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AI abundance and the real challenge of sharing it

25 August 2025 · 41 views · 0 likes · 0 reposts · 117 blog views

AI automation economy philosophy productivity

What happens when machines do almost everything better than we do?

In the post that I read there was a reminder of Keynes’ prediction back in 1930. He thought that by 2030 people would only need to work 15 hours a week. Well, we are almost there and while life is definitely less physically demanding than it was for our grandparents, most of us are still locked into 40-hour workweeks. Some even more.

Another interesting framework was the division of goods and services into four buckets: rivalrous vs non-rivalrous, and saturable vs unsaturable. It explains why some things - like housing, healthcare, and education - keep getting more expensive, while others - like software or electronics - get cheaper and more abundant. It shows how technology has already shifted scarcity in the past (think about food after fertilizers) and could do the same again in the future.

The article also gets into what might happen when a small group of “AI superusers” boosts their productivity by 💯 or even thousands of times. Imagine how that kind of wealth could distort rivalrous goods like land or housing. The nightmare scenario is San Francisco’s housing crisis multiplied by ten.

What I found most useful was the idea that the only real solution isn’t just more regulation or redistribution, but actually turning rivalrous goods into non-rivalrous ones through technology. Examples:

1️⃣ AI doctors to make healthcare more abundant. 2️⃣ Mass desalination and even space expansion to reduce land scarcity. 3️⃣ Upzoning and building to ease housing shortages.

Technology can turn yesterday’s scarcity into today’s abundance, but only if we let it. Instead of clinging to artificial bottlenecks, we should look for ways to expand supply alongside demand so that everyone benefits.

It’s a long read, but I came away thinking less about doom and more about opportunity. If AGI really is just around the corner, then the real challenge isn’t whether it will destroy jobs, but whether we’ll figure out how to share the abundance it creates.

AI abundance and the real challenge of sharing it
AI abundance and the real challenge of sharing it

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