An example closer to home, so to speak. I like a glass of fine wine with my evening meal (tonight is Linderman's Clancy 2005). Someday, probably within the next 50 years, a vintage will be able to be completely anaylsed, with every type of molecule determined and the exact proportions measured. The you will be able to reproduce, say Mouton Rothschild vintage X, for say, 5 cents on the dollar. What will happen to the wine producers? I will be able to produce that "vintage receipe" for 500 years or more. Will we be worse off for having all the Bordeax producers failing? And yet, everybody will have better wine than they ever could have afforded under the old analog world. The same thing happened when the industrial age started and hammered individual craftsmen....
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