Tag: POST-SCARCITY

  • The System of Scarcity 

    The System of Scarcity 

    Europe’s gas storage is low. Gas prices may rise. Electricity prices may rise with them—even in Sweden.

    This is presented as if Europe is running out of energy.

    Meanwhile, the sun continues to pour an incomprehensible amount of energy onto Spain and the rest of southern Europe every day. The wind continues to blow across the Earth. Rivers continue to flow through Scandinavia. We already possess the technology required to capture, store, distribute and intelligently combine all of these sources.

    The gas may be scarce.

    Energy is not.

    What we are witnessing is not merely an energy problem. It is a perfect demonstration of the system of scarcity.

    The Actual Need

    Europe does not need gas.

    Europe needs energy.

    Gas is only one possible means of providing heat, electricity and industrial power. Yet because enormous investments, markets and infrastructure have been built around gas, a shortage of gas is treated as a shortage of energy itself.

    This is extraordinarily narrow thinking.

    The Clean River

    Imagine someone standing beside a clean river and declaring that there is nothing to drink because the shop has run out of bottled water. The person has confused one commercial product with the underlying need that the product was supposed to satisfy.

    We do this throughout the economy.

    We do not fundamentally need oil.

    We need transportation, heat, materials and industrial processes. We do not need one particular metal. We need whatever function that metal performs. We do not need concrete in every conceivable construction. We need safe and durable buildings. We do not need one particular crop from one particular supplier. We need nutritious food.

    The Sane Civilization

    In a sane civilization, we would always begin by identifying the actual need. We would then examine every available resource, technology and method capable of meeting it.

    If one resource became scarce, we would not run around like headless chickens announcing the end of civilization. We would look for alternatives. We would substitute materials, redesign products, recycle components, improve efficiency or find a completely different way to achieve the desired result.

    A particular resource may be scarce without the solution being scarce.

    But that is not how our present system thinks.

    Market Thinking

    Unfortunately we don’t live in a sane civilization at the moment.

    The monetary system does not primarily ask how human needs can be met with the resources available. It asks what can be owned, traded and sold profitably through the system that already exists.

    Europe has built a market around gas. Companies own extraction rights, pipelines, terminals, storage facilities, power plants and contracts. Governments have designed policies around this structure. Financial markets trade expectations about its future availability. Millions of incomes, investments and institutional interests have become attached to maintaining it.

    Consequently, when gas becomes scarce, the response is not simply to move as quickly as possible toward whatever abundant alternatives are available. The shortage becomes a market event. Prices rise. Traders speculate. Households worry. Industries demand support. Governments compete for supplies.

    The system has mistaken its own dependency for a law of nature.

    In Sweden, electricity prices can be affected by European gas prices even though very little Swedish electricity is generated from gas. Electricity is traded through interconnected markets, and expensive gas-generated electricity elsewhere can influence prices far beyond the place where that gas is actually burned.

    The Labyrinth

    Spain may simultaneously receive an abundance of solar energy. But instead of regarding this as part of Europe’s shared energy capacity, we place a labyrinth of markets, ownership structures, pricing mechanisms, national interests and insufficiently coordinated infrastructure between the sunlight and the people who need energy.

    Then we point to the resulting bottleneck and call it scarcity.

    We have created a monetary maze between the resource and the need. When the resource cannot pass efficiently through the maze, we conclude that there is not enough.

    Scarcity Within

    The deepest scarcity, however, is not found in a gas storage facility. It is created in the human mind.

    It begins with the belief that there cannot possibly be enough for everyone. It is the narrow, frightened and egoic conviction that human beings are separate competitors trapped in a struggle over an inadequate world. If I do not acquire as much as possible for myself, someone else will take it. If others gain access, I must be losing something.

    From that belief, we created institutions based on ownership, competition, accumulation and exclusion. Those institutions then restrict access to resources and produce deprivation. Finally, the deprivation is offered as proof that the original belief was correct.

    The scarcity mindset creates the scarcity system. The scarcity system restricts access. Restricted access reinforces the scarcity mindset.

    It is a closed loop operating inside a world of extraordinary natural wealth, technological capability and human ingenuity.

    This does not mean that every resource is infinite. Earth is a finite planet. Some materials are genuinely rare. Ecosystems have limits, and reckless extraction can destroy the very foundations of human life.

    But physical limits do not require a civilization based on permanent scarcity. They require intelligence.

    They require us to know what resources exist, understand the rate at which they can safely be used, eliminate unnecessary waste, recover materials, develop alternatives and design products around what is sustainably available.

    The belief that physical limits force us to compete, hoard and exclude one another is not realism. It is a failure of imagination.

    Money Needs Scarcity

    Money does not merely help us manage scarcity. The monetary system depends upon scarcity in order to function.

    If something is genuinely abundant and freely accessible, there is little reason to buy or sell it. Nobody can build an enormous fortune selling something that everyone can already obtain freely whenever they need it.

    For trade to remain necessary, there must be a barrier between people and the things they require. Sometimes that barrier is a genuine physical limitation. But it can also be created through ownership, prices, patents, restricted distribution, deliberate underproduction or the destruction of surplus.

    If there were true abundance, we would not need money or trading.

    This creates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the monetary system. It claims to pursue abundance through economic growth, innovation and increased production. Yet genuine abundance threatens the very prices and profits upon which the system depends.

    If housing were freely available to everyone, housing would cease to be an enormously profitable investment vehicle. If clean energy were universally available, energy empires could no longer collect fortunes from controlling access to it. If nutritious food were produced in abundance and distributed according to need, hunger could no longer coexist with mountains of discarded food. If knowledge and technology were openly shared, artificial monopolies built around controlling them would disappear.

    The system therefore does not merely distribute what exists. It determines who is permitted access.

    That is why food can be destroyed while people go hungry. Houses can remain empty while people are homeless. Factories can remain idle while essential needs go unmet. Medicines can exist while patients are unable to obtain them. Renewable energy can surround us while families fear their next electricity bill.

    These are not always shortages of the things themselves. They are shortages of permission, purchasing power and access.

    Proof of Abundance

    Despite the extreme inefficiency of the present system, we are, amazingly enough, still here. We extract vastly more resources than necessary because of the profit motive, manufacture disposable products, transport goods absurd distances, destroy unsold food, demolish usable buildings, discard functioning technology and bury valuable materials in landfills. 

    Yet Earth has continued to provide for billions of people in spite of all this waste.

    That alone is evidence of the extraordinary abundance our planet has to offer.

    But under the monetary system, this abundance is available primarily to those with enough money to access it. Some people can command more food, land, energy, housing and manufactured products than they could possibly use, while others are denied the essentials of life. What we call abundance today is therefore an abundance built upon extreme inequality, relentless extraction and enormous waste.

    It is not an abundance we have created intelligently. It is an abundance we have plundered selectively.

    And this cannot continue for much longer—not if we expect humanity to continue for much longer on this planet. The fact that Earth has survived our inefficiency until now does not mean its capacity is limitless. It means we have been given an extraordinary margin of abundance and have mistaken that generosity for permission to waste it.

    Manufacturing Waste

    The present system extracts far more resources than humanity actually needs—not because people require everything being produced, but because companies must continue selling in order to survive and generate profit. A product that lasts for fifty years is less profitable than one that must be replaced every five. A device that can be repaired and upgraded indefinitely creates fewer sales than one that is sealed, unsupported and eventually declared obsolete.

    The result is an economy built around continuous turnover. Countless competing companies manufacture slightly different versions of the same products, duplicate factories and distribution networks, cover everything in disposable packaging and spend enormous resources persuading us to replace things that still work. Unsold food is destroyed, usable clothing is discarded, buildings remain empty, machinery stands idle and valuable materials are buried in landfills because providing access without payment would undermine their market value.

    Humanity now extracts approximately 100 billion tonnes of materials from Earth every year, while the global economy remains only about eight percent circular. There is no precise calculation of how much extraction would disappear without the profit motive, but a reduction of twenty to forty percent is entirely conceivable once products were designed for durability, repair, sharing, standardization and complete material recovery. The same resources could provide a far higher standard of living while placing dramatically less pressure on the planet.

    This means that removing the profit incentive would not create deprivation. It would effectively create abundance.

    We would no longer need to extract enough resources to satisfy human needs and keep billions of products flowing continuously through the machinery of sales and profit. We would produce what was actually needed, make it as durable as possible, share rarely used equipment, repair what broke and recover its materials when it finally reached the end of its useful life.

    Abundance does not require producing an infinite number of disposable things. It means ensuring that everyone can access what they need. By removing the commercial requirement to manufacture, sell, discard and replace as much as possible, humanity could create greater abundance for everyone while extracting considerably less from Earth.

    Extreme Wealth

    This also explains why extreme billionaires could not exist in a world where everyone had enough.

    A billion euros is not a billion pieces of food, houses, cars or solar panels. It is a claim upon real resources and productive capacity. It gives one person extraordinary power to command land, materials, technology and human activity.

    That power has meaning only because access is unequally distributed.

    If everyone could obtain excellent housing, food, healthcare, education, transportation, communication and energy without payment, currency would lose  its practical power. A billionaire might still possess a vast numerical fortune, but there would be little that fortune could command which everyone else could not already access.

    Extreme wealth is therefore not evidence that society has created abundance. It is evidence that access to abundance has been concentrated through the ingenious monetary system. Ingenious for the billionaires, that is.

    The greater the distance between the billionaire and the person who cannot afford electricity, food or shelter, the more successfully the system has manufactured scarcity for one person while manufacturing almost unlimited purchasing power for another.

    The fortunes at the top and the deprivation at the bottom are not unrelated accidents. They are two results of the same system.

    Another Logic

    A sane world with a global resource-based economy would begin from a completely different question.

    Not:

    What can be sold?

    Not:

    Who can afford it?

    Not:

    Which shortage will produce the highest price?

    But:

    What do we need, what resources do we have available, and how can we use them intelligently for everyone?

    If humanity needed energy, we would map all available energy sources and build the most effective combination. Solar energy from sunnier regions could be integrated with wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal energy, storage and an interconnected grid. Production would be planned around physical reality rather than profitability.

    If a particular material became scarce, a global resource inventory would reveal that fact before it became a crisis. Products would be redesigned. Alternative materials would be developed. Existing components would be recovered. Wasteful uses would be discontinued, while essential uses received priority.

    There would still be limits. There would still be engineering challenges, ecological constraints and difficult decisions. But we would face those challenges as one civilization trying to solve them—not as competing owners attempting to profit from them.

    The greatest abundance available to humanity is not any single resource. It is our capacity to think, adapt, invent and cooperate. There are usually many ways to meet the same underlying need.

    Yet we suppress that abundance when we trap every solution inside the question of whether it is profitable.

    Europe worries about the gas in its storage tanks while an immense fusion reactor shines above us every day. That image captures the entire insanity of the present system.

    We are not living in a world without solutions. We are living inside a system that repeatedly overlooks them because they do not fit its narrow logic.

    The ultimate scarcity is not a lack of sunlight, resources, technology or human capability.

    It is the scarcity inside our thinking.

    And the moment we leave that thinking behind, we may discover that the world was far more abundant than we had ever allowed it to become.

    The Abundant World

    In the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity, billionaire Benjamin Michaels awakens in 2115 to discover that humanity has finally abandoned the system of scarcity. Money, trade and ownership have been replaced by stewardship, intelligent resource management and optimized sharing. The world did not become abundant because Earth suddenly produced infinite resources. It became abundant because humanity stopped wasting what it already had.

    Discover the world that became possible when humanity finally chose abundance over scarcity here.

  • Beyond Ownership: Why AI Will Render the Concept of Ownership Obsolete

    Beyond Ownership: Why AI Will Render the Concept of Ownership Obsolete

    When tech leaders and titans of high finance debate the future of artificial intelligence, they inevitably reach the same tantalizing conclusion: intelligent automation and robotics will soon unleash an era of unprecedented global expansion. In this near-future world, the cost of producing goods, energy, and services drops toward zero.

    Yet during a high-profile exchange at the World Economic Forum in Davos between Elon Musk and Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, a critical fault line emerged. While Musk pointed to exponential productivity as the solution to global poverty, Fink zeroed in on the structural question mainstream visionaries routinely gloss over:

    Larry Fink: 

    “Elon, can that expansion be broad? Or is it narrow? And how can that be created? How can it broaden the global economy?”

    When asked directly how it broadens the economy, Musk answered that economic output will scale exponentially with robotic labor:

    “The way to think of it is that if you have a large number of humanoid robots, the economic output is the average productivity per robot times the number of robots.”

    He argued that in a benign scenario, automated production will eventually saturate all human material needs to the point where people won’t even be able to think of new tasks to ask a robot to perform.

    But Fink’s point strikes at the very foundation of our economic system, wondering if this expansion will benefit everyone or just a few. If automated systems become the sole engine of wealth creation, who actually owns the engine? A few hyper billionaires, or humanity as a whole?

    The Flaw in the Market Solution

    Musk’s answer to Fink’s concern relies on traditional market dynamics: scale, open-source competition, and plummeting marginal costs. In Musk’s view, because tech companies naturally seek the largest possible customer base, market competition will force AI and robotics out to billions of people, making abundance broad by sheer volume.

    However, this logic contains a massive blind spot.

    Lowering the cost of production does not solve the fundamental problem of access if the underlying mechanisms of income, capital, and private title remain unchanged. If a tiny fraction of corporate entities and private individuals own the algorithms, data centers, energy grids, and robotic factories, then even hyper-cheap abundance remains bottled up behind a legal gatekeeper.

    Traditional market thinking tries to patch this hole with ideas like Universal Basic Income (UBI) or Universal High Income(UHI). But these are merely temporary band-aids—scaffolding designed to pump financial purchasing power into the hands of consumers so they can continue buying goods from capital owners and thus pump the financial power back to the capital owners. It attempts to maintain the illusion of a market exchange long after the necessity of human labor in production has evaporated.

    Furthermore, these universal income models assume a tax base that is rapidly disappearing. In our current framework, state tax revenue relies completely on citizens—through income taxes, payroll taxes, and wage-driven consumer spending. But if AI and robotics displace human labor at scale, the primary engine of public revenue dries up. Where does the state draw the funds to distribute a UBI or UHI if the taxable working class no longer exists? Proponents point to “robot taxes” or corporate AI levies, but this creates an absurd circular loop: taxing corporate capital to fund state payouts, so citizens can hand that money right back to the corporate capital owners. The logic completely falls apart. The only true resolution is to stop trying to patch a broken loop and instead replace the monetary system itself, making the shift from ownership to stewardship our main foundational change.

    If we want true, broad abundance, we cannot simply adjust the distribution of money. We have to fundamentally rethink the concept of ownership itself.

    From passive Ownership to Active Stewardship

    Our current economic framework is anchored in private property rights—a system designed to manage artificial scarcity by granting an owner the legal right to exclude others, extract rent, and maximize short-term capital returns.

    When applied to an automated world, exclusive ownership becomes an even tighter artificial bottleneck that enforces artificial scarcity.

    Crucially, our economy is fundamentally powered by human activity, not machines. The entire monetary engine—from taking out and repaying loans to paying taxes, settling monthly bills, and earning wages—relies on billions of people earning an income to cycle capital back through the system. If intelligent automation and robotics displace human labor at scale, the conventional flow of money collapses; without workers earning, there are no consumers spending or taxpayers funding public infrastructure. The rise of AI does not just present a disruption to jobs—it forces an inescapable reality upon us: when human labor is no longer the foundational fuel of production, the entire monetary system breaks down, compelling us to fundamentally rethink the necessity of money, trading, and ownership itself. Thus, UBI/UHI would not last very long or be much of a point at all as soon as the technology has come far enough. 

    To bridge the gap between technological capacity and universal human flourishing, society must transition from a paradigm of Ownership to a paradigm of Stewardship.

    1. Access Over Exclusion

    Under stewardship, the goal of economic infrastructure is not asset appreciation, but functional access. When AI and automated systems manage agricultural yield, energy lproduction, and goods manufacturing, the legal right to “own” the production capacity becomes redundant. Assets are treated as shared public infrastructure—much like the air we breathe or open-source protocols—where access is granted based on need and utility rather than account balances.

    2. Sustainable Abundance with Ecological Limits

    The word “abundance” on its own can imply reckless, endless consumption. Coupling it with sustainability requires stewardship. Private ownership incentivizes the rapid liquidation of natural capital because balance sheets do not account for planetary depletion. Stewardship bakes ecological boundaries directly into the system, using AI non-monetary to monitor resource pools, closed-loop recycling, and carrying capacities in real time.

    3. Dissolving the Gatekeeper Class

    So long as capital accumulation dictates who survives, technological advancement will run the risk of creating an ever-narrower elite. Replacing ownership with stewardship removes the leverage of the gatekeeper class. No one own anything. We all optimize and share everything based on need. When production assets are managed as a trust for all humanity, technology stops being a mechanism for extracting wealth and becomes what it was always meant to be: a tool for human liberation.

    The Horizon Beyond Money

    The debate between Larry Fink and Elon Musk reveals that even the highest tiers of global finance and technology recognize that a massive transition is underway. Yet they remain bound by the language of the old world—debating how market mechanisms or asset portfolios will adjust.

    True sustainable abundance is not just about producing more stuff faster with robots. It is about outgrowing the archaic game of tokenized exchange altogether.

    By shifting our foundational logic from who owns the world to how we responsibly steward our shared resources, we pave the way for a true post-scarcity future—a world where technology serves human purpose rather than financial accounting.

    Beyond the Paradigm of Ownership

    It is crucial to recognize that transitioning from ownership to stewardship is not a push to revive 20th-century state-collectivism or government control. Replacing private ownership with state ownership merely transfers exclusive authority from a corporate board or private individual to a bureaucratic government. Both models operate on the exact same underlying logic: the assumption that someone—an individual, a company, or a state—must possess the Earth and dictate access.

    Transcending Ownership

    Stewardship transcends the concept of ownership altogether. In nature, no forest owns the rain, and no river issues an invoice for its water; ecosystems operate through open, interconnected relationships rather than title deeds. Transforming our mindset means recognizing that humans are not masters or owners of the planet, but temporary caretakers.

    When we step away from “mine versus state-owned” and move toward stewardship, access is no longer mediated by legal title or purchasing power. Instead, societal assets, technological infrastructure, and natural resources exist to be maintained, optimized, and shared directly for human well-being and ecological health. It is not a shift in who owns the property—it is the maturation of human consciousness past the need to own at all.

    Operationalizing Stewardship: How Non-Monetary Resource Management Works

    If money is no longer used as a proxy for access, and state bureaucratic allocation is rejected, how does a society actually coordinate the flow of goods, energy, and raw materials?

    In a stewardship model, non-monetary resource management replaces speculative market pricing with real-time physical feedback loops and dynamic allocation protocols.

    1. Direct Physical Feedback Over Price Signals

    Under traditional economics, price is an indirect, highly distorted signal that measures purchasing power rather than actual human need or environmental health. In a non-monetary stewardship framework, interconnected sensor and AI networks track direct physical parameters—crop yields, regional water tables, energy grid storage, material depletion, human input and atmospheric boundaries—in real time. Supply chains shift from chasing financial profit margins to maintaining biological and operational equilibrium.

    2. Algorithmic Commons and Universal Access

    Instead of purchasing goods through monetary debt or tokenized exchanges, access is coordinated via an open algorithmic commons. Essential foundations of human welfare—clean energy, nutritious food, shelter, healthcare, and educational tools—are provisioned unconditionally as public infrastructure. When physical constraints arise for localized or rare resources (such as prime physical locations or unique craftsmanship), allocation is governed by transparent scheduling, shared usage cycles, or community-agreed priority frameworks rather than financial bidding wars.

    3. Thermodynamic and Ecological Accounting

    Monetary balance sheets record financial growth while treating environmental destruction as an “externalities” line item. Non-monetary resource management relies on strict physical accounting: tracking energy efficiency, material recyclability, and ecological carrying capacity. Automated manufacturing systems are programmed to execute projects only when raw materials can be sourced, used, and recycled within planetary boundaries.

    4. Polycentric, Transparent Governance

    To prevent automated networks or administrative boards from becoming centralized gatekeepers, governance is structured polycentrically. Local communities retain direct democratic authority over their immediate environments and social priorities, while open-source, auditable protocols coordinate larger-scale logistical distribution across regions.

    By grounding economic coordination in tangible physical reality rather than symbolic monetary exchange, non-monetary stewardship replaces structural scarcity with a system designed for real sustainable abundance.

    Experience the Future Beyond Money

    If you want to explore what this transformation looks like in practice, the novel Waking Up: A Journey Towards a New Dawn for Humanity paints a vivid picture of a world where ownership, money, and trade have truly become relics of the past. Seen through the eyes of Benjamin Michaels—a bewildered billionaire who wakes up into this post-scarcity reality—the story allows readers to experience the daily life, culture, and human dynamics of a society grounded entirely in stewardship and abundance. The book is not a manifesto or instruction manual. Rather, it is a story meant to inspire and show what can be possible in a future like this. For Benjamin, waking up after 100 years in cryonic preservation is of course a shock. But what will he experience in this new world? 

    Will he survive? Will he thrive? Or will he succumb to the temptation of another wake-up trying to bring the world back to what it was…? Back to money, war and ownership…?

    Discover his story