I'll take a red Ferrari convertible please...

I don't think that such a thing would end scarcity, it would just change what sort of things are scarce. Some of those are still material things, I don't think a replicating technology will be able to produce more penthouses overlooking central park for example, but many of them will be esoteric things. Time is of course a big one. Intellectual property will probably also become more important, just as now it is more valuable to have a Gucci bag then it is to have one that looks just like it, certain designs will remain valuable.

I've never bought into the notion of poor people somehow being 'forced' to consume and the rich showing their wealth by not consuming. Doesn't make any sense to me.

The idea originates, if memory serves, from Fred Pohl's short story The Midas Plague in which a fully robotocized production system requires individuals to utilize a certain level of manufactured goods per day... it is a fun inversion of standard production thinking, actually, and, yes, large sized machines that could make houses do use a lot of resources and then, of course, you have to find some way of utilizing them to destruction, too.

Personalized distributed production frees most folks of the needs for regular goods. This concept is going open source (as well as a robotics platform) and some of the views are directly aimed at larger scale production for vehicles and homes. Raw materials processing then becomes an issue, but do note that you are now in the arena of processing your own smelter, forge, tree cutting and lumbering system... the question then becomes energy source, not productive means, and it is yet another reason to move to a larger electrical source base over 30 to 50 years.

The scary part is the Von Neumann aspect of self-replicating machines... they can serve as a means to gather certain resources, but, as Fred Saberhagen points out, the first interstellar war machine that goes bad with self-replicating capability becomes a very, very nasty foe. His Berserker books all point to a robotic anti-life group of machines intended as a last ditch 'doomsday' device by a race on a losing end of a war. Unfortunately the machines didn't stop at victory over the one enemy...

Self-replicating machines do offer something that little else can, and that goes from the macro level to that of molecules and cells... then you can start printing your own cellular material for food or other purposes....

One of the possibilities this opens up is the ability to cheaply colonize other planets. All we have to do is identify an area with the necessary mineral resources and let loose a couple of these machines and they can do the rest. With programmed evolution to make the next stage of machine at each step, we simply drop them off, wait a few decades, and move in.

The company that came up with this idea isn't named SkyNet is it?

Alas, money isn't wealth in the first place, so the abolition of money wouldn't matter.

Money is a ticket in line to say what the economy does next, presumably something for you. The number of tickets is regulated by the Fed so that the economy is kept busy but not too busy. The Fed simply creates and distroys tickets, buy selling or buying debt, and there's no effect on the country's wealth.

What you have instead is products without labor. Presumably the economy can be busier then, and there must be more money, not less.

I am unconvinced that this particular technology can do everything that is claimed for it - but it will definitely be on my watchlist.

Thing is, it's subject to entropy and scarcity of resources itself, you know? I doubt it can turn lead into gold, no matter how many nuclear reactors you throw at it.

Justus -- "Fred Pohl's short story The Midas Plague"

Possibly more like the darker view in Knight's 'A for Anything'.