values in a nanotechnology world

What an awesome thread. It ain't about the minutiae of the science, but about the way humans will deal with a diff environment. Psychology, economics. Very Margret Atwood, very Ursula LeGuin.

I do think that 'rights' will expand. Just like a right to clean tap water and sanitation grew in the 19th century (if your home doesn't have those, expect your children to be taken away by the state). And we may see a right to Internet (if you don't have net access, you children will be taken away to somewhere that does).

What becomes so cheap that it becomes a right, not a luxury?

What becomes valuable? I guess it's like a chemical reaction. The limiting factors determine the size of the output (if you have 5 times as much hydrogen as oxygen, you can still only make one molecule of water per atom of oxygen). So on the material level, certain atoms - titanium, germanium, polonium - become more valuable than others (especially carbon, silicon and nitrogen).

Nitrogen, yeah, it's like what the German scientist did during WWI. Faber (great name)? Found a way to extract nitrogen out of thin air. Before that Germany had to export nitrogen for its agriculture and explosives industries from Chile. You can see why the latter was a problem during the a war.

Plus I wouldn't expect every home to have every needed atom. A T-bone steak dinner 'grown' in a nanoven? Sure. But cobalt or molybdenum or other trace minerals will have to be picked up at the local store. (Expect too the diet moralizing to continue, and parents to fret about what they put into their kids mouths. And for anti-technology reactionaries like today's organics, anti-McD's, slow-foodies, etc.)

But in general. Yeah, design swamps out cost of production, or cost of materials, as the most significant part of a product's cost. So, it will be defended more. Why shouldn't it? We s/w developers charge for our code not for the copies that it gets distributed on. Nanocoders will do the same (and, sure, the Gnostic open sourcers will come out again, saying design is infinitely valuable (like love or music) and so should be given away gratis).

Example, expect celebrity cannablism - meat grown from a famous person's DNA ("I'll have the braised Jolie breasts with alfredo fettucine, and she'll have the coq au Brad Pitt"). 60% of the price of the meal is in copyright fees (just like you pay extra for 'farm fresh' or 'raised wild' foods today).

Land prices will probably fall as more of the earth is opened up to real estate inventory (deserts, oceans). If you can make anything anywhere you can live anywhere. So the concentration of high priced real estate (cities) may become more evenly distributed (of course people said that about the Internet 15 years ago, yet major cities are doing better not worse - sometimes a good pint of beer with friends is unreplicable on the net, or in a bottle).