I enjoy your vision, it's unique.

The only real question is how does the innate property of humans, greed, come into this. Surely this machine would need some interested corporation to construct it. Whatever company will, in essence be defunct by design and only exist in the short-term no?

EDIT: I guess other questions emerge, why won't such a power be wielded for capitalism, it seems pretty easy to create a false-scarcity market if only corporations owned such a machine.

Again, this is a post-scarcity scenario so I guess the moment that any one person not happy with keeping the status quo got their hands on one it would all be over.

More horrifically imagine a few Imortan Joe types seizing control of the Machines in a large enough area and leaving everyone not useful to them to starve.

Do you actually envision a single Machine to do all of this? I upvoted the entry because I think it's in the neighborhood of correct, but I'd expect to actually have a suite of many different kinds of machines, much like today's industries, but eliminating dependencies on fossil fuels and human labor. I'd expect machine-built greenhouses containing farming machines rather than actually manufactured carrots, for example.

Absolutely this is a thought experiment where "an economy" might be The Machine.

I also thought of explaining this concept using a magic wand, but wanted something more grounded.

But calling it a machine I think helps us avoid some of our political hang ups about organizing the productive machinery of society. Even if The Machine ends up being more like our normal economy.

I still hope some day we can literally have a large machine that does a bunch of this. I do think it would be truly useful.

Check out Jacque Fresco and Roxanne Meadows with the Venus Project. Quite a bit of thinking has gone into a similar idea already. I'm a huge fan of the Venus Project.

Definitely! I'm a big fan of Jacque Fresco and The Venus Project for their beautiful vision. I also think it serves as an interesting data point that despite their wonderful vision, they were unable to gain traction.

This makes me think an idea like this needs to be funded by a profitable organization.