Post-scarcity scarcity
Why individual agency still dominates in an abundant future
Our beliefs about the future are dysfunctional. Three competing narratives now dominate contemporary discussion:
Apathy: the future is not worth thinking about
Annihilation: intelligent machines will end civilization
Abundance: robotics and AI will meet all of your needs
These are dangerous beliefs for the modern human. Not only are they unlikely to come true, but subscribing to any of them will cause you to make terrible plans—or no plans at all.
Apathy
The apathetic fundamentally believe the future doesn’t require preparation. Emblematic of this camp is the elementary school teacher, early in her career, who told me her job was safe from artificial intelligence.
Beliefs like this are common because radical change is so difficult to imagine. Our brains didn’t evolve to simulate the consequences of rapid technological progress. Besides, change is scary; superintelligent machines doubly so.
And in recent memory, apathy was a successful strategy. We have been living in the shallow end of the exponential disruption curve, with slow-moving changes giving us ample time to adapt. But that was the tutorial level; the boss fight begins when the curve turns steep.
This time, those who fail to plan for swift disruption may watch the pillars of their lives—including careers, skills, assets, and relationships—crumble beneath them. Apathy will lead to a form of annihilation—not the kind where the robots kill you, but the kind where your life stops making sense.
But there’s another kind of annihilation, and in this version, the robots really do kill you.
Annihilation
The annihilation camp hasn’t quite decided how we will be annihilated. Perhaps we will be ruled by immortal tech elites or perhaps we will simply be turned into paperclips.
And who dares dissent? If you believe that a global networked self-improving unstoppable machine superintelligence is going to destroy us all, there really is nothing you can do. You swallowed the narrative; now let its poison dissolve your executive function.
If apathy is I don’t need plans, then annihilation is my plans don’t matter. Annihilation breeds apathy, just as apathy leads to annihilation.
There is an evolutionary adaptation at play here: the desire not to spend one’s finite energy on pointless pursuits. If you know the end is near, struggling will only waste your time and amplify your suffering. Don’t play a game you can’t win.
But even a low probability of survival calls for proper planning. After all, disasters always lurk on the horizon. Anything from a heart attack to an asteroid could foil your plans. But that doesn’t mean you should stop making them. If you might live, you ought to plan as if you will.
If we can get annihilation from a certainty down to a probability, then we can quickly restore the paramount importance of planning and agency. And it seems an easy task to chip away at the absolute certainty of just about anything. Could I convince you there’s a 1% chance we avoid annihilation?
Consider that even a malevolent machine intelligence will face opposition. AI safety, reciprocal adaptation, countermeasures, and co-evolution will prevent us from proceeding monotonically to doom. Annihilation is not certain.
Abundance
And now we close the triad with the most optimistic of the three beliefs: abundance. The post-scarcity prophecy in which work becomes obsolete. In this vision, we flourish under a warm blanket of benevolent, pervasive technology. Most goods and services are readily available and ultra-low-cost.
When you hear someone speak of the inevitability of universal basic income or the end of money as a concept, you know they believe in abundance.
The emotional lure here is obvious: all you have to do is wait, and eventually time itself will deliver a cheat code for your life. Who among us could resist such a tempting offer? But by listening to the siren’s call of abundance, we once again sabotage our agency.
We may very well have great abundance in the future. The problem with abundance is that it can at best half-deliver on its promise. Universal post-scarcity is impossible because abundance doesn’t eliminate competition; it shifts it.
Some things will still be scarce, and it is precisely those things that will be in especially high demand. When machine companions are pervasive, true friendship becomes gold. When virtual vacations are free, seeing the ocean in person becomes extraordinary. When AI slop is everywhere, original ideas become priceless.
Abundance breeds a new kind of scarcity. Let’s examine its nature.
The List
The notion of a post-scarcity society always carries an asterisk that reads like a warning label: doesn’t apply to status goods. This is like a label on soap that says can’t be used for cleaning.
Status is a fundamental human need. “People’s subjective well-being, self-esteem, and mental and physical health appear to depend on the level of status they are accorded.” (Anderson et al., 2015)
People strive to appear socially valuable, to command respect, and to wield influence. Status goods aren’t some esoteric afterthought; they’re a fundamental driver of human behavior. And status goods are, by definition, scarce.
When abundance exists in a category of goods, those goods lose their ability to confer status. If we believe in abundance, then this process of devaluation will creep its way through everyday sources of status like homes, cars, jobs, clothes, and leisure time. While these “easy” sources of status will disappear, the desire to obtain it will not. And so when abundance arrives in one area, people will pursue scarcity in another.
To better understand this dynamic, we might imagine a list of resources that are likely to resist technological disruption. But this isn’t any old list. It’s The List: those things that will retain value in the long term. Surely such an input would be critical to anyone’s plans.
No one can know the contents of The List with precision. But we can attempt a rough draft by outlining that which even a superintelligence could not meaningfully create:
Human connection and attention
Friendship and love
Access to exclusive clubs and social groups
Parasocial relationships (an online following)
Power and influence
Human abilities and appearance
Top-tier intellectual, athletic, aesthetic, or creative prowess
(The point is not to beat the machines; it’s to rank highly against other humans)
Physically limited spaces and materials
Beachfront property
One-of-a-kind cultural or natural sites
Rare earth elements and their derivatives
Originals
Ideas
Works of art
Artifacts
Retro technology
Some NFTs / cryptocurrencies
Principles of The List
At first glance, this draft of The List seems arbitrary and disconnected. What does skill in, say, basketball have to do with the quantity of neodymium in the Earth’s crust?
But there are unifying principles. And it’s helpful to understand these principles when evaluating whether something belongs on The List. In particular:
Humans are finite. Battlestar Galactica notwithstanding, machines cannot create more humans. And in a post-scarcity world, we will place greater value on whether a human created a resource, rather than the resource itself. Marxists rejoice; the labor theory of value may finally see its day in the sun.
Earth is finite. There are no planets even remotely similar to it. Machines cannot increase the surface area of the Earth, nor transmute one element into another in any meaningful quantity.
History is finite. There were a finite number of things that happened in the time before abundance. Machines cannot go back in time. Artifacts, places, and even people from this time cannot be authentically duplicated.
Humans rank against humans. Even if machines exceed humans in all areas of competence, our status will derive from our ranking against other humans. Magnus Carlsen is still the number one chess player in the world, even though he carries in his pocket a machine that can easily beat him.
Math beats machines. Machines cannot break cryptography, and there exists forms of cryptography that even quantum computers cannot break. The finite world of machines can never exceed the infinite world of mathematics.
It’s true that in the long run, with sufficient technology, the first two principles can be eroded. Asteroids can be mined, planets terraformed, humans cloned at scale. But for the purposes of planning, these possibilities seem sufficiently distant.
Planning with urgency
Most of the resources on The List are already very valuable, either in dollars or in qualitative terms. But we are still early. ChatGPT was released just three years ago. Tesla’s Optimus robot is still in development. And many people are not thinking about the future with clarity, or at all.
Once the steep part of the disruption curve hits, competition for The List will increase drastically. Therefore the aim of the successful planner is not merely to make plans, but to execute them with urgency. The earlier you start, the better your future becomes.
But what does that mean in practice? Simple awareness of The List will shape how you allocate your personal capital. You may pursue development of a skill not because it will lead to a career, but because you intend to master it. You may invest in assets secured by location, cryptography, or originality. You may place greater importance on relationships, social capital, and audience.
Planning of this nature is a permanent mindset, not a one-time project. However you proceed, it should be with the knowledge that the game of life will continue in the future. It’s a game that requires your active participation: agency rather than helplessness.