcity. When we think about the end of material needs, it’s usually our own, says John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. But what about everyone’s needs? “Scarcity is the basis of our fundamental economic system,” he says. This is the capitalist paradigm whose principles are, to most of us, as non-negotiable as the laws of physics. How would the economy work if everything was free? Who would make things if no one got paid? Isn’t this just communism? Trying to envision a world not organised around the market is a bit like a fish thinking about what’s outside the water.

Jeremy Rifkin did it in his 2014 manifesto The Zero Marginal Cost Society . Capitalism, he contends, is almost done eating itself. “It’s the ultimate triumph of the market” – a final transition to a society in which automation has brought the cost of producing each additional unit of anything near to zero, and products are essentially free.

For a taster of how this looks, consider the music and publishing industries. The internet has made the production and distribution of content incredibly cheap. Though painful for some, Rifkin sees this trend as the harbinger of a new paradigm that will spread to all other industries. A critical enabler will be fabrication devices that can make almost anything on demand: think of today’s 3D printers but immensely more sophisticated, like a modern computer versus a 1960s electronic calculator.

Within 60 years, these devices might have evolved into machines called molecular assemblers. The term …