The world turned upside down.

[kengr]

Fantasy I had the other night. Some agency (aliens?) starts selling on the black market little boxes that can be fed a structural formula (say via a simple computer interface. You pour stuff into the input hopper and if they have been fed enough of the right elements, the desired chemical comes out the output hopper and the "leftovers" come out the waste hopper.

Not only would this kill the war on drugs, it'd kill drug dealers and all the infrastructure clear up to the drug lords.

Of course, it'd also make controlling explosives, poisons, etc impossible as well.

Still, it's an interesting thought experiment.

So assume that the devices can't be taken apart. And they don't consume much power. They aren't useful for large quantities of material (say the max output is a few pounds a day).

So what changes do *you* see resulting from this? Assume that there are too many to successfully confiscate or prohibit them.

Comments

[freetrav.livejournal.com]

I can't for the life of me recall the title or author, but there was a SF story that I recall that had something similar as a plot. The end result was a near-crash of civilization, a major population decline, and a feudal society built on the ashes, based around control of the black boxes, and developed from anarchic thuggery. Wish I could find the story; the black box in it wasn't quite the same as yours (IIRC, it was a replicator/duplicator), but...

[kengr]

I recall the story. I think it was by Del Rey, but I won't swear to it. If my library wasn't in storage I could walk over and search the shelf (yes, I own a copy)

This isn't quite that subject to abuse. For one thing, the lack of transmutation makes it harder to do some things, and the fact that it can't produce anything with more of a structure than a powder or lump limits stuff too.

It makes molecules, not objects.