That being said, as it gets cheaper to distribute information and turn that information into physical goods, the amount of value in the production of physical g

That being said, as it gets cheaper to distribute information and turn that information into physical goods, the amount of value in the production of physical goods is going to approach the cost to manufacture those goods. There will always be some money in service, repair, etc. but a lot of things value will be destroyed along the way and it is not yet clear if that is a net positive for society at large. --- Let's assume that because of patent protection not being available, smartphones are widely copied and become really cheap and all the 5 billion adults in the world have access to them. Clearly the smartphone makers themselves would make less profit. Now what? Would it make society as a whole worse off? There would be a lot of ideas that will be born on top of the smartphone - in fact, we are already seeing many of them. And profit would shift to people who execute on those ideas. There was a time not that long ago AT&T used to justify its monopoly and sky-high prices for long distance calls on the investment it was making in Bell Labs. The profits that used to be enjoyed by AT&T have become distributed (to Apple, Google, Qualcomm and so on) and the R&D has also become distributed. If you looked at Bell Labs in isolation, the end of AT&T monopoly was a big negative. But if you look at the ecosystem as a whole, there is no contest.