It could be a general Gnostic reference. Abraxas is also a Marvel Comics character.

Yours is the minority report!

And blackjack.

Sorry, I won't go for anything less than 239 PUs.

It's unclear from the game whether your side is purely defensive or if it's actually aiming to wipe the cabal out. Without spoiling things too much if you want to play the game, they never get their chance. But your point about illness is a good one. It used to be the case that mental hospitals were run like prisons. Perhaps one should instead run prisons (for those who have no alternative, like the cabal members) as hospitals.

As for social-technical points, I would say that social points are actually more important than technical points. If you have lots of social points, you can make abundance work without high tech; but if you have lots of technical points - i.e. power - without the social points that confer the responsibility needed, you could get a parallel LulzSec making an airborne plague "for the lulz", or terrorist fanatics wiping out cities with nanotech. Some of the same is alluded to in a later cutscene of Hostile Waters, where it is shown that the universal assemblers can also be used as universal disassemblers.

So far, responsibility has managed to stay ahead of power - even with nuclear weapons, the nations of the world have managed to not destroy themselves. But will it hold as more and more power is available? I don't know, but there will be interesting times.

(And as a note on churches: I got the feeling that they were talking about the kind of religion that could be subordinated to authority. Consider the claim of the divine right of kings, and the significant power the Pope wielded back in those days. One can graft hierarchy to any organization, and so attempt to gain control of the organization's domain.)

And all I have to say is:

This is how the Duke ends,
this is how the Duke ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper.

RIP!

You might want to check the cutscenes to the old game Hostile Waters, particularly Nanotechnology and Cabal. It's an RTS, but your side is a post-scarcity society and the enemy group is those leaders that didn't like the redistribution of power that brought.

It may be simple, but I haven't seen that kind of setting elsewhere.

No, that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that were replicators or printers to exist, but the classical economy derived its scarcity value entirely from DRM, I would have no problem downloading "LaBWaRe.CRACKED.stl.rar", or for the intellectual challenge of it, downloading the demo (were there such a thing) and cracking it myself. And since the only thing separating this scenario from one where everybody could have everything they wanted is the artificial addition of DRM, I don't think the majority of the people would feel bad in either cracking or downloading pirated copies, either.

In the current world, at least you can claim that it's unjust to download a pirated copy since it deprives the author of the money they would get if you had bought it legally. However, if the only thing that makes things have monetary value in a replicator+DRM society is that there is DRM, then money only exists as a legitimate way of canceling the DRM. Thus, my pirating doesn't deprive the ultimate authors of their value since they can just pirate what they need, too.

It is true that things will be much less clear in the intermediate period where somethings can be printed and other things not, but the greater the fraction of things you need that can be printed, the weaker the claim that piracy is morally bad will be. In practice, in such a "mixed economy" (scarcity/abundance), I'd probably just try to make open source labware.

That would be Manna.

And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?

Then I start IDA, Replicator Edition -- or wait for the kind folks at Razor (or Reloaded, Deviance, whoever) to do that if I don't know how. At least for current "digital content", those who don't like pirates can claim to some degree that pirating deprives the producers of money - but if the DRM is just a scheme to keep poor (who otherwise could print anything they wanted) poor, that logic kinda goes out the window.

Just like North Korean radio!

And if they're going to implement another image format, why don't they do it right and pick some form of embedded zerotree wavelet? Those beat the pants off JPEG (and most other DCT codecs) while being perfectly progressive (i.e. you can truncate the picture data itself at any point and get the same result as you would if you had compressed to that size).

Instead we'll get yet another block coding format, for what? So that Google can use it to leverage WebM?

Specialization is for insects.

No, but one of the passengers is a Belgian detective, and then the train gets stuck in a snowdrift.

The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.

Couldn't the AI act as the superstructure of that distributed approach? As it is, in the ideal case, the market economy converges on prices through a process of trial and failure (tatonnement); but given more detailed data (say, input-output information), the AI could converge more quickly towards equilibrium. It's still a distributed approach because all the actual innovation happens at the hands of the participants - the people - but the mechanism itself would be much more responsive. The additional information could also be aggregated by the AI for the people to use. For instance, input-output data could show what the limiting resources to production of a given sort are, and people could then try to find better ways of producing those resources if they value the good in question -- and such could happen without having to go through multiple stages of tatonnement.