apr 2026
of the futures people argue about, the abundant one is the one i actually believe in.
not naively. i dont think everything gets solved and nobody suffers. but the direction seems clear enough: the cost of most goods falls hard, a lot of work stops needing a person, energy and medicine get meaningfully better, and the number of people whose day is organised around not having enough goes down a lot.
thats the good outcome. i want it. im building toward it.
and it is the one i find hardest to look at honestly, because i dont think it ends the thing everyone assumes it ends.
it was the organising principle. its why you get up. why you build anything. why you accumulate, why you plan, why you defer things you want now for things you want later.
remove it and you havent just removed hardship. youve removed the structure that a great deal of human behaviour was hanging off.
and people do not respond to that by becoming serene. we are competitive in a way that does not switch off when the reason for competing goes away. we just find a new thing to be scarce about. every time material constraint has loosened, historically, the competition has not stopped, it has relocated, usually within about one generation and usually into something less measurable than the thing before it.
so “everyone has enough” is not an ending. its the start of an argument about what counts now.
money gets weaker as the thing it buys gets cheaper. so probably not that, or at least not in the way it works now.
my guess, and it is a guess, is that what stays genuinely scarce is the ability to shape the system rather than live inside it. what gets built, what gets optimised for, whose preferences end up encoded in the things that make millions of small decisions on everyone else’s behalf.
thats an uncomfortable kind of scarcity, because it doesnt look like scarcity at all.
everyone is comfortable, and the number of people with any real say is small and getting smaller, and the comfort is what makes that hard to notice.
which is the version i cant argue myself out of. it isnt a dystopia. nobody is suffering in it. thats exactly what makes it sticky.
everything above is a guess, and guesses about the future age badly. so here is the part i can actually see from where im standing.
im deep in agent payments at the moment, and the thing i keep coming back to isnt the money. it was that once software can spend on its own, somebody has to write the rules it obeys. how much, to whom, in what circumstances, revocable by whom. those rules are code, they are written by a small number of engineers at a small number of companies, and they will govern an enormous number of autonomous decisions that no human reviews individually.
thats not a metaphor for power. its the mechanism. the abstract worry about whose values get encoded into the system has a very concrete version, and the concrete version is a policy layer being designed right now, mostly by whoever got there first, mostly without anyone treating it as a decision about anything larger than a budget.
i find that more clarifying than the philosophy, because its checkable. you can go and read who is writing it.
i might have the shape wrong. every generation believes its own scarcity is the final one and that the next thing is unprecedented. mostly they were wrong, and the new constraint turned out to be as mundane as the old one.
people are better at meaning than doom writing allows. the assumption that comfort produces emptiness is a very particular kind of argument, usually made by people who are not short of anything, and the historical record on it is not nearly as strong as it gets presented.
and abundance is genuinely good. i dont want the caveats to read as reluctance. a world where nobody’s life is organised around scarcity of food or medicine is enormously better than this one, and the failure modes of that world are better failure modes than the ones we have. “what do we compete over now” is a much better problem than “will there be enough.”
because the alternative to building it isnt a better version. its the same version with fewer people in the room who were thinking about this part.
what id want is just that we stop treating “everyone has enough” as the finish line. its a handover. the material problem gets solved and a distributional one takes its place, and the second one is harder because it doesnt announce itself, it doesnt hurt, and it is very easy to be on the wrong side of while feeling perfectly fine.
same war. different battlefield. and the battlefield is being surveyed now, mostly by people who think theyre writing a permissions system.