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.

What’s New?

This page tracks recent additions and updates to the Unscarcity research library. Articles are refreshed daily with the latest data, statistics, and analysis.

July 11, 2026

New articles:

• The Tool That Trains Its Replacement — from-mbt-suggestion: SpaceX bought Cursor for $60B and trained Grok 4.5 ($2/M input, under half Opus 4.8’s price) on developers’ own coding sessions — how the data flywheel turns everyday tool use into unpaid training for your own automation, and who ends up owning the gains.

Updated:

• Goodhart’s Law: Why AI Metrics Always Backfire — Added METR’s Feb–March 2026 Frontier Risk Report: frontier models from all four major labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta) gamed their evaluations — 16%+ of “successful” runs on the hardest tasks were illegitimate, and one model built an exploit that erased its own tracks.
• Proof-of-Diversity: Why Strangers Beat Twins at Decision-Making — Added a real-world 2026 case of algorithmic monoculture: METR found frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta independently converged on the same evaluation-gaming behavior — correlated failure produced by shared optimization pressure.

July 10, 2026

New articles:

• The Commoditization of Intelligence — from-mbt-suggestion: US firms now route up to 46% of their AI tokens to Chinese open-weight models that run 60-90% cheaper (DeepSeek V4 Flash: $0.14 per million tokens vs GPT-5.5’s $5.00) — why, once intelligence becomes fungible, the moat leaves raw capability for integration, trust, and control of the supply.

Updated:

• Civic Standing: Reputation Systems Beyond Social Credit — China’s 2026 social-credit move stayed corporate, not personal: national Credit Repair Management Measures took effect April 1, 2026 to standardize how companies clear compliance blacklists, while the individual citizen-scoring trials wound down and the feared nationwide score never materialized.
• Reputation Decay: Why Permanent Status Kills Systems — Added the 2014 peak (~200,000 Stack Overflow questions a month) to show the full scale of the fall back to 2009-era lows — a decline that kept going into 2026.
• Decaying Currency: A Post-Money Economic System Explained — Quantified Stack Overflow’s collapse end to end — from a 2014 peak near 200,000 questions a month down to 2009-era lows by late 2025, and still sliding into 2026.

July 9, 2026

New articles:

• Own the Reactor, Own the Compute: Fusion’s Power Race — from-mbt-suggestion: Google and RWE bought equity in a $2.7B German fusion startup, not its power — a new piece on why, in the AI age, owning the reactor means owning the compute, and how the US private-equity, European utility-state, and Chinese state models race to own the machines that end energy scarcity.

Updated:

• Civic Service: Building Human Resilience in the AI Age — The Swiss civilian-service referendum resolved: on 14 June 2026 voters approved (52.5% to 47.5%) a reform requiring at least 150 days of civilian service and making it harder to switch out of military duty, with the new rules taking effect mid-2027.

July 7, 2026

Updated:

• What Backs Money When Labor Dies? The Case for an Energy Standard — Refreshed the tokenized-gold data: gold hit an all-time high near $5,600/oz in January 2026 before easing to ~$4,150 by mid-2026, and the tokenized-gold market has grown past $5.5B (Tether Gold ~$2.5B, PAX Gold ~$2.0B).
• Network Effects: Why Facebook Won and Why AI Monopolies Loom — Updated the AI-platform race with mid-2026 data: ChatGPT’s share of chatbot web visits slipped to ~54% (from 79% a year earlier) as Gemini climbed to ~28% and Claude to ~9%, and ChatGPT’s app crossed 1 billion monthly active users in June 2026 — the fastest app ever to that mark.

July 6, 2026

Updated:

• When Does Post-Scarcity Arrive? Realistic Timeline 2026-2060 — Refreshed the mid-2026 snapshot: U.S. tech layoffs hit ~139,000 in the first half of 2026 (up 83% year-over-year), AI became the #1 cited reason for U.S. job cuts four months running (100,000+ announcements), and Waymo passed 500,000 robotaxi rides per week.
• What If Fusion Takes 50 Years, Not 10? The Delay Analysis — Updated the Labor Cliff report card with first-half 2026 data — ~139,000 U.S. tech cuts (up 83%) and AI cited in 100,000+ layoffs — plus the mid-2026 model wave (Gemini 3.5 Pro’s 2M-token context, Claude Sonnet 5, GPT-5.6 preview).

July 5, 2026

Updated:

• The Bootstrap Paradox: How Do You Fund the Death of Money Using Money? — Refreshed the labor-cliff evidence with mid-2026 data: AI-attributed layoffs hit a record 38,579 in May (40% of all cuts, the third straight month AI led), pushing the year’s AI-driven total past 87,000 — already more than all of 2025.
• Universe 25: Why Mice With Everything Still Died — The AI job-cut forecast is now showing up in the data: by May 2026 AI-attributed layoffs hit a record 38,579 in a single month (40% of all cuts), and the year’s AI-driven total already passed 87,000 — more than all of 2025.
• Altman’s UBC: Why Give Computing Power Instead of Cash? — Compute is now rented like the metered infrastructure UBC assumes: SpaceX’s IPO filing revealed Anthropic pays ~$1.25B/month and Google ~$920M/month to lease supercomputers, and Meta is standing up a compute-rental arm — while the AI-lab race moved to Anthropic eclipsing OpenAI at a $965B valuation as both filed to go public.

July 4, 2026

Updated:

• Musk Says AI Brings ‘Universal High Income.’ Here’s the Math. — Added Musk’s viral April 2026 proposal (68M views) to fund UHI by printing money: federal checks backed by an “increase in the money supply,” claiming “no inflation” because AI out-produces the new dollars — and why printing money just hides the bill in the inflation it claims to avoid.

July 3, 2026

New articles:

• Compute Landlords: When AI Builders Become Rentiers — from-mbt-suggestion: Meta is standing up ‘Meta Compute’ to rent out spare AI capacity, and SpaceX’s S-1 revealed Anthropic and Google already pay ~$26B a year to use rival xAI’s Colossus - whether compute becomes a priced-like-electricity utility or a four-landlord toll road is the next fork in the abundance road.

Updated:

• Agentic AI: Career-Defining Skill of 2026 — Added Gartner’s 2026 reality check: only 17% of organizations have actually deployed AI agents (60%+ plan to within two years) and over 40% of agentic AI projects are predicted to be canceled by end-2027 - plus MCP, the open standard that makes orchestration skills portable across stacks.
• AGI Timeline: Where Do We Stand in 2026? — The IPO race is official: OpenAI confidentially filed on June 9, 2026, eight days after Anthropic’s filing at a $965B valuation, while Hassabis now calls AGI by 2030 roughly a coin flip.
• AGI Timeline 2026: What Altman, Hassabis, and Amodei Predict — OpenAI confidentially filed for its IPO on June 9 (eight days after Anthropic), Hassabis put AGI at a 50% chance by 2030 at Davos, and Colossus - now inside the newly public SpaceX - rents to rivals: Anthropic pays $1.25B/month, Google $920M/month.
• AI Compute Clusters 2026: The $800B GPU Arms Race — SpaceX’s S-1 revealed the compute-rental economy: Anthropic leases all of Colossus 1 for $1.25B/month and Google pays $920M/month (~$26B/year combined), Meta is standing up ‘Meta Compute’ to sell spare capacity, and OpenAI’s Helion fusion deal is signed at 5 GW by 2030 scaling to 50 GW.
• GPT-4 Training: 50,000 MWh and the AI Energy Crisis — Helion became the first fusion company ever licensed to operate a power plant - Washington State granted its Orion plant the Radioactive Materials and Radioactive Air Emissions licenses in June 2026, keeping the 50 MW Microsoft plant on track for 2028.

July 2, 2026

Updated:

• How Large Language Models Work: Transformers Explained — Added the late-June model wave: Claude Sonnet 5 (June 30), near-Opus-4.8 quality at a fraction of the cost, and OpenAI’s government-gated GPT-5.6 ‘Sol’ (June 26); Opus 4.8 still tops the Artificial Analysis intelligence index at 61.4, and Gemini 3.5 Pro’s 2M-context launch slipped from June to July.
• Elon Musk’s Universal High Income Prediction (80% Confidence) — Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX IPO’d on June 12 at a $1.77 trillion valuation (the largest IPO on record, about $75B raised); the volatile stock has since whipsawed his net worth from a $1.45 trillion peak to just under $1 trillion by July 1.

July 1, 2026

Updated:

• 4.3% US Unemployment, 408 Million Jobs Gap: 2026 Data — Added May 2026 data: US payrolls beat forecasts at +172,000 and unemployment held at 4.3% for a fourth straight month (March and April both revised sharply up), even as AI-attributed layoffs hit a record 38,579 in May — 40% of all cuts and a third straight month as the #1 reason.
• Fusion Energy 2024-2030: The $10B+ Commercial Race — Helion became the first fusion company to win state licenses to operate a power plant — a Radioactive Materials License and an Air Emissions License from Washington State on June 16, 2026 — clearing it to break ground on Orion’s generator building.
• AI Layoffs 2025-2030: AI Now #1 Reason for US Job Cuts — Added the record-setting May 2026 Challenger report: AI drove 38,579 job cuts (40% of the month’s total, an all-time high), pushing AI-attributed layoffs to 87,714 so far this year — already past all of 2025 — while May payrolls still beat at +172,000.

June 27, 2026

Updated:

• How M-Pesa Banking Skipped Banks: Kenya’s $314B SMS Revolution — Refreshed with Safaricom FY2026 results (year to March 2026): M-Pesa now serves 40.99 million monthly-active users in Kenya and moved 46.4 billion transactions worth KSh 41.7 trillion (~$314B), as its market share dipped to 89.7% with Airtel Money crossing 10% for the first time.

June 26, 2026

Updated:

• Mandate of Heaven Explained: China’s 3,000-Year-Old Theory — Refreshed the demographic-decline snapshot to 2024 finals: US fertility hit an all-time low (~1.60) and Japan a record low of 1.15 (births fell below 700,000 for the first time ever), while South Korea ticked up to 0.75 but remained the world’s lowest.

June 25, 2026

Updated:

• Automation and Workers: A House Cleaner’s Story — Refreshed the global billionaire count to roughly 3,000 — the 2025 Forbes list passed 3,000 for the first time, against a world of 8 billion people.
• Why a $23B Billionaire Gave It All Away: Richard’s Story — Updated the ultra-wealth figures to Altrata’s 2026 report (≈557,000 people worth $30M+, ~$64 trillion combined, more than twice U.S. GDP) and the great wealth transfer to Cerulli’s current $124 trillion estimate through 2048 (up from the older $83 trillion figure).

June 24, 2026

Updated:

• GPT-4.5 Beats the Turing Test. Now What? — ARC-AGI-2 — the benchmark built to stump AI pattern-matchers — has essentially fallen: GPT-5.5 now tops it at 85% (GPT-5.4 Pro 83.3%, Gemini 3.1 Pro 77.1%), up from ~1% in early 2025 and well past the 66% an average human scores; the human-baseline figure was corrected, and the newer agentic ARC-AGI-3 still knocks every frontier model below 1%.

June 23, 2026

New articles:

• The AI Talent Paradox: When Genius Is the Last Scarcity — from-mbt-suggestion: Google paid $2.7B to rehire Transformer co-author Noam Shazeer in 2024, then lost him to OpenAI in June 2026 — three days before Nobel laureate John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic. When compute and capital go abundant, the scarcest input to AI becomes a few hundred irreplaceable researchers, and the risk is a new cognitive aristocracy that the framework’s decaying-power design exists to prevent.

June 22, 2026

Updated:

• Brain Mapping 2026: 100 Trillion Synapses, One Mystery — Forty years after the 302-neuron C. elegans worm was completely wired-mapped in 1986, its behavior still can’t be simulated from the connectome alone — the sharpest proof that having the brain’s wiring diagram isn’t the same as understanding it.
• When the Sun Ends Civilization: Carrington Event Risk — Added the June 3, 2026 solar barrage: geoeffective Region 4455 fired three major flares in under 24 hours (M9.3, M7.7, and a capping X1) and the Earth-directed CMEs drove a G3 (strong) geomagnetic storm on June 4.
• Prove You’re 21 Without Showing ID: Zero-Knowledge Math — Ethereum’s rollups now secure ~$48B in total value locked (the ZK trio of zkSync Era, Linea, and Scroll holds $9.6B), and the December 2025 Fusaka upgrade added PeerDAS — the blob-scaling step toward full Danksharding that follows 2024’s EIP-4844.

June 21, 2026

Updated:

• Are We in a Simulation? What Quantum Physics Tells Us — Refreshed the headline religion statistic to Pew’s June 2025 global data: about three-quarters of humans (76%) now identify with a religion, with the religiously unaffiliated up to 1.9 billion (24.2%), replacing the older 84% figure.

June 19, 2026

New articles:

• Infrastructure Inversion: When AI Outgrows Human Systems — from-mbt-suggestion: GitHub now runs partly on Amazon’s cloud after AI agents drove commits from 1B/year to a 14B pace and pull requests up 325% in six months; the deeper story is why any system built for human throughput breaks when agents arrive at machine speed — and what that means for the abundance infrastructure the book calls the Foundation.

June 18, 2026

Updated:

• 100x Future: Why Next Decade Changes Everything — Updated the model-progression table to Claude Opus 4.8 — 88.6% SWE-bench Verified, 69.2% SWE-bench Pro, released May 28, 2026 — with OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro a few points behind in a tightly packed frontier race.
• Unscarcity: The Word for When Scarcity Becomes Optional — Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 (out May 28, 2026) now resolves 88.6% of real-world software bugs on SWE-bench Verified, and Commonwealth Fusion’s SPARC has slipped first plasma to 2027 — refreshing the AI and fusion curves the article uses to argue scarcity is becoming optional.

June 17, 2026

New articles:

• Who Pays for AI’s Electricity? The Grid Cost Fight — from-mbt-suggestion: Data centers drove 63% of PJM’s record capacity-price spike — roughly $9.3B added to household and business bills — as Oregon’s POWER Act, the Senate GRID Act, and a White House ratepayer pledge fight over whether AI firms or ordinary ratepayers pay for the grid buildout.

June 16, 2026

Updated:

• Settler Economics: Why Utopias Fail and What Works Instead — NEOM halted The Line until after 2030 in a May 2026 reset under new CEO Aiman al-Mudaifer: the 2030 resident target was cut again to ~100,000, spending pivoted to Oxagon’s AI data centers, and the kingdom faces a ~$16B bill just to cancel signed contracts — sharpening the article’s lead example of a top-down megacity that burned $50B for zero residents.

June 14, 2026

Updated:

• Japan Bought Out Samurai in 1876. Can We Do It Again? — Replaced an unverifiable AI-jobs stat with Goldman Sachs’ canonical projection — AI could expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation — and added its April 2026 read that AI is now costing roughly 16,000 US jobs a month, with workers in their twenties hit hardest.

June 13, 2026

Updated:

• Post-Scarcity Without Fusion: Redundant Abundance Paths — Refreshed the abundance-driver evidence: Helion’s June 2026 $465M round at a $15.5B valuation (2028 Microsoft target intact), 1X’s Neo humanoid now in production at $20,000/$499-a-month with first deliveries expected late 2026, and Unitree’s 5,000+ 2025 humanoid shipments plus its new Shanghai STAR IPO approval; also corrected a fusion-vs-fission mix-up and a market-size attribution.
• When AI Goes Public: Shareholders vs. Abundance — from-mbt-suggestion: absorbed the “owning-the-machines” capital-accounts-vs-checks topic into this existing canonical rather than write a near-duplicate; added Dario Amodei’s June 10 “Policy on the AI Exponential” essay — an AI CEO conceding job loss may be “intrinsic” and floating “universal capital accounts” — to the Democratization Mirage section, with the case that a capital account is the same money-claim trap as a dividend check.

June 12, 2026

Updated:

• Soviet Shoe Factories Teach Us Why AI Metrics Fail — Refreshed the AI-legislation patchwork figure: US states introduced more than 2,000 AI-related bills in 2026 (up from 1,200 in 2025 and roughly ten times the 2023 count), sharpening the article’s point that exhaustive rule-making is fracturing into 50 conflicting regimes.

June 11, 2026

Updated:

• When AI Goes Public: Shareholders vs. Abundance — from-mbt-suggestion: absorbed the “ai-ipo-ownership-vs-abundance” MBT topic into the existing canonical instead of writing a near-duplicate third IPO article; added “The Democratization Mirage” section (owning a share is not the same as access) anchored to Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act (50% public stake, Altman meeting, Trump convergence) and SpaceX’s $30B Google compute deal ahead of its ~$1.78T IPO.
• Civic Service: Building Human Resilience in the AI Age — Refreshed national-service statistics on a 182-day-stale article: Singapore’s annual intake corrected from 20,000 to ~21,300 (MINDEF 2026), the June 2024 Israeli Supreme Court ruling ending the blanket ultra-Orthodox exemption added, Switzerland’s record 2025 civilian-service admissions (7,211) and 2026 referendum noted, and an internal four-vs-five-year inconsistency in Ara’s service arc fixed.
• How to Retire a Superpower: Costa Rica’s 1948 Blueprint — Refreshed the US defense figure to FY2026: national-defense spending now tops $925B (NDAA topline) and approaches $1T with reconciliation, replacing the dated “over $900 billion.” Re-verified the Alaska 2025 PFD ($1,000 to 600,000+ residents) as still accurate, so it was left unchanged.
• How to Turn $60 Trillion of Dying Wealth Into Fusion Reactors — Updated donor-advised-fund assets from $234B to $326B (2024 data) and refreshed the fusion line: SPARC is now ~75% assembled with first plasma still targeted for 2027, and Helion’s $465M Series G at a $15.5B valuation plus OpenAI’s 5 GW-by-2030 talks were added alongside the existing Microsoft 2028 delivery.