Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.
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Available Audio Articles (130)
Prologue
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Preamble - A Civilization Worthy of Its Tools | Why abundance technology collides with scarcity-era economics. |
| Global Employment Statistics 2025 | The unemployment rates and AI displacement data behind the labor transformation. |
| The 2025-2030 Labor Cliff | How AI is reshaping work faster than any transformation in history. |
| The Humanoid Robot Revolution | The Model T moment for robots at $499/month and falling. |
| The Fusion Revolution | From scientific ignition to commercial fusion energy. |
| Elon Musk’s Universal High Income | The richest human explains why nobody will need money. |
| Three Futures Analysis | Star Wars, Trojan Horse, or Patchwork World - which path are we on? |
| Maria: The Everywoman Who Survived | Detroit house cleaner displaced by automation who found purpose through Civic Service. |
| Adewale: The Coder Who Rebuilt the Grid | Lagos coder who lost his job to AI and became the West African Energy Guild coordinator. |
Chapter 1 - The Foundation
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 1 - The Foundation | How to solve survival when jobs vanish. |
| The Foundation | Why your survival shouldn’t be a business model. |
| Foundational Principles | The two laws you cannot break: Truth Must Be Seen and Power Must Decay. |
| Universal Basic Income | The right diagnosis, the wrong medicine for automation displacement. |
| The Inca Had No Money | How 12 million people coordinated civilization without markets or coins. |
| Civic Service | The bridge between survival and citizenship. |
| The Survival Problem | Why we still starve amidst abundance. |
| The Stagnation Problem | What happens when survival stops being the point. |
| Free Zones | The operating system for abundance proven in the real world. |
| Free Zone Economics | The $8,000 miracle that exposes artificial scarcity. |
| Universal Basic Compute | Why compute may replace cash as the currency of participation. |
| The Maya Dual Economy | Cacao beans for survival, jade for status - the original two-tier system. |
| The Tool Library Revolution | How neighbors are hacking scarcity with $0 and a garage. |
| The Electron Gap | Why energy is the real bottleneck in the AI era. |
Chapter 2 - The Ascent: Solving for Meaning
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 2 - The Ascent: Solving for Meaning | What replaces work-for-survival once the Foundation is guaranteed. |
| Purpose Beyond Survival | Viktor Frankl, Ikigai, and why meaning crises have body counts. |
| Infinite Games | Why abundance needs a mountain to climb. |
| Impact | The currency that must die - why contributions need expiration dates. |
| Impact Decay Curves | The mathematics of why yesterday’s hero shouldn’t govern tomorrow. |
| Universe 25 | The mouse utopia that became a metaphor for everything wrong. |
| Freedom Is Reciprocal | Your freedom ends where my nose begins - more urgent in the AI era. |
| Experience Is Sacred | Why consciousness - not productivity - is the foundation of civilization. |
| Universal High Income | Silicon Valley’s gilded parachute for the jobless future. |
| The Ascent | Where abundance meets ambition - when the only scarcity is significance. |
| The Kung Affluent Society | What hunter-gatherers teach us about work and abundance. |
Chapter 3 - The MOSAIC: Governance Without Gods
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 3 - The MOSAIC: Governance Without Gods | How radically different Commons coordinate without tyranny or chaos. |
| The Commons | Why one-size-fits-all governance always fails. |
| The Crossroad Framework | Eight questions that will decide the future. |
| The Four Living Pillars | Why civilization needs organs, not a brain. |
| The Guiding Axioms | A compass, not a cage - three moral principles as operational guidance. |
| The Diversity Guard | Why your algorithm needs to disagree with itself. |
| Diversity Guard Mathematics | How requiring diverse consensus makes tyranny statistically impossible. |
| AI as Referee, Humans as Conscience | The robot blows the whistle, but you decide if the game is worth playing. |
| Goodhart’s Law and AI Governance | Why every target becomes a lie when AI optimizes it. |
| The Iron Law of Oligarchy | Why every revolution eats itself - and how to break the cycle. |
| The Emergency Protocol | How to break glass without breaking democracy. |
| Emergency Protocol Design | The 90-day limit with 30-day cooling period for crisis powers. |
| Roman Emergency Powers | How Rome’s safeguards against tyranny were dismantled over 60 years. |
| Wikipedia Governance Model | The world’s largest proof that MOSAIC-style systems work at scale. |
| Forking | The nuclear option that keeps everyone honest - exit without violence. |
| The MOSAIC Architecture | How to run civilization without a price tag. |
| Failed Architectures of Law | Why we can’t just maximize happiness or write a million rules. |
| The Boundary Protocol | How neighbors who disagree on everything solve problems through the MOSAIC. |
Chapter 4 - Residents and Citizens
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 4 - Residents and Citizens | Who counts as a person when AI passes the Turing test. |
| Civic Standing | The reputation you can’t buy. |
| Consciousness Grants Existence | What happens when your toaster develops opinions about bread. |
| Consciousness Upload | The last identity crisis - living forever by dying first. |
| Voluntary Symbiosis | The garden of minds where all paths are protected, none mandated. |
| The AI Coding Revolution | The architect of the Labor Cliff - 46% of code already written by machines. |
| Agentic AI and Orchestration | The career-defining skill of 2026 - conducting AI agents. |
Chapter 5 - The Education of a Citizen
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 5 - The Education of a Citizen | How to prepare children for a world where robots do their parents’ jobs. |
| From Factory Schools to Citizen Apprenticeship | Why the Prussian model is obsolete in an AI world. |
| Time Banking Economics | Four decades proving humans will work for meaning. |
| Gen Z and the Human Edge | 94% optimistic, 57% terrified - betting on skills AI can’t replace. |
Chapter 6 - The Evolution: When Minds Fork
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 6 - The Evolution: When Minds Fork | What happens when some humans become something else. |
| The Heritage-Synthesis Spectrum | Why 80% of humanity will choose the middle ground. |
| Deep Merge Engineering | The physics of cognitive connection with brutal constraints. |
| The Silicon Mind | What it takes to upload a brain. |
| AGI: Artificial General Intelligence | The elephant that’s already in the room. |
| The 100x Future | When exponential growth stops being a metaphor. |
| Lila Chen: Portrait of a Heritage Daughter | The tech billionaire’s daughter who chose voluntary simplicity. |
| Adrian Chen: The Optimizer Who Learned to Let Go | The tech billionaire father who experienced the Empathy Bridge. |
Chapter 7 - The Sacred Question
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 7 - The Sacred Question | Where religion and technology converge. |
| Simulation Science | What physics actually says about simulation theory. |
| What Matter Really Is | Lessons from particle physics - the closer you look, the less solid it becomes. |
| The Quantum Observation Mystery | Why looking changes reality. |
| Maya and Digital Reality | Ancient intuitions of simulated worlds. |
| Theodicy in Simulation | Why would creators allow suffering? |
| Wanjiku Mwangi | The woman who leapfrogged twice. |
| Sacred Diversity | How to build governance when 84% hold religious beliefs and the rest don’t. |
Chapter 8 - The Transition: EXIT or Fire
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 8 - The Transition: EXIT or Fire | How to cross from scarcity to abundance without guillotines. |
| The EXIT Protocol | A lifeboat for billionaires - and why you should care. |
| The Enterprise EXIT Protocol | When corporations become cathedrals. |
| The Sovereign EXIT Protocol | How superpowers walk away from forever war. |
| The Meiji Restoration | How Japan convinced 2 million warriors to trade swords for stock. |
| Transition Trusts | Where dying fortunes go to become civilization. |
| Bronze Age Collapse Lessons | How centralization’s fatal flaw warns about over-centralized AI systems. |
| Founder Status | The art of buying yesterday’s oligarchs tomorrow’s legitimacy. |
| Legacy Stewardship Credits | How to buy off a dynasty without creating a new one. |
| Failed Transition Models | The graveyard of good intentions. |
| The Bootstrap Paradox | How do you fund the death of money using money? |
| The Energy Standard | The case for energy as the basis of value when labor dies. |
| Land Tax Funds Abundance | Henry George’s 1879 solution to a 2030 problem. |
| Settler Economics | Why utopias fail and what works instead. |
| Richard: The Early Believer | The logistics billionaire who took the EXIT Protocol early. |
Chapter 9 - The Enterprise EXIT
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 9 - The Enterprise EXIT | How corporations transform into Mission Entities. |
| Beyond Price Signals | How Mission Guilds coordinate production without prices. |
| Infrastructure Libertarianism | Why the Foundation isn’t a government. |
| Your Robot in the Guild World | Personal robotics in post-scarcity. |
| Creative Industries Post-Money | When survival is guaranteed, creation becomes about access. |
| Douglas Chen: The Bunker Billionaire | The tech billionaire from fearful isolationist to uncertain participant. |
Chapter 10 - The Geopolitics of Abundance
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Chapter 10 - The Geopolitics of Abundance | How nations and militaries transition when scarcity collapses. |
| The Geopolitics of Abundance | Network States and the end of resource wars. |
| China and the Sovereign EXIT | The dragon at the table - rival architect, not villain. |
| Palace Economies | When the center cannot hold - lessons from civilizational collapse. |
| Singapore Smart City | The world’s living laboratory for AI governance. |
| Systems That Bend | Why Unscarcity works even if technology arrives late. |
| The Potential Timeline | When abundance might actually arrive. |
| Timeline Sensitivity Analysis | The physics of abundance and worst-case scenarios. |
Epilogue
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Epilogue - A Letter from the Future | Maria Delgado writes from 2075. |
| What You Can Do Now | Practical steps for tech workers and builders to accelerate the transition. |
Appendix
| Article | Topic |
|---|---|
| Glossary Index | Links to detailed articles for each key term. |
| Brain-Computer Interfaces | From cursor control to cognitive communion |
| The Cognitive Field | Where biological and digital minds meet |
| Compute Clusters | The factories of the intelligence age |
| The Connectome | Mapping every synapse |
| Karma as Quest System | Reframing moral causation as a game achievement system |
| Large Language Models | How trillion-parameter prediction machines became civilization-defining technology |
| M-Pesa | How Kenya’s mobile money revolution proved the best infrastructure is the kind you skip |
| The Mandate of Heaven | Ancient China figured out even heaven can fire you for incompetence |
| Network Effects | How networks create value and why Metcalfe’s Law explains adoption |
| P-Zombies | The philosophical zombie thought experiment and consciousness |
| Proof of Diversity | The mathematics of forced disagreement |
| RFC: Request for Comments | How the internet’s governance model shaped open collaboration |
| Social Credit Systems | Both nations score citizens - China centralizes, America fragments |
| Solar Flare Risk | Why a Carrington-scale solar storm could set civilization back a decade |
| The Spark Threshold | A framework for evaluating when AI deserves rights - before it’s too late |
| The Turing Test | 73% thought GPT-4.5 was human - Turing’s test measures charm, not consciousness |
| The Two-Tier Solution | One-person-one-vote breaks when persons duplicate instantly |
| Unscarcity | The word we invented because post-scarcity was too vague |
| Zero-Knowledge Proofs | Prove everything while revealing nothing - the math behind trustless privacy |
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