A new political movement and government reform won't be enough to bring abundance, but AI and new technologies could soon make things that are costly & scarce today, cheap & abundant for all tomorrow
You put your finger on the other side of the equation. I set it aside in this essay, literally saying that at one point. That's a whole other essay, at least. But it does seem like the shift to AI is going to create the kind of transition where we are going to have to rethink the income side of earning a living. I'm not sure it will be UBI, though maybe, and that's a start. That idea got a lot of traction in the tech world from people who did see the disruption of AI on the horizon. And now it is here.
That and that if you have the end point in sight why not start working on starting to try to implement the types of things that will be a part of the lives of those future people. Those types of changes will not just happen by accident. What this moment in our history really means is that it’s is our first opportunity to use new tools that were previously unavailable to us to make actionable progress.
i'm not sure they are considering how cheap everything might become. the biggest cost behind every item is energy: energy to find resources, energy to mine/plow/plant/grow, energy to extract/harvest, energy to transport, energy to prepare/convert, energy to shape/form/construct, energy to take to market/package, energy to deliver/pick up, etc. if energy becomes uber cheap, and that does seem likely in the life time of my kids, everything, e v e r y t h i n g becomes cheap and available in high volumes.
UBI is already present in places like Kuwait where monarchs are so rich they appease the populace by providing everything needed (housing. food, clothing, etc.).
it isn't hard to imagine a few mega corporations producing all goods and services, making untold fortunes, being taxed at unheard of rates, the owners and their few employees still being richer than rich, and the taxes being used to provide for the citizenry.
Unfortunately for the pro-abundance partisans in the Democratic Party, their party now draws nearly all of its energy and power from people who staff and run and manage the organizations which are, in practice, anti-abundance. Regulators, therapists, educators, administrators, researchers, nonprofit coordinators, professors, lobbyists... all of these professions are comprised of status-seeking rule followers (generally women) whose compensation is almost completely disconnected from the actual social value they generate. These professions are organized into entities which have their own incentives, and the incentives are to grow endlessly by addressing 'problems' without actually solving them. Pick a social problem at random. there's a bureaucracy which has sprung up to manage it. I bet the problem you picked has gotten worse in recent decades, and I bet the bureaucracies have gotten bigger and the compensations lusher. This is not a recipe for abundance. If we really wanted abundance we would have to redirect the efforts of millions of professionals who busily work on completely unproductive projects for decades. That is, to put it mildly, not a popular proposal among our professional class, nor within the Democratic Party (although they're basically the same thing now).
There is something to what you are saying. And that is what the Abundance book by Klein and Thompson gets are more than what I do here. I am just trying to get a yes/and we now have the technology to actually pull off abundance. But we do need to get through this political log-jam on the left-of-center side.
I work at a large US tech company that just did another year of 14 billion revenue, up 8%. My business unit is one of the most profitable, staff do more with less (marketing budget cut, again). No one in my team has had a raise in five years despite cost of living pressures. Just interested to understand the concept of abundance here? It seems to me there’s already quite a bit of abundance, trickle down isn’t really happening. The worry with UBI I have is it will not reflect abundance but will just create a massive poverty class as the ‘owners’ will lowball what they are asked to contribute at every opportunity (see min wage)… I don’t think people want check and balances just to stymie progress, people want to be protected from the inevitable unintended consequences. We have a saying in tech when you build the ship you build the shipwreck… hopefully AI helps us get better at strategic foresight.
We will need an economic rework at a pretty fundamental level. Not just in tech but across the board. I have some thoughts on how that might play out and I will try to do that in some of my next few pieces. Including the one I'm working on for next week. Thanks for reminding all about that key piece of the puzzle.
I was actually told if you want a pay raise buy more shares, so there ya go! A lot of companies are doing share buy-backs as well BTW so there’s that to consider as well… (I also have shares in companies) but the actual ‘social contract’ seems a bit broken already, and we haven’t even reached UBI - that’s my concern about UBI as an ‘answer’
i knew Bill Church when Church's Chicken only had one restaurant in San Antonio. at that time he employed a chicken cook and paid him minimum wage. years later, when Church's had grown to hundreds of restaurants, the pay for chicken cooks was still minimum wage.
- corporate growth doesn't change what fair pay is for a job
- profit growth doesn't change what fair pay is for a job
- employees take jobs voluntarily
- companies hire voluntarily
- employees voluntarily accept pay offered
- companies voluntarily pay
- employees can change employer and/or the work they do at will
- companies can hire at will, but cannot always fire at will
your situation isn't wonderful (been there, done that), but you can change employer, change the work you do, or start your own company. as opposed to changing an economic system and the associated societal fabric...
AI personalized medicine at scale to know someone’s entire health history could fill the gap where current hospitalists have incomplete data. All for that.
i suggest you are overlooking one development with high potential (perhaps it is in the next tech wave) and that is nano engineering. the ability to change materials is already in our grasp, but the energy costs are prohibitive. however, once fusion is harnessed, nano engineering becomes affordable meaning atoms of sand can be converted to rare earths, etc. so potentially, elements considered to be exhaustible (e.g. platinum) might actually be essentially infinite.
Back in the 1990s I used to be much more bullish on nanotechnology, as many were. But I think over the years that seems farther on the horizon. Funny enough, I am rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age sci fi novel, and that is all about a world of nanotechnology. It was written in the early 1990s when nano was more in the air. I don't think it will make much of an impact in my 25 year timeframe.
i agree that it is out there on the distant horizon. but if my children live to the age of 100, they may very see nano engineering change resource scarcity.
This is the exact conversation that we should all be having. If the fundamental rules that have shaped all societies to-date (e.g. cost of production, resource allocation, scarcity, etc...) can be solved for, how should society orient itself when those rules change? If we are at an inflection point where for the first time in our history, we can imagine the tools needed to build a previously impossible version of the world increasingly divorced from the containing factors that have defined our collective beliefs, habits, institutions, and motivations up to this point, what should we be doing today to bring about that change? That is the logical end-point of the tsunami of general purpose technology referenced in this article (which is based on a fairly conservative view of the promise posed by those technologies). The key difference between now and any other point in our history is that path that we would need to take to achieve that type of paradigm shift is no longer opaque or insurmountable. Based on the pace of change, the pace of which is growing exponentially, it is not a question of "if" we will have the tools and ability to remake the world in such positive and fundamental ways, but instead a matter of when. The (emphasis added) question that is raised by this point in history is how we should respond. What sort of responsibility do we have to the billions of lives, both present and future, when each day that we do not do everything in our power to bring about that change as soon as possible potentially means one more day those people will need to experience needless suffering? Why would we not do everything we can to get as close to that ideal as we possibly can?
Implied in the Great Progression is the belief that the great calling of the people alive in this moment is to rise to this singular occasion. To envision and set out to make the world as close to this ideal image as we can now and do everything we can to support the development of the tools and structures that will make it possible to realize its fullest potential in the future. There are things we can do now to orient ourselves to embrace and foster this incoming change, orient our society in a way that starts to increase the quality of the people's lives today. None of this is to say that we have those tools in-hand, or at the scale or scientific refinement to make that dream a reality in this moment. It will require the largest social transformation that we have ever experienced. But what Peter has rightly pointed out is that we have risen to similar occasions before. We have worked as a global community, sometimes as opposing factions of that global community, but in concert and at a planet wide scale. That same level of coordinated effort is what this moment demands in order to harness and realize its fullest potential.
I like what you are wrestling with here. It seems to me that at some point at a reasonably optimistic trajectory humans will get to a world of abundance where you don't work for income and there is plenty for all. The question is will it take another 3 centuries to get to the time of Star Trek? Or happen this century? What's clear is that we could not have done it before the 21st century. We simply did not have the technology. But now we can start to look ahead and see it taking shape. That seems to be the spirit of what you are saying here.
seems a bit optimistic to me. innovation cannot advance faster than the societal tolerance for change. societies are made up of humans. by default, humans dislike uncertainty. change brings uncertainty. ergo, human nature has a choke hold on the rate of change based on risk tolerance... and that is a good thing.
Arthur, I don’t think that it is overly optimistic but I am not sure that is really the point. Even if there is an outside chance that you can come close to the type of change that I am talking about, wouldn’t doing everything you can to get as close to the optimistic ideal only rational way to move forward? You are correct that humans do not like uncertainty. But think about the things that create uncertainty in most people’s everyday life. I think what you will find at the core of most of that uncertainty and the associated fear that people are based on not being able to maintain the lives they have and/or not be able to provide food/shelter/etc… for themselves and their families. I would bet that if you asked most people if they “would support a change that would mean that you can work less for more” people would be onboard. Even if I am wrong and people would need convincing I think the lost opportunity costs associated with not even trying based on the potential payoff we could see in increased quality of life would be worse overall
Thank you Peter! I couldn’t agree more and am equally optimistic about our future.
I’m going to order the book so, for now, please forgive me as I fail to understand why you insist on picking an ideological side which I’m sure the book suggests.
Abundant cheap, clean energy, advancements in healthcare, etc. can & will certainly help provide global prosperity required for peace, country cultures and freedoms. Hopefully this optimism can provide much needed common sense restraints around the destructive, deceptive policies of carbon taxes, Green New Deal, EV mandates, even CBDC during this transition period.
A single, “left of center” party is not required. We absolutely need the checks and balances you’re implying constrain progress. The real constraints are global corruption, waste, fraud, abuse.
I am not necessarily picking a side here. I think there is the potential for a new 60/40 coalition in American that would draw off both sides. For all the talk of "abundance" on the left of center, there is comparable talk of "progress" that tends to be more right of center. But the leaders of both side actually interact a lot. I was at an invite-only conference last fall that did just that. I'm going to talk more about that at some point too.
This is not a new concept. Going back to the 1930s and 1940s you had the dichotomy of William Vogt (who was a major player in the early conservation movement) and Norman Borlaug (an agronomist who tremendous developed breakthroughs in yields for both wheat and rice). One wanted growth to stop, while the other trust science to develop the answers for continued expansion. Read "The Wizard and The Prophet" by Charles C. Mann (2018) - it is a fascinating tale that is a precursor to today's "less is more" vs. "let's move forward" debate.
Thanks for that reference. I have not read that book, though I have met and really respect Charles Mann. His books that I have read are terrific. I need to check this one out now too.
Yes, I caught that on my read this morning. We are refining the editing process with my editor, and will have more eyes on the story before it goes out next time. Thanks for pointing that out though.
No matter how cheap products become, consumers must have an income. Are we ready for universal basic income?
You put your finger on the other side of the equation. I set it aside in this essay, literally saying that at one point. That's a whole other essay, at least. But it does seem like the shift to AI is going to create the kind of transition where we are going to have to rethink the income side of earning a living. I'm not sure it will be UBI, though maybe, and that's a start. That idea got a lot of traction in the tech world from people who did see the disruption of AI on the horizon. And now it is here.
That and that if you have the end point in sight why not start working on starting to try to implement the types of things that will be a part of the lives of those future people. Those types of changes will not just happen by accident. What this moment in our history really means is that it’s is our first opportunity to use new tools that were previously unavailable to us to make actionable progress.
many futurists see the need for UBI.
i'm not sure they are considering how cheap everything might become. the biggest cost behind every item is energy: energy to find resources, energy to mine/plow/plant/grow, energy to extract/harvest, energy to transport, energy to prepare/convert, energy to shape/form/construct, energy to take to market/package, energy to deliver/pick up, etc. if energy becomes uber cheap, and that does seem likely in the life time of my kids, everything, e v e r y t h i n g becomes cheap and available in high volumes.
Or better yet, a federal job guarantee. See The Case for a Job Guarantee, by Pavlina Tcherneva.
UBI is already present in places like Kuwait where monarchs are so rich they appease the populace by providing everything needed (housing. food, clothing, etc.).
it isn't hard to imagine a few mega corporations producing all goods and services, making untold fortunes, being taxed at unheard of rates, the owners and their few employees still being richer than rich, and the taxes being used to provide for the citizenry.
Unfortunately for the pro-abundance partisans in the Democratic Party, their party now draws nearly all of its energy and power from people who staff and run and manage the organizations which are, in practice, anti-abundance. Regulators, therapists, educators, administrators, researchers, nonprofit coordinators, professors, lobbyists... all of these professions are comprised of status-seeking rule followers (generally women) whose compensation is almost completely disconnected from the actual social value they generate. These professions are organized into entities which have their own incentives, and the incentives are to grow endlessly by addressing 'problems' without actually solving them. Pick a social problem at random. there's a bureaucracy which has sprung up to manage it. I bet the problem you picked has gotten worse in recent decades, and I bet the bureaucracies have gotten bigger and the compensations lusher. This is not a recipe for abundance. If we really wanted abundance we would have to redirect the efforts of millions of professionals who busily work on completely unproductive projects for decades. That is, to put it mildly, not a popular proposal among our professional class, nor within the Democratic Party (although they're basically the same thing now).
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/leviathan
There is something to what you are saying. And that is what the Abundance book by Klein and Thompson gets are more than what I do here. I am just trying to get a yes/and we now have the technology to actually pull off abundance. But we do need to get through this political log-jam on the left-of-center side.
Well said!
I work at a large US tech company that just did another year of 14 billion revenue, up 8%. My business unit is one of the most profitable, staff do more with less (marketing budget cut, again). No one in my team has had a raise in five years despite cost of living pressures. Just interested to understand the concept of abundance here? It seems to me there’s already quite a bit of abundance, trickle down isn’t really happening. The worry with UBI I have is it will not reflect abundance but will just create a massive poverty class as the ‘owners’ will lowball what they are asked to contribute at every opportunity (see min wage)… I don’t think people want check and balances just to stymie progress, people want to be protected from the inevitable unintended consequences. We have a saying in tech when you build the ship you build the shipwreck… hopefully AI helps us get better at strategic foresight.
We will need an economic rework at a pretty fundamental level. Not just in tech but across the board. I have some thoughts on how that might play out and I will try to do that in some of my next few pieces. Including the one I'm working on for next week. Thanks for reminding all about that key piece of the puzzle.
i disagree. my share prices are doing good, thank you
I was actually told if you want a pay raise buy more shares, so there ya go! A lot of companies are doing share buy-backs as well BTW so there’s that to consider as well… (I also have shares in companies) but the actual ‘social contract’ seems a bit broken already, and we haven’t even reached UBI - that’s my concern about UBI as an ‘answer’
supply and demand applies to the labor market.
i knew Bill Church when Church's Chicken only had one restaurant in San Antonio. at that time he employed a chicken cook and paid him minimum wage. years later, when Church's had grown to hundreds of restaurants, the pay for chicken cooks was still minimum wage.
- corporate growth doesn't change what fair pay is for a job
- profit growth doesn't change what fair pay is for a job
- employees take jobs voluntarily
- companies hire voluntarily
- employees voluntarily accept pay offered
- companies voluntarily pay
- employees can change employer and/or the work they do at will
- companies can hire at will, but cannot always fire at will
your situation isn't wonderful (been there, done that), but you can change employer, change the work you do, or start your own company. as opposed to changing an economic system and the associated societal fabric...
AI personalized medicine at scale to know someone’s entire health history could fill the gap where current hospitalists have incomplete data. All for that.
i suggest you are overlooking one development with high potential (perhaps it is in the next tech wave) and that is nano engineering. the ability to change materials is already in our grasp, but the energy costs are prohibitive. however, once fusion is harnessed, nano engineering becomes affordable meaning atoms of sand can be converted to rare earths, etc. so potentially, elements considered to be exhaustible (e.g. platinum) might actually be essentially infinite.
Back in the 1990s I used to be much more bullish on nanotechnology, as many were. But I think over the years that seems farther on the horizon. Funny enough, I am rereading Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age sci fi novel, and that is all about a world of nanotechnology. It was written in the early 1990s when nano was more in the air. I don't think it will make much of an impact in my 25 year timeframe.
i agree that it is out there on the distant horizon. but if my children live to the age of 100, they may very see nano engineering change resource scarcity.
This is the exact conversation that we should all be having. If the fundamental rules that have shaped all societies to-date (e.g. cost of production, resource allocation, scarcity, etc...) can be solved for, how should society orient itself when those rules change? If we are at an inflection point where for the first time in our history, we can imagine the tools needed to build a previously impossible version of the world increasingly divorced from the containing factors that have defined our collective beliefs, habits, institutions, and motivations up to this point, what should we be doing today to bring about that change? That is the logical end-point of the tsunami of general purpose technology referenced in this article (which is based on a fairly conservative view of the promise posed by those technologies). The key difference between now and any other point in our history is that path that we would need to take to achieve that type of paradigm shift is no longer opaque or insurmountable. Based on the pace of change, the pace of which is growing exponentially, it is not a question of "if" we will have the tools and ability to remake the world in such positive and fundamental ways, but instead a matter of when. The (emphasis added) question that is raised by this point in history is how we should respond. What sort of responsibility do we have to the billions of lives, both present and future, when each day that we do not do everything in our power to bring about that change as soon as possible potentially means one more day those people will need to experience needless suffering? Why would we not do everything we can to get as close to that ideal as we possibly can?
Implied in the Great Progression is the belief that the great calling of the people alive in this moment is to rise to this singular occasion. To envision and set out to make the world as close to this ideal image as we can now and do everything we can to support the development of the tools and structures that will make it possible to realize its fullest potential in the future. There are things we can do now to orient ourselves to embrace and foster this incoming change, orient our society in a way that starts to increase the quality of the people's lives today. None of this is to say that we have those tools in-hand, or at the scale or scientific refinement to make that dream a reality in this moment. It will require the largest social transformation that we have ever experienced. But what Peter has rightly pointed out is that we have risen to similar occasions before. We have worked as a global community, sometimes as opposing factions of that global community, but in concert and at a planet wide scale. That same level of coordinated effort is what this moment demands in order to harness and realize its fullest potential.
I like what you are wrestling with here. It seems to me that at some point at a reasonably optimistic trajectory humans will get to a world of abundance where you don't work for income and there is plenty for all. The question is will it take another 3 centuries to get to the time of Star Trek? Or happen this century? What's clear is that we could not have done it before the 21st century. We simply did not have the technology. But now we can start to look ahead and see it taking shape. That seems to be the spirit of what you are saying here.
seems a bit optimistic to me. innovation cannot advance faster than the societal tolerance for change. societies are made up of humans. by default, humans dislike uncertainty. change brings uncertainty. ergo, human nature has a choke hold on the rate of change based on risk tolerance... and that is a good thing.
Arthur, I don’t think that it is overly optimistic but I am not sure that is really the point. Even if there is an outside chance that you can come close to the type of change that I am talking about, wouldn’t doing everything you can to get as close to the optimistic ideal only rational way to move forward? You are correct that humans do not like uncertainty. But think about the things that create uncertainty in most people’s everyday life. I think what you will find at the core of most of that uncertainty and the associated fear that people are based on not being able to maintain the lives they have and/or not be able to provide food/shelter/etc… for themselves and their families. I would bet that if you asked most people if they “would support a change that would mean that you can work less for more” people would be onboard. Even if I am wrong and people would need convincing I think the lost opportunity costs associated with not even trying based on the potential payoff we could see in increased quality of life would be worse overall
i wasn't arguing against trying. i was simply exposing my view about reality. plus even in the US change moves in waves and often takes generations.
Thank you Peter! I couldn’t agree more and am equally optimistic about our future.
I’m going to order the book so, for now, please forgive me as I fail to understand why you insist on picking an ideological side which I’m sure the book suggests.
Abundant cheap, clean energy, advancements in healthcare, etc. can & will certainly help provide global prosperity required for peace, country cultures and freedoms. Hopefully this optimism can provide much needed common sense restraints around the destructive, deceptive policies of carbon taxes, Green New Deal, EV mandates, even CBDC during this transition period.
A single, “left of center” party is not required. We absolutely need the checks and balances you’re implying constrain progress. The real constraints are global corruption, waste, fraud, abuse.
I am not necessarily picking a side here. I think there is the potential for a new 60/40 coalition in American that would draw off both sides. For all the talk of "abundance" on the left of center, there is comparable talk of "progress" that tends to be more right of center. But the leaders of both side actually interact a lot. I was at an invite-only conference last fall that did just that. I'm going to talk more about that at some point too.
Thank you for this abundant perspective
This is not a new concept. Going back to the 1930s and 1940s you had the dichotomy of William Vogt (who was a major player in the early conservation movement) and Norman Borlaug (an agronomist who tremendous developed breakthroughs in yields for both wheat and rice). One wanted growth to stop, while the other trust science to develop the answers for continued expansion. Read "The Wizard and The Prophet" by Charles C. Mann (2018) - it is a fascinating tale that is a precursor to today's "less is more" vs. "let's move forward" debate.
Thanks for that reference. I have not read that book, though I have met and really respect Charles Mann. His books that I have read are terrific. I need to check this one out now too.
after thousands of years of humans, can there really be a new concept?
Yes, I caught that on my read this morning. We are refining the editing process with my editor, and will have more eyes on the story before it goes out next time. Thanks for pointing that out though.