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Unscarcity Research

Unscarcity: The Word for When Scarcity Becomes Optional

AI improves 100x/year. Robots cost $499/month. Fusion ignited. When making stuff costs nothing, who gets it? Not post-scarcity—unscarcity.

12 min read 2810 words /a/unscarcity

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.

Unscarcity: The Word We Invented Because “Post-Scarcity” Was Too Vague

Let’s start with a confession: “post-scarcity” is a terrible term. It sounds like an economics professor fell asleep reading science fiction and woke up with a neologism stuck to his face. It gestures vaguely at “after scarcity ends” without telling you what comes next—like saying you’re “post-hungry” without mentioning you’ve just eaten the best meal of your life.

We needed a better word. Something that captures not just what we’re leaving behind (scarcity) but what we’re building instead (a civilization where abundance is infrastructure, purpose is abundant, and power doesn’t calcify into permanent hierarchies).

Unscarcity is that word. And it means something very specific.

What Unscarcity Actually Is

Unscarcity isn’t a destination. It’s an operating system.

Traditional economics assumes scarcity is the foundational constraint—there isn’t enough stuff, so we need mechanisms (markets, hierarchies, violence) to allocate it. This was true when human muscle was the primary input, land was finite, and energy came from burning things. In that world, economics was the “dismal science” of managing inevitable tradeoffs.

But the equation is changing. AI improves at roughly 100x per year in compute efficiency. Humanoid robots from companies like 1X and Tesla are sliding down cost curves that would make solar panel manufacturers jealous—1X’s Neo costs approximately $499/month, less than a week of minimum wage labor. Fusion energy, after decades as a punchline, has crossed the ignition threshold—Commonwealth Fusion’s SPARC is expected complete in 2026, targeting net energy gain, with Helion aiming to deliver electrons to Microsoft by 2028.

When the primary inputs to production (energy, labor, intelligence) approach zero marginal cost—meaning each additional unit costs almost nothing to produce—the operating system built on managing their scarcity starts to crash. You can’t run Windows 95 on a quantum computer. You can’t run a scarcity-based economy on an abundance-generating machine.

Unscarcity is the upgrade. It’s the civilization OS designed for the post-labor, post-scarcity-of-essentials, post-excuses world we’re actually building.

The Three Engines of Abundance

Unscarcity isn’t wishful thinking. It’s engineering, driven by three exponential curves that are already happening:

The Brain (AI)

Large Language Models are evolving faster than Darwin could have dreamed. In 2023, generating a coherent paragraph cost dollars. In 2025, it costs fractions of a cent. By next year, the cost will be measured in units so small we’ll need new words for them.

But forget the costs—focus on the capabilities. AI has progressed through three distinct stages:

Stage 1: The Intern (2023-2024): AI as a talented but unreliable assistant—producing brilliant first drafts that occasionally insisted Napoleon won World War II. Useful, but requiring constant supervision.

Stage 2: The Manager (2025-2027): AI agents that don’t just generate content but execute tasks. They schedule your meetings, book your flights, reconcile expenses, and coordinate other AI agents. Your extremely competent executive assistant who never sleeps and never complains about the thermostat.

Stage 3: The Oracle (2028+): AGI-adjacent systems that develop strategic reasoning exceeding human experts. Not just executing tasks but predicting outcomes and optimizing complex systems in real-time. The cognitive substrate on which civilization runs.

This progression collapses the “Intelligence Constraint.” For all of human history, smart thinking was scarce and expensive. Now it’s becoming a utility. Genius on tap.

The Body (Robotics)

Robots were dumb for decades—brilliant at welding the same spot a million times, useless the moment something unexpected happened. Your toddler navigates a messy room better than a million-dollar industrial arm could.

Then came simulation. Tools like NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim let engineers train robots in hyper-realistic digital gyms. One minute of real-world computing time simulates hours of practice for thousands of robot avatars simultaneously. We’re running robot Groundhog Days at warp speed.

The results are emerging now. Boston Dynamics’ robots do parkour. 1X’s humanoid robots handle unstructured environments. Tesla’s Optimus is sliding down a cost curve that makes your smartphone look expensive by comparison.

McKinsey estimates up to 30% of work hours could be automated by 2030. That’s not “might be.” That’s “if current trends continue and we do nothing to accelerate them.”

When robots cost $3/hour to operate, never sleep, never call in sick, and never ask for healthcare, the economic logic of human labor doesn’t weaken—it collapses like a folding chair at a sumo convention.

The Fuel (Fusion Energy)

On December 5, 2022, scientists at the National Ignition Facility achieved ignition—getting more energy out of a fusion reaction than they put in. After seventy years of “fusion is always thirty years away” jokes, the physics finally cooperated.

This isn’t fusion-curious anymore. 35 of 45 fusion companies surveyed globally expect commercial pilots between 2030 and 2035. Congress has increased fusion spending to record levels of approximately $1.5 billion. When Microsoft signs contracts for fusion power, it’s usually not vaporware.

Fusion decouples energy from geography. The fuel is deuterium, found abundantly in seawater—the ocean becomes an infinite gas station. With unlimited clean energy, we unlock cheat codes for physical reality: desalinate oceans, recycle matter with perfect efficiency, scrub carbon from the air.

Energy is the master input. When energy approaches zero marginal cost, so does everything that depends on it—which is everything.

Why “Unscarcity” Instead of “Post-Scarcity”

The prefix matters. “Post-scarcity” is passive—it describes what you’ve left behind, like calling yourself “post-adolescent” instead of “adult.” “Unscarcity” is active—it’s the deliberate dismantling of artificial limitations, the engineering of abundance, the unmaking of the constraints that kept humanity in survival mode for 300,000 years.

But more importantly, Unscarcity names something that generic “post-scarcity” misses: a complete system.

Post-scarcity is a condition. Unscarcity is an architecture.

The Unscarcity framework includes:

  • The Foundation: The 90% layer where essentials (housing, food, healthcare, energy, education) flow like tap water—unconditionally provided because scarcity genuinely is over for these things.

  • The Ascent: The 10% layer of genuinely scarce opportunities—life extension, space exploration, consciousness expansion—allocated through earned Impact, not inheritance or purchase.

  • The MOSAIC: Federated governance—where power is distributed across many self-governing communities rather than concentrated in one capital—across thousands of autonomous Commons, coordinated through shared rules rather than a central authority. Think Wikipedia governance at civilizational scale.

  • The Five Laws: Constitutional axioms functioning as the “physics” of Unscarcity civilization—Experience is Sacred, Truth Must Be Seen, Freedom is Reciprocal, Power Must Decay, Difference Sustains Life.

  • The EXIT Protocol: The engineered off-ramp for legacy elites, trading dying wealth for living legacy—because transitions that don’t account for power holders usually end in guillotines.

  • The Civic Service: The pathway from Resident (receiving the Foundation) to Citizen (participating in governance and earning Impact)—because rights and responsibilities should be connected.

This is what “post-scarcity” visions typically miss. They imagine the condition of abundance without engineering the institutions that prevent its capture, the incentives that maintain contribution, or the transitions that get us from here to there without burning everything down.

The Two Futures We Actually Face

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that “post-scarcity” optimists often dodge: the same technologies that could give us Unscarcity could just as easily give us dystopia.

AI, robotics, fusion—they’re neutral amplifiers. They don’t automatically deliver utopia. They present us with a choice between two very different futures:

Path 1: The “Star Wars” Future (The Default Path)

This is the path of least resistance—which, in human history, usually means the path of most suffering.

If we simply extrapolate current trends without deliberate intervention, we get something resembling the original Star Wars (and not the hopeful parts): A small elite controlling the robots and AI. Vast populations rendered economically irrelevant. Superpowers competing for dominance with autonomous weapons instead of human soldiers. The 19th-century industrial revolution repeating itself, but with drones instead of smokestacks and algorithms instead of foremen.

The billionaires who own the AI companies become the new aristocracy—more powerful than any feudal lord because their “serfs” aren’t even needed for labor. Food printers exist but require subscriptions. Medical nanobots cure cancer but cost a million dollars. Housing is abundant but you rent forever. The surveillance is total. The AI answers to them, not us.

This isn’t dystopian fiction. It’s the most probable outcome if we do nothing. History repeats because the incentive structures that drove previous patterns haven’t changed. Capital accumulates, power consolidates, winners rewrite rules to keep winning.

Path 2: The Unscarcity Future

We build a new Civilization OS—an upgrade for humanity’s collective software.

In this version, we recognize that when energy and labor become near-free, hoarding wealth makes about as much sense as hoarding air. But we also recognize that machines, for all their brilliance, are fragile—one solar flare away from becoming very expensive paperweights.

So we build a Symbiotic Foundation where AI provides the abundance (food, shelter, healthcare) and humans provide the resilience (judgment, maintenance, the ability to reboot the system when it inevitably crashes).

We evolve from an economy of Scarcity (where value comes from what’s rare) to an economy of Unscarcity (where value comes from what we contribute).

We design institutions—Impact that decays, Commons that federate, EXIT protocols that transition power peacefully—specifically to prevent the Star Wars outcome.

Most outcomes will land somewhere between these attractors. But Unscarcity isn’t a prediction. It’s a design specification. It’s not what will happen—it’s what could happen if we build it deliberately.

What Unscarcity Is NOT

Before you mentally file this under “naive utopianism” or “techno-communism,” let’s be precise about what we’re not claiming:

Unscarcity Is Not Utopia

Humans will still be petty, jealous, tribal, and prone to posting unhinged comments at 2 AM. The system assumes this. It’s designed for humans as they actually are—messy, contradictory, occasionally brilliant—not as the angels philosophers wish we were.

There will still be conflict, disappointment, failure, heartbreak. The difference is that your conflict won’t be about whether you can afford dinner. Your disappointment won’t be eviction. Your failure won’t be homelessness.

Unscarcity removes the survival stress. It doesn’t remove the human condition.

Unscarcity Is Not Communism

There’s no central planning committee deciding what color shoes you wear or how many potatoes you deserve. The infrastructure responds to demand, just like the internet does. Think less “Soviet breadline” and more “really competent public library that also handles your electricity.”

The Foundation operates like Infrastructure Libertarianism—maximum local freedom enabled by invisible coordination. Your choices aren’t constrained; they’re enabled. The logistics layer handles the boring parts so you can focus on the interesting ones.

Unscarcity Is Not “Tech Will Save Us”

Technology is an amplifier, not a savior. The same AI that could diagnose cancer could run a surveillance state. The same robots that could build housing could enforce borders. The same fusion energy that could power abundance could power weapons.

Unscarcity isn’t about trusting technology. It’s about designing institutions that channel technology toward flourishing rather than domination. The technology enables. The institutions direct. The values constrain.

Unscarcity Is Not Finished

This is a blueprint, not a prophecy. We’re honest about what we don’t know—like how to transition military superpowers, or how to prevent AI capture by existing elites, or exactly what happens when consciousness can be uploaded to silicon.

We offer hypotheses, not certainties. Some of these ideas are wrong. We’d rather admit the gaps than pretend they don’t exist. Anyone who claims to have a complete solution for civilizational transformation is either lying or deluded.

The Paradox That Named It

Here’s the irony that gives Unscarcity its edge:

We produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. Yet 673 million went hungry in 2024. We have 16 million vacant homes in America—enough to house every homeless person more than 28 times over. We have pocket supercomputers and billionaires racing to Mars, but 67% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck.

We have abundance. We enforce scarcity.

The starvation isn’t real—it’s artificial. The homelessness isn’t inevitable—it’s designed. The anxiety about survival isn’t physics—it’s policy.

Unscarcity is the recognition that we’re already past the point where scarcity was a genuine constraint for essentials. The scarcity we experience now is manufactured—a legacy of institutions built when scarcity was real, now maintained because they benefit certain people.

The word “Unscarcity” contains both the observation and the solution: we must undo the artificial scarcity we’ve constructed. Not wait for technology to make us post-scarcity, but actively dismantle the systems that enforce scarcity despite abundance.

The Transition Question

The hardest part of Unscarcity isn’t the technology. It’s the transition.

How do you get from a world where survival depends on employment to a world where survival is infrastructure? How do you convince billionaires to trade obsolete wealth for living legacy? How do you build Free Zones that prove the concept without triggering existential panic from existing power structures?

This is what The Great Shift addresses—and it’s not gentle. The Labor Cliff (2030-2035) arrives before the abundance technologies fully mature. There’s a gap—maybe a decade—where human labor is increasingly worthless but the Foundation infrastructure isn’t ready to catch everyone.

That gap is the danger zone. It’s where the Star Wars future has its best chance.

The EXIT Protocol exists to buy time—giving legacy elites a dignified off-ramp so they don’t burn the world down fighting the transition. The Civic Service exists to give displaced workers something to do during the gap—building the infrastructure that eventually makes itself obsolete. The Free Zones exist as proofs of concept—small-scale demonstrations that abundance actually works.

But none of these guarantee success. They shift probabilities. They make the Unscarcity path more likely and the Star Wars path less certain. The outcome remains genuinely open.

What Unscarcity Asks of You

Unscarcity isn’t passive. It makes demands.

It demands honesty: about the systems we’ve built, the scarcity we’ve manufactured, the futures we’re drifting toward. No more pretending that the current arrangement is natural or inevitable.

It demands imagination: the ability to picture a world where survival isn’t a struggle, where contribution isn’t coerced, where power decays by design. This is harder than it sounds—we’re so marinated in scarcity assumptions that abundance feels like cheating.

It demands engagement: not just agreement but participation. The framework is incomplete. The details are debatable. The transition is uncertain. This isn’t a package to be consumed—it’s a conversation to join.

It demands urgency: not panic, but recognition that the window is finite. The technologies are arriving whether we’re ready or not. The question isn’t whether AI and robotics will transform the economy—it’s whether we build the institutions to handle that transformation before it hits.

The Word Made Architecture

In the end, “Unscarcity” is just a word. But words shape thought, and thought shapes action, and action shapes reality.

The word “economy” comes from Greek oikonomia—household management. For millennia, that made sense: economics was about managing scarce resources within defined boundaries.

But what happens when the boundaries expand and the scarcity dissolves? What happens when the “household” is eight billion people and the “resources” are generated by machines that never tire?

We needed a new word for that. Something that acknowledges we’re leaving the old world behind while being specific about what we’re building instead. Something that captures both the undoing of artificial limitations and the construction of something that hasn’t existed before.

Unscarcity is that word. It’s not a prediction. It’s not a promise. It’s an invitation—to think differently about what’s possible, to engage with the specific architectures that might make it real, and to participate in the conversation about which future we’re actually building.

The technologies are arriving. The transition is beginning. The only question is whether we design the future deliberately—choosing the institutions, incentives, and safeguards in advance—or stumble into whatever emerges from letting current trends run unchecked.

Choose deliberately.

Sources

AI and Automation

Robotics

Fusion Energy

Economic Precarity

Background Reading

  • Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (2006)
  • Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society (2014)
  • Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler, Abundance (2012)

Last updated: 2025-12-17

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