For most of human history, life has been organized around scarcity.
Food had to be grown. Shelter had to be built. Things had to be manufactured. Someone had to transport them, repair them, sell them, account for them, and manage the people doing all of that work.
Survival required labor.
We built an economic system around that reality. You contribute something other people value, you receive money in return, and you use that money to obtain the things you need or want.
Money, viewed this way, is more than a medium of exchange.
It is stored freedom.
Enough money means I can decide not to work tomorrow. More money means I can make that decision for longer. It lets me choose where I live, what I do, what risks I take, and how much of my limited time belongs to someone else.
This is one reason people spend so much of their lives trying to accumulate it.
But I’ve been wondering what happens if the assumptions underneath that entire system begin to disappear.
Intelligence is becoming cheap
We’re already watching the first part happen.
A growing amount of intellectual work can now be performed by artificial intelligence. Writing software, analyzing information, creating images, researching subjects, designing systems, answering questions, diagnosing problems, and coordinating increasingly complicated tasks are becoming faster and cheaper.
We’re nowhere near the end of that progression.
Eventually, asking an AI to perform a complicated intellectual task may become about as remarkable as asking a calculator to divide two numbers.
At that point, intelligence itself begins to look less like a scarce resource.
But intelligence is only half of the equation.
The other half is labor.
What happens when robots build robots?
Imagine increasingly capable general-purpose robots that can perform much of the physical work humans currently perform.
They mine materials.
They operate factories.
They build houses.
They grow and harvest food.
They maintain infrastructure.
They manufacture products.
They repair one another.
And eventually, they manufacture more robots.
That last step matters.
A robot that can build another robot changes the economics of labor in a fundamental way.
Today, producing another worker requires roughly two decades of biology, parenting, education, housing, food, healthcare, and social development.
A robotic worker could eventually be manufactured in hours or days.
Then that robot can help manufacture another.
And another.
The productive capacity of civilization would no longer scale primarily with the number of humans willing and able to work.
It could scale with machines.
Then follow the chain one step further
Machines require energy.
But energy is another area where the long-term constraint may look very different from today’s.
The Earth receives an extraordinary amount of energy from the sun. Solar generation, storage, grid technology, nuclear power, and whatever energy technologies emerge next are improving alongside AI.
Machines powered by abundant energy can acquire materials, manufacture products, transport goods, maintain infrastructure, and manufacture more machines.
AI accelerates the science and engineering behind all of those processes.
Better AI creates better machines.
Better machines create more productive capacity.
Greater productive capacity builds more energy infrastructure.
More energy supports more computation and more machines.
The cycle reinforces itself.
This is where the implications become difficult to dismiss as merely “AI taking jobs.”
Jobs may be one of the least interesting consequences.
But what about scarce resources?
This is usually where the argument stops.
There is only so much copper. Only so much lithium. Only so much aluminum. Only so much land.
That’s true if we freeze technology where it is today.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable assumption.
If intelligence becomes dramatically more capable and dramatically cheaper, materials science should advance with it. Recycling should improve. Extraction should improve. Manufacturing should become more precise. Substitution should become easier.
Products may require less material in the first place.
Materials that are expensive or difficult to obtain today may be replaced by materials we haven’t invented yet.
Waste itself becomes a resource if machines can economically disassemble, sort, refine, and reuse it.
And Earth’s resources aren’t necessarily the final boundary either.
The point isn’t that physical scarcity disappears completely. Some things will always be scarce. A particular piece of land can only be occupied by so many people. There is only one original Picasso. There are only so many beachfront homes in Maui.
But most of what humans need to live very well doesn’t require unique objects.
It requires food, energy, shelter, transportation, healthcare, manufactured goods, information, and services.
If the cost of producing those things approaches the cost of energy and raw materials, while both are becoming increasingly abundant and efficiently used, something strange happens.
The marginal cost of a very good life could fall dramatically.
Which raises a more interesting question about ownership
Whenever I think about this future, one objection keeps appearing:
Who owns the robots?
It’s a reasonable question because ownership determines access in the world we currently inhabit.
If one company owns the machines, the factories, the energy systems, and the AI, why would it give everyone else the output for free?
Initially, it probably wouldn’t.
The transition could be messy. Possibly very messy.
But take the thought experiment further.
What happens when machines can manufacture machines, and those machines can manufacture nearly everything else?
The economic importance of owning a particular machine begins to decline if another one can simply be made.
The same applies to factories.
And eventually to much of productive capital.
Ownership is extraordinarily valuable when the thing being owned is scarce.
Abundance changes that equation.
A billionaire today can own ten houses, twenty cars, three airplanes, and a yacht. Those things signal wealth partly because most people cannot afford them.
But if nearly anyone could obtain a beautiful house, excellent transportation, extraordinary food, sophisticated healthcare, and almost any manufactured object at negligible cost, owning more of them becomes considerably less interesting.
You can only sleep in one bed at a time.
At some point, accumulation stops producing much additional freedom because nearly everyone already has access to most of what money once purchased.
That would be a profound change in human incentives.
Money is a bridge
I don’t think money is disappearing next Tuesday.
Quite the opposite.
During the transition, money may become particularly important because our existing economic system will continue operating while the technology underneath it changes.
That’s why I still think of money as stored freedom.
For someone living today, accumulating enough capital provides optionality while we move through a period that could be unusually unpredictable.
But that creates an odd possibility.
We may be spending enormous amounts of our lives accumulating something whose primary purpose is to buy freedom, just before technology begins making many of the things we purchase with that freedom radically cheaper.
That doesn’t make saving money irrational.
It makes the destination interesting.
The goal may not be to become unimaginably wealthy.
It may simply be to have enough resources to cross the bridge.
And then what?
This is the part I find much more interesting than the technology.
Humans have spent essentially our entire existence with survival somewhere in the background.
Even wealthy people organize enormous portions of their lives around work, money, achievement, status, and accumulation.
We go to school so we can get jobs.
We get jobs so we can earn money.
We earn money so we can support ourselves.
We save money so someday we won’t have to work.
Then we call that retirement.
But imagine that sequence becoming unnecessary for most people.
Not because a government sends everyone a check.
Not because wealth has been redistributed.
But because producing the things necessary for an excellent life simply doesn’t require much human labor anymore.
For the first time, a civilization could face a peculiar problem:
What do billions of human beings do when almost nothing needs to be done?
Some people would create.
Some would explore.
Some would compete.
Some would study subjects that have no economic value whatsoever.
Some would raise families.
Some would travel.
Some would build things simply because building them is interesting.
Some would probably spend an astonishing amount of time doing absolutely nothing.
And perhaps we’d discover that much of what we currently call purpose was actually necessity wearing better clothes.
I don’t know whether this happens in ten years or fifty
There are enormous technical, political, economic, and social obstacles between here and there.
Maybe some prove harder than I expect.
Maybe entirely new constraints appear.
But when I look at AI, robotics, energy, automation, materials science, and manufacturing as interconnected systems rather than separate technologies, the direction seems difficult to ignore.
We are steadily reducing the amount of scarce human effort required to produce useful things.
If that trend continues far enough, the question isn’t merely what happens to employment.
It’s what happens to an economic and social system built during a period when human labor was indispensable.
And beyond that is an even stranger question.
For thousands of years, humans have dreamed about freedom from necessity.
We may be among the first generations forced to figure out what to do with it.