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.

Glossary Index

Links to detailed articles for each term defined in the Unscarcity manuscript glossary.

How to read this glossary:

• Terms marked with an asterisk (*) are novel concepts proposed within the Unscarcity Project—ideas you won’t find in standard dictionaries or economics textbooks.
• Terms without an asterisk are existing concepts from economics, technology, or governance that the book applies in new ways.
• Each term links to a full article explaining the concept in depth.

A

• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
• Agentic AI & Orchestration* — The shift from prompting AI to orchestrating autonomous agents
• AI as Referee, Humans as Conscience*
• AI Convergence Factor* — Why rival nations’ AI advisors may calculate their way to cooperation
• AI-Assisted Deliberation — AI supporting human decisions without making them
• Ascent Guild* — Organizational form for knowledge production (software, research, art)

B

• Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) — Technology enabling direct communication between brains and computers

C

• Civic Service* — Four-year voluntary commitment bridging Resident and Citizen status
• Compute Clusters — Massive GPU warehouses training frontier AI models
• Connectome — Complete map of neural connections in a brain
• Civic Standing (Trust)* — Your earned reputation as a trustworthy citizen
• Cognitive Field (Internet of Minds)* — Optional infrastructure for direct mind-to-mind connection
• Commons* — Self-governing community within the MOSAIC
• Consciousness Grants Existence, Relationship Grants Influence*
• Consciousness Upload*
• Constitutional Core (Five Laws / Five Laws)* — The supreme rules governing Unscarcity civilization
• Crossroad Framework*

D

• Diversity Guard* — Governance mechanism preventing groupthink through radical diversity
• Double-Slit Experiment — Quantum experiment revealing that observation changes outcomes
• DPIF (Distributed Proof-of-Integrity Framework)* — Transparent ledger technology for validation

E

• Electron Gap — The physical energy constraints on AI compute
• Emergency Protocol*
• Enterprise EXIT Protocol* — How corporations transform into Mission Entities
• EXIT Protocol* — The “Amnesty Deal” for legacy elites
• Experience Is Sacred (Prime Axiom / Law 1)*

F

• Factory Model Education — The industrial-era school system being replaced
• Failed Architectures of Law
• Failed Transition Models
• Four Living Pillars*
• Founder Status* — Status granted through EXIT Protocol
• Foundational Principles
• Forking — Copying and diverging a codebase or blockchain as a governance escape valve
• Free Zones* — Demonstration projects where the Foundation operates
• Freedom Is Reciprocal (Law 4)*
• Fusion Energy

G

• Gen Z and the Human Edge — Why uniquely human skills matter more in the AI era
• Goodhart’s Law
• The Great Shift* — The transition from scarcity to abundance civilization
• Guiding Axioms / Five Laws*

H

• Humanoid Robots

I

• Impact (Impact)* — The decaying currency of contribution
• Impact Trust* — Mechanism to commit Impact to a validated life mission
• Infinite Games
• Iron Law of Oligarchy
• “It from Bit” — John Wheeler’s hypothesis that physical reality emerges from information

K

• Karma as Quest System — Rizwan Virk’s reframe of moral causation as game mechanics

L

• Labor Cliff* — The economic crisis when AI automates jobs faster than new ones form
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — AI systems trained to predict and generate text at scale
• Leapfrog Effect — How societies without legacy infrastructure skip ahead
• Legacy Stewardship Credit*
• Liquid Democracy — Hybrid voting where delegation is flexible and revocable

M

• Mandate of Heaven — Ancient Chinese concept of conditional divine legitimacy for rulers
• Maya (Illusion) — Hindu concept of reality as divine construction, not ultimate truth
• M-Pesa — Kenya’s SMS-based mobile money system that leapfrogged traditional banking
• Merit
• Metaphysical Neutrality* — The MOSAIC’s approach to allowing radically different belief systems to coexist
• Mission Entity* — Post-corporate organizations optimizing for civilizational purpose
• Mission Guild* — Organizational form for physical production
• MOSAIC* — The federated political architecture of diverse Commons

N

• Network Effects — When a product becomes more valuable as more people use it
• Network State — Nation starting online, acquiring physical territory through shared values

P

• P-Zombies (Philosophical Zombies) — Thought experiment about beings identical to humans but lacking consciousness
• Palace Economies
• Planck Scale — The fundamental “pixel size” and “tick rate” of the universe
• Planetary Defense Corps* — What the military-industrial complex becomes
• PNPS (Personhood and Network Presence Score)* — System tracking Civic Standing
• PoD-VV (Proof-of-Diversity Verified Value)* — Validating subjective contributions
• Proof-of-Diversity (PoD)*

Q

• Quadratic Voting — Voting where strength of preference is expressed

R

• Random Citizen Assemblies — Decision bodies formed by lottery
• RFC (Request for Comments) — The open standards process that built the internet through rough consensus
• Resistia* — Nations refusing accountability, outcompeted not invaded

S

• Simulation Hypothesis — Nick Bostrom’s argument that we may be living in a computer simulation
• Social Credit System — The warning example of surveillance scoring
• Soft Budget Constraint — Why Soviet enterprises decayed (and how we avoid it)
• Sovereign EXIT Protocol* — Geopolitical transition for nations
• Spark Threshold* — Assessment for consciousness determining Resident rights
• Stagnation Problem*
• Stewardship* — The relationship between Mission Entities and resources
• The Substrate* — Global computational infrastructure for uploads
• Survival Problem*

T

• Theodicy — The problem of evil: why would creators allow suffering?
• The Ascent* — The “infinite game” of civilization challenges
• The Foundation / The Foundation* — Universal infrastructure providing life essentials
• The Ascent* — Arena for big challenges: space, longevity, advanced science
• Time Banking — Care exchange without money (Fureai Kippu)
• Transition Trust* — Legal entity for transferring wealth during EXIT
• Turing Test — Alan Turing’s 1950 test for machine intelligence through imitation
• Two-Tier Solution for Personhood* — Resident vs. Citizen rights framework

U

• Universal Basic Compute (UBC) — Compute as a civil right, alternative to UBI
• Universal Basic Income (UBI)
• Universal High Income (UHI)
• Universe 25
• Unscarcity*

V

• Venezuela Paradox* — Warning: abundance tech + scarcity distribution = collapse
• Voluntary Symbiosis* — Philosophy of human-AI evolution with choice

Z

• Zero Marginal Cost — When producing one more unit costs nearly nothing
• Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) — Cryptographic proofs that verify facts without revealing underlying data