Post-Scarcity, Sure, But Who's Handing Out the Scarcity Chips?

Spent a chunk of my Sunday morning reading a thread on r/singularity instead of doing anything useful, which is on brand for me lately. The post was from someone who’d worked at Anthropic, now out, doing interviews about how AI is going to end jobs as we know them and usher in something called Universal High Income. Not basic income, mind you. High income. The idea being that once AI does all the labour, the economic pie gets so big that even a thin slice for everyone looks like wealth.

He admitted in the post that the interview went badly. People didn’t buy it. Not because the logic was wrong, necessarily, but because nobody trusts the people who’d be doing the distributing. And reading through the comments, that’s exactly where it landed, over and over. Someone put it better than I could: when in history have the wealthy ever voluntarily given up their excess? The answer is basically never, not without a fight, a revolution, or a union with actual teeth.

I’ve been in IT long enough to watch a few rounds of “this technology will free you up for higher-value work” play out. Spoiler: the higher-value work usually means the same work, for the same pay, except now there are three fewer people doing it and you’re covering their tickets too. I’m not being dramatic about this, it’s just what downsizing has looked like every time I’ve seen it. The tools get better, the output per person goes up, and the extra value doesn’t trickle down to the person who learned the new tool. It goes up. It has always gone up. So when someone tells me the AI version of this will be different, that this time the surplus gets shared around, I want to believe them. I genuinely do. I just don’t have a single data point from the last forty years of my working life that supports it.

And yet. I also think the scale of what’s happening right now is different enough that the old pattern might not hold cleanly. OpenAI apparently had an unreleased model crank out 722 maths manuscripts, proofs across 372 families of results, in the time it’d take me to read them. Whether all of that holds up to scrutiny is a separate question, but even half of it being real is wild. We’re not talking about a slightly better spreadsheet macro. We’re talking about something that might genuinely compress decades of research into months. If that’s true, the economics underneath everything shift, and nobody, including the people building it, really knows what shape things land in. That’s the honest answer. Not “it’ll be fine” and not “we’re cooked,” just: nobody knows, and anyone speaking with total confidence in either direction is selling you something.

There was another thread the same day from someone saying they feel alone, like they’re the only one who gets how fast this is moving, watching friends and family shrug it off while they lie awake doing exponential maths in their head. I felt that one in a different way. Not the doomscrolling anxiety part, I’ve rationed my news intake too carefully for that to properly sink its teeth in, but the loneliness of caring about something your mates don’t particularly want to discuss over a parma. I’ve tried bringing this stuff up at a barbecue in the outer suburbs. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Most people have a vague sense that AI is “doing something” to jobs, filed somewhere between climate change and the state of the Suburban Rail Loop: important, abstract, someone else’s problem until it isn’t.

Here’s the tension I can’t resolve, and I’m not going to pretend I can. I think the technology is extraordinary and getting more extraordinary by the month, and some part of me finds that genuinely thrilling, the same way I found the moon landing footage thrilling as a kid watching it on a rerun. And I think the people currently holding the keys to it have shown zero historical appetite for sharing the proceeds unless forced to. Both things are true. A fairer distribution of whatever wealth this generates isn’t going to happen because a tech founder has a change of heart on a podcast. It’ll happen, if it happens at all, because enough ordinary people decided it mattered enough to vote for it, strike for it, or otherwise make it more expensive to ignore than to address.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this one. I’d like to say “it’ll be fine, smarter people than us are on it,” but I’ve met some of those smarter people and they’re mostly just moving fast and hoping the ground stays under them too. What I do think is worth doing is the unglamorous stuff: staying informed in sensible doses, not the paperclip-maximiser doomscroll, and actually turning up when the policy conversations happen, because this is a policy problem as much as a technology one. The maths proofs are impressive. Whether anyone outside a handful of companies ever sees the benefit of them is still, entirely, up to us.