Economics, advanced manufacturing techniques and space settlements

Ian Woollard wrote:

>
> Ok. So, on to economics. The book Future shock
> once argued that advanced manufacturing would mean
> that people would get put out of work, in a large
> scale way. However that doesn't seem to have
> happened.
>
> The question is: will the effective zero cost
> of machines built with 3D printers have that
> effect?

No. Not all that many people in our economy actually make things. I
certainly don't (I do computer science research, all I do is rearrange
infintesimal magnetic charges on disks). In the future, of course, all 10
billion of us will be busy, full time, fixing broken links in web pages :-).