Nearly every institution we live inside rests on one assumption. There is not enough to go around, and a human life must therefore be spent securing a share. Money is a claim on scarce resources. A job is the standard way a person earns that claim. The assumption runs deeper than economics. Ask a stranger who they are, and they will usually answer with what they do for a living. Work sits at the center of identity because through the whole of recorded history, work was how a person stayed alive.
The arrangement earned its place. The pressure of scarcity organized billions of strangers into markets that coordinate without anyone commanding them, and competition for advantage funded the railway and the vaccine. An honest ledger records the costs beside the gains. The same arrangement produced exploitation and alienation, and it taught us to read a person’s income as a measure of the person.
Intelligence has always been one of the scarce inputs. Planning a supply chain or diagnosing a disease consumed hours of trained attention, and the trained hours were expensive. Artificial intelligence is making those hours cheap. Machine systems already perform a growing share of the analysis and coordination that once required them. Thinking feeds into everything we build, so as the price of thinking falls, the cost of everything downstream falls with it. When machines supply the thinking and much of the labor, survival no longer demands a lifetime of work, and the oldest premise of our institutions expires.
Abundance needs a careful definition. Nothing on the horizon makes everything infinite. Land stays limited, and so do attention and time. Under scarcity, securing resources is a requirement of staying alive, and the requirement falls on everyone. Under functional abundance, the necessities are within society’s capacity to provide. Food, housing, medicine, and education become shared infrastructure rather than prizes for market performance, and markets retreat to the things that remain genuinely scarce.
Nothing guarantees the abundant outcome. A society can hold the technical capability for abundance while continuing to enforce scarcity, and the enforcement would rest on inherited belief rather than any physical limit. Each of us absorbs ideas about work and worth long before we can examine them. Beliefs taken in that early can set a person against their own interests and feel like common sense the whole time.
The deeper break is personal. A value system built on scarcity tells each person who they are. It prices their hours and supplies a ready answer to the question of what they are worth. When machines can do the work that used to justify the wage, the ready answer expires with the premise. The question that remains is older and better. What can I provide? A person can provide amusement, novelty, a hearing for someone else’s ideas, a reason to gather. A smile from across the room carries value that no market has ever priced. The scarcity system counted none of it, and all of it was real.
That is the work ahead of us. A framework fit for abundance will have to be built deliberately, the way the scarcity system never was, and the building has to begin while we still live inside the old structure.
— Chiaroscuro Joven