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Which also doesn't make sense: you can't replicate the drug, but it hardly implies you also can't replicate the factory which makes it, for example. Just how fa
by XorNot 3y ago
Which also doesn't make sense: you can't replicate the drug, but it hardly implies you also can't replicate the factory which makes it, for example. Just how far up the "can't do that" chain do you go?
The thing is, the mechanism of the Replicator is less important then what it represents: productivity with zero human labor input. We don't live in that world - we have trouble conceiving of that world. But that's essentially the whole promise of AI: robots which can build more robots, which can then build products for us.
At some point, your whole civilizations pipeline becomes "energy + robot labor". And once you get the first part of the Dyson swarm up and running, energy is infinite - at least in human terms.
- hnlmorg 3y agoI agree but Star Trek was never intended to be hard Sci-Fi. Sometimes it even breaks from its own cannon (and I’m not just talking about Discovery/Klingons. Almost all of the alien species have undergone revision over the years). So I’m ok with replicators being a lazy plot device. It’s not like there aren’t countless others, like transporters, the usage of large mother ships rather than lots of smaller vessels, universal translators, 3D geometry presented in 2D, every species being bipedal, etc. The point behind Star Trek is that it presents the best of humanity rather than the worst — which is what most other popular sci-fi stories focus on.