The Warning Label For Emerging Technology

Category: Utopia/Dystopia

What Napster Can Teach Us About AI, Abundance, and the Future

March 31st, 2026

Talk to any tech bro, and they’ll be happy to tell you, scarcity is about to become a thing of the past. Abundance is coming and we are going to have so much awesomeness that we can’t even fathom how amazing it will be. Sam Altman recently said that society has been structured around managing scarcity, and now we need to get used to managing abundance. Hell yeah, bro! There’s just one problem. Well… there are many problems, but a big one that isn’t talked about is that nothing in abundance is worth anything. This fact alone can bring visions of utopian abundance crashing down like a house of cards in a tornado, and it’s a lesson we can learn from Napster. Yes, that Napster.

AI, Abundance, and the Future

We are told that scarcity is about to be in our rearview and the bright shiny utopia is out the windshield. With AI and robots doing all of the work, the cost of goods and services will crash to near zero. It’s yachts and Lambos for everyone! Oh, there’s just the small problem that nobody has a job. Damn, there goes my Lambo.

These takes are common, and you see them every day. For example, here’s a random one I saw this morning.

But this isn’t the only claim. They also claim it will cure all diseases and won’t just end poverty, but make everyone rich.

The “things will be free” argument is typically packed among heaps of bullshit, as seen in these examples. It’s intended to overwhelm your critical thinking skills. Let’s just acknowledge that none of this makes sense.

They state that people are going to lose their jobs, but don’t worry, because AI is going to make everything super awesome! They also claim that in this new environment, people are going to become obscenely rich by giving you free shit. Admittedly, I don’t have an MBA, but that doesn’t seem to be how business works.

I’ve covered this topic before in Techno-Communism and the Things Will Cost Nothing Fallacy. In that article, I attacked some of the core premises of this fallacy. I even covered the fact that, despite the premise, things will still cost something, and that nobody is investing in companies to produce zero-dollar goods and services. I may only lightly recover some of that ground, so please refer to the previous article for the core arguments.

This is an important topic to consider now because we will see better AI technologies. We will eventually get to AGI. Many of the nonsense claims people make about today’s LLMs will be true of this new technology, and the impacts will be far-reaching. We need to consider how this environment affects us as humans and our culture.

In this article, I focus on value and frame the lesson of Napster as it relates to abundance and the future.

Napster

I have to do some work here. Let me explain Napster to young millennials and Gen Z, who’ve always had reliable internet connections and never had to wait for anything. Napster was a peer-to-peer file-sharing application that mostly focused on music. If there was a song or album you wanted, you’d search for it and download the MP3s. The songs were encoded at varying quality levels, and depending on how many people had the files and their internet connection speeds, you may have to wait a day or two for the songs or album to download. Oh, and surprise! Sometimes the files you downloaded weren’t what they claimed to be at all.

A look back on the UI of Napster is enough to haunt your dreams.

I use the term “was” in reference to Napster, but apparently, they are still around and drumroll… They’ve pivoted into AI slop. Imagine that! Although you might think this is the lesson of this article, it’s not. It’s just a fun byproduct in the AI era. Enjoy.

Back in 2000, Metallica sued Napster. For clarification, Metallica was a band of aging gentlemen who sounded like Avenged Sevenfold. Sad but true.

At the time, I remembered thinking how backward Metallica looked, like they were just some aging rock band that didn’t understand technology. Most of all, they just looked greedy. People just wanted the freedom to use their music as they wished. Many downloaded MP3s of albums they already owned. For example, maybe you already had Metallica’s black album on tape or found downloading MP3s easier than ripping them from the CD you owned. CDs were also cumbersome, and taking a bunch with you on a road trip was a pain. Sure, people pirated music, but that was a minority. My perspective solidified as the space for digital music grew.

As digital music grew, it came with heavy-handed DRM (Digital Rights Management), which meant that, despite purchasing the music legally, you couldn’t use the music the way you wanted to or play it on devices you chose. Hell, Sony even went so far as to install malware on your computer in an attempt to stop piracy.

Then came streaming, and music essentially became free. The lesson that started with Napster now came full circle with services like Spotify and Apple Music. However, inheriting a gigantic problem.

Music Is Now Free and Worth Nothing

In the ignorance of my youth, I fell victim to a condition most young people do. I failed to see the big picture. When something is free, it is essentially worth nothing. Nobody values music today, and why should they? There was no friction to access it. Nobody had to go to a store and choose between one album and another. Nobody had to wait in line for a midnight release from their favorite artist. Nobody had to choose which albums to take with them on a road trip. Although this sounds like a major inconvenience, it enhanced the value of music for both the listener and the artist. These activities created loyalty and forged a bond.

Musicians were well aware that listeners had a choice when buying music and felt responsible for creating art to the best of their ability. Or at least, this concept was in the back of their mind. Artists also made money selling music, which gave them the freedom to spend more time on their craft, further enhancing their art/product. This environment didn’t require an artist to be as big as Taylor Swift to do so, either.

Purchasing music connected listeners to artists in a way that streaming doesn’t. When people bought an album, they listened to the album the way the artist intended. They could evoke emotion through ebbs and flows, taking people on a musical journey. With streaming, people just add things to playlists and hit shuffle. An artistic vision of an album is completely dismantled, chucked into the chaos of a musical vortex, spinning alongside Snoop Dogg and Conway Twitty.

Now, artists blast out music as fast as they can to increase their breadth because more music means more potential streams. Not releasing music at a steady cadence creates the impression that you’ll be forgotten in the vast sea of content.

Of course, artists now have to make money in other ways, spending less time on their music. They used to agonize over albums and songs, pouring their hearts and souls into them and taking the time to get things right. They also took creative chances. Now, music is collapsing into a formulaic structure where all music sounds the same, and artists bash the formula like the preprogrammed buttons in Mortal Kombat.

Music has become less something to be listened to and more something that provides background noise in daily life. It doesn’t take pride of place as an activity. It’s wallpaper.

Musical Abundance and Lost Value

What we have today is essentially musical abundance. There’s literally so much music on streaming platforms that people can’t find it. In 2024, it was reported that Spotify had over 100 million songs with over 60,000 new songs added per day. Want to guess just how much of that is good music? Certainly less than 1%, there is no way you can convince me that there are 1 million good songs on the platform. In this world of abundance, most things are shit.

As an artist, you basically have to give your music away. As a listener, music is nothing to you. If one song isn’t available, you just listen to something else without emotion. Music, possibly humanity’s very first art form and something that has meant so much to so many humans throughout history, is now stripped of its value and devoid of connection and meaning. In reality, musical abundance hasn’t led to positive outcomes for either the artist or the listener, and this is our lesson here.

In reality, musical abundance hasn’t led to positive outcomes for either the artist or the listener.

The healing effects, the satisfaction, the connection, the memories, and most of the factors that made music valuable and essential to humanity are now gone. Industrialized, homogenized, and mass-produced music has stripped the art of its value. For the far fewer than 1% of songs that aren’t terrible, we are left with momentary blips of completely forgettable, average sounds labeled as music that just happen to hit our ears. No wonder kids are rediscovering the classics.

There’s no going back. Once a technology is implemented, even if it makes things worse, there is no going back. We are stuck with it, which is why it’s so important to understand the trade-offs and implement mitigations before adopting a technology. We just can’t seem to do that.

Now, the music industry also has its share of blame here. It got greedy. A CD never should have cost anywhere near 20 dollars, unless it was a double album or some other special edition. $9.99 was a fair price and should have been the cost for an album. But that time has passed.

Abundance Math Doesn’t Make Sense

Let’s set a couple of foundations for abundance. The premise behind abundance is that companies will employ AI and robots instead of human workers. So, first and foremost, no jobs for most people on the planet.

We are told by futurists and AI bros that abundance will bring a utopia. That everything will be democratized. The cost of everything will be near zero, compute, goods, intelligence, development, and on and on. With so many things driven to essentially zero, not only does the math behind abundance not make sense, but its value as well, as we’ve seen with music.

With so many things driven to essentially zero, not only does the math behind abundance not make sense, but its value as well, as we’ve seen with music.

Let’s start off by addressing the use of the term democratize. Whenever an AI bro uses the term democratize, they actually mean something else: either devalue, degrade, or destroy. I call these the 3 D’s, and I’ve covered this before. But let’s get back to cost and value.

It doesn’t matter if the cost of things is driven to near zero. If they cost something and you have nothing, you still can’t afford it. If a brand new car costs a dollar and you don’t have a dollar, its inexpensiveness doesn’t change the fact that you have to walk. Assistance programs like UBI will hardly have us living lives of luxury.

When people have little to no money, they tend to focus on pure necessities. Pretty much the entire global economy is focused on selling us stuff that we want, not necessarily things we need. That means in this situation of supposed abundance, most companies on the planet disappear.

This shift will rewire our values. I’ve discussed how this may happen in retail through the implementation of agentic shopping. This rewiring isn’t lost on people who are thinking about these issues. The CEO of Walmart resigned because of AI’s potential to upend retail. If successful, more rewiring is on the way and will upend the entire fabric of the modern world. Just imagine, instead of lusting after material things, the dominant belief in the world was meditation and inner peace. Not great for business.

In a world of abundance, many large companies probably won’t exist. Diversification and competition will eat them alive. The abundance of tools and techniques will allow for quick imitation. Sure, some will remain, kind of like the company store in a mining town, but the economic landscape will look vastly different.

We are told that, despite things being so cheap, companies will make money from volume. But once again, with distribution spread across many small companies, it’s hard to see how that amounts to anything more than table scraps. This begs the question, then, where will the money for UBI come from? Even worse, instead of UBI, we may end up with company vouchers, forcing us to buy from a single company or to obtain vouchers for things we don’t need.

Abundance Equals Sameness

Henry Ford is quoted as saying of the Model T that a customer can have any color they want, as long as it’s black. There’s a lesson here for technological abundance. Many are laboring under the delusion that a world of abundance looks like the world of today, just with more. But the reality is this world will look totally different.

The world of technological abundance laid out before us isn’t a world of diverse beauty with green grass and open skies where people spend their days writing poetry and contemplating their existence in the universe. It’s a homogenized world of sameness where everything collapses into uniformity because this uniformity is predictable and can be mass-produced at scale. Individuality and one-offs are unpredictable and costly, and thus must be crushed. It’s a world where humans become little more than a burden.

Sure, people will try to control for this uniformity in the ways that they can. For example, if a family has a 3D printer at home, they have some control over what they print. However, they still need the resources to buy the printer and printing materials, and most would rely on the available designs. This concept of a utopia is starting to smell pretty rank.

New Business? Maybe.

I’m sure it will be said that I’m not envisioning the new businesses that will sprout up and how humans will change their behavior. Sure, the world is a complex place that defies prediction. I acknowledge that adaptation is possible, and surely, humans will change their behavior. They won’t have a choice. But it isn’t going to turn out the way people think.

Just shooting from the hip here, but a world in which people don’t have money and things are essentially free doesn’t seem like a robust environment for business. You won’t see a plethora of new startups all angling for that gigantic pot of nonexistent money.

You won’t see a plethora of new startups all angling for that pot of nonexistent money.

People invest in companies on the hopes of a big return. They take chances and are willing to take losses, but the gambler loses big in this new environment. Because even an investor with money and a successful business bet basically converts that investment into less money. In this environment, there are no incentives to improve, and everything will plateau at mediocrity to preserve existing margins.

Another thing to consider is that this environment is inherently fragile. Any problem, no matter how small, could cause a company to lose money since the margins would be so tight. Any amount of downtime, errors, or integrity issues, whether accidental or intentional, could be catastrophic. The predictable answer from the AI bro is: “But the AI won’t make mistakes.” To which I say, good luck with that.

Now, is it possible for us to evolve beyond money or capital toward a society that aligns its value with other meaningful activities and goals? Sure, it’s possible. But, once again, this wouldn’t be good for the business bros who are pushing this fallacy the hardest. In a world where abundance is truly successful and is beneficial to humanity, it’s bad for business.

Complexities and Negative Impacts

A full conversation on the negative impacts is outside the scope of this article. However, I have covered some of these before.

I’d argue that these people vastly underestimate the world’s complexities and the sheer number of negative impacts this change brings, not just on the economics but on humanity as a whole. There are basically only one or two ways this can kind of go right, and an incalculable number of ways it can go wrong. For example, this is an environment tailor-made for surveillance and totalitarianism. How can it not when your existence is completely dependent on external factors like the state or the generosity of a benefactor?

If you think that people will tolerate a few trillionaires while the world suffers mass unemployment, you are dead wrong. This is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be stated. I can completely envision a group calling themselves The Children of Ludd wreaking havoc. Only their anger won’t be isolated to the machines in data centers and their embodiments out in the world. They’ll direct their anger at the people they see exploiting the situation as well. It won’t be pretty.

I can completely envision a group calling themselves The Children of Ludd wreaking havoc.

In many cases, this new environment will make people far more tribal and extreme and willing to believe just about anything, but this is a topic for another day.

Conclusion

The vision of abundance defined by the tech bros is an absolute fallacy. It’s a world in which AI is talked about more like magic and less like an actual technology. From this tap spouts outlandish claims with no foundation in reality. As we’ve seen, even when abundance works, it has a degradation effect.

A world of successful abundance appears to be bad for business, which raises the question: Why are so many business leaders pushing this concept? If I had to guess, it’s that they hope to make their money before this big crash and leave humanity to pick up the pieces.
AI-as-Entertainment: Sloputainment and Next-Generation Time Wasting

November 19th, 2025
Humans are incredibly creative, especially when it comes to wasting time. Throughout the ages, we’ve explored time-wasting with zeal, inventing new methods and distractions to pass the time and avoid contemplation. In the current age, that tool is generative AI. Generative AI has transformed not into an indispensable productivity tool, but into a babysitter. While AI companies push hard to convince enterprises that their tools are a great fit for business use cases, for many people, it has become a way to fill time exploring AI slop in its many forms. Welcome to the world of sloputainment.

Sloputainment: Next-Generation Time Wasting With AI Slop

No matter your position on generative AI’s usefulness for day-to-day productivity, it’s undeniable that generative AI truly excels at producing slop. The risks and impacts of slop outputs are aligned with the context in which they are generated. In business or safety-critical use cases, slop can have a significant negative impact, causing damage and endangering people. However, people messing around on the internet or playing with these tools on their own typically present a lower risk. There are exceptions, for example, using generative AI to bully or harass others, but, largely, that’s not what most people use them for.

In a previous post, I commented that people secretly like slop and that it is here to stay. Slop is a way for people to entertain themselves, pass the time, and generate content. Something we all witness daily.

Ethan Mollick, one of AI’s biggest cheerleaders and proponents of its productivity, spends much of his time playing around with image and video generation. Or at least, this is what his social media feed suggests.

The AI music generation app Suno reported annual recurring revenue of $150 million. You don’t think all these people are getting gold records out of this, do you?

And, before someone mentions, “But, did you see the number 1 country album was AI,” let me stop you there. You should watch this video instead of listening to that garbage.

Not only does the song suck, but apparently, someone only had to spend 3k for this publicity. Pretty good investment.

Using AI to make music makes someone no more of a musician than a child wearing a firefighter’s helmet makes them a firefighter. Nobody is going to see a child with a firefighter’s helmet on and send them into a burning building, remarking that’s what they signed up for.

Using AI to make music makes someone no more of a musician than a child wearing a firefighter’s helmet makes them a firefighter.

People are even using AI for gender reveals in totally normal ways, such as smashing into the Twin Towers or taking down the Hindenburg. You know, perfectly normal, totally sane shit.

OpenAI is even making the shift towards porn. This isn’t the move a company makes when they are on the cusp of AGI. It’s a move you make when you are hemorrhaging money and desperate for any avenue whatsoever to revenue.

Sloputainment is popular because it checks critical boxes. It’s a form of entertainment for the person creating it. A form of entertainment that requires no talent or effort, resulting in extremely low friction. Also, it creates content that the person can share on social media. Many constantly search for things daily to transform into content, fearing that a single day without posting on social media will make them irrelevant. The fact that sloputainment checks both the entertainment and content boxes all but guarantees it’s here to stay.

Sloputainment and the Illusion of Productivity

But directly using AI to create slop images and video is only one form of sloputainment. There is another form that masks itself as productivity or hustling. In a new trend, people boast publicly about how they’ve abandoned things like video games in favor of building software. Largely inconsequential software projects for themselves, but the task is transformed into content. And their perspective based on isolated projects is transformed into an entire worldview.

Why it’s bad to let AI creep into every moment and aspect of your life? I don’t know, why is that bad? With some people, there’s no delineation or line they won’t let AI cross. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure it’s fun for people playing around with this stuff. I mean, building things with Legos can be fun, too. But nobody is confused when they build something with Legos that they are building the next big thing. That something really could come out of it, and that they may be onto the next multi-million-dollar app. This isn’t AI psychosis, but it is delusional.

There is a distinction that needs to be made here between the forms of sloputainment. The only way to get good at something is to practice it. For example, you can’t get good at building AI agents without building agents, which is why vibe coding doesn’t teach you much about real-world development. Even the person who coined the term vibe coding understands this. This activity is different than people just posting slop images to social media.

The issue is the undercurrent of hustle bro culture, which gives the impression that if you aren’t hustling, you’ll be left behind. In many ways, this public performance is meant to show that their personal activities are better than everyone else’s. It’s self-flagellation in the era of generative AI. People playing around with things to learn and understand is good. People replacing other activities in their personal lives with the illusion of productivity is bad.

In many ways, these activities resemble people playing around with their friends, similar to garage bands having fun jamming on nothing in particular. However, secretly hoping in the background that they get their big break and a gold or platinum album. Only, instead of a gold or platinum album, this is their award. It’s fitting that in the generative AI age, you get awards for spending money instead of making it.

It’s fitting that in the generative AI age, you get awards for spending money instead of making it.

However, instead of representing people enjoying the output of their creative pursuits, it’s just representative of a system chewing up tokens. The dystopia says, “Nom nom.”

Sloputainment Is Content

AI is not only making everything entertainment, but as a byproduct, it’s creating content. This is the knockout punch for our modern information junk food diet. It’s the ice cream piled high on a cake, topped with potato chips, chocolate, caramel, and a pound of M&Ms for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Social media has rewired our brains to see everything and everyone as content. The whole world is our content oyster, and nothing escapes the content lens. It’s why you see things like idiots defacing coral reefs with graffiti. If only this were AI slop. This is why some people have no problem using AI to harass other people and organizations. As I mentioned back in 2020, harassment is the true legacy of technologies like deepfakes. This does seem to be bearing out in the age of generative AI.

I think what bothers me most about this hustle bro nonsense is that it gives the impression of devaluing so much of what is truly valuable. I mean, quiet contemplation looks like time wasting to morons in motion. Which is Newton’s Fourth Law of motion, morons in motion, stay in motion. It’s also why so many people get so many things so wrong. They are so busy hustling that they never stop to contemplate, you know, to get things right.

It takes me forever, by generative AI standards, to write an article like this. Writing is thinking, and in each of these articles, I’m working my way through the topics like everyone else while attempting to give them the level of contemplation they deserve. If this site were about content instead of contemplation, I’d be blasting out AI-slop articles with clickbait headlines, trying to game SEO. You know, like over 99% of the internet. Instead, I’m content to labor away in obscurity. If writing is thinking, then generating with AI is the lack of thinking. This gets lost in the tidal wave of content slop.

If writing is thinking, then generating with AI is the lack of thinking.

Sloputainment is Entertainment

Somewhere along the way, we conned ourselves into thinking everything needs to be entertainment. Things now have to be converted into entertainment to be valuable. Even something as mundane as our own data can now be transformed into entertainment. I mean, Google created NotebookLM, allowing the generation of a podcast from our data. Because learning from reading, analyzing, and engaging with ideas is boring, and only losers would learn that way. We now have to be entertained to learn.

There’s a problem, though. When something is viewed as entertainment, it appears to have a more truthful weight or feeling. To use modern vernacular, you could even say that data-as-entertainment emits truth vibes. Where we may question an AI overview or summary, we are less likely to question the same data in the form of a podcast that sounds like humans or a video presentation with a human voice, but it’s the same data with the same issues. Especially since much of this data doesn’t conflict with our biases, otherwise, we wouldn’t consider it entertainment.

Where we may question an AI overview or summary, we are less likely to question the same data in the form of a podcast that sounds like humans or a video presentation with a human voice.

Take Graham Hancock’s Ancient Apocalypse docuseries on Netflix. Presented on a platform like Netflix, stunning locations, cinematic shots, but all 100% pure, unadulterated bullshit. Yet presenting the content this way lends it weight and credibility. Of course, it doesn’t help that the docuseries doesn’t feature any actual experts either.

Graham Hancock is a fraud with no expertise and a peddler of bullshit. Yet, he was given a platform to spread his nonsense to a wider audience. AI-as-entertainment platforms risk doing the same for every type of content and data. We risk embedding falsehoods and misperceptions deep in our brains due to formatting issues.

We risk embedding falsehoods and misperceptions deep in our brains due to formatting issues.

Text presented in paragraph form with easily clickable links is a much better, easier way to verify content than an audio podcast you listen to in the car or while doing something else. The same can be said of video presentations or cartoon talking heads. But paragraphs have higher friction than podcasts.

Admittedly, NotebookLM is neat technology, but the disconnect lies in failing to distinguish between a technology being cool and the value it truly provides, and in a far greater disconnect about what the technology does to us. You know, the tradeoffs. So much of our current moment consists of waving hands, directing our attention to how cool a technology is without consideration of use cases or impacts.

I’m sure this is just a continuation of a trend that Neil Postman identified as starting with television. But AI supercharges it. Imagine, instead of a podcast, next up will be video. As a matter of fact, while I was writing this post, Google updated NotebookLM to include generative video overviews, taking data entertainment to the next level. Using video, we can learn about someone like Neil Postman not by engaging with his work but through cartoon summaries that may or may not capture the important aspects. An approach Postman would detest, but no doubt see coming. There is a good chance these summaries miss important details as they focus on what’s most interesting, shocking, or exciting. We are about to “true crime” everything.

I should note that the impacts aren’t the same for all types of information. For some things, simple summaries are fine. However, the difficulty we face is understanding where the true delineation point lies, and, of course, the tendency to overestimate our knowledge based on trivial information.

There was an early attempt to use AI to cut together movie trailers. The AI identified the most “exciting” aspects of the movie, explosions, car chases, etc., but it didn’t connect with people or follow a story. It was just a bunch of cutscenes with no through line. Now, everything is cutscenes, fueling our entertainment addiction. There’s a lot of history that’s boring but important, and we risk paving over history as we reengineer it into entertainment.

We risk paving over history as we reengineer it into entertainment.

If you are lucky, there’s a memory of an entertaining school teacher who made classes more tolerable, and you may have even learned more because of it. We also have memories of learning things from documentaries. These memories may lead us to think that entertainment is the best way to engage with a topic and learn. However, there’s a distinction between entertaining and entertainment.

Entertaining is a method that still requires friction to get to a goal. It’s just that the friction becomes more tolerable due to heightened interest and engagement. For example, the entertaining school teacher still required the same reading and homework assignments. Entertainment is content that promises a complete reduction of friction. No need to read a book or engage with the content, watch this AI-generated short instead. Remember, knowledge and understanding aren’t generated from summaries or bullet points.

You may be thinking that there’s not a lot of harm in these activities, and for the most part, this is correct. How each person wastes their time is up to them. Fair enough, to each their own. However, consider that when we use AI to harass other people, we cause them harm. When we use AI to create entertainment masquerading as something else, we harm ourselves. This is what I take issue with: the tradeoffs that nobody considers and the false perception that hustling this way is the only way to make progress in the modern age.

There is no doubt that people use generative AI daily for productivity tasks. Great. And if people truly are using these activities to learn, fair enough. However, things like vibe coding and AI summaries don’t teach valuable lessons. Quite often, the lessons come afterward, when you get owned or try to apply your newfound summarized knowledge.

Conclusion

Sloputainment leaves so many things undiscovered, about ourselves, others, and the world. With every prompt, it steals from us, taking our time, understanding, and even our sense of who we are. We get sucked into the content vortex spinning chaotically around a hollow center with no ability to center ourselves, and it takes effort to break free.

Wasting time isn’t a modern concept. However, we have supercharged it with AI. In On The Shortness of Life, Seneca explains that it isn’t that life is too short, but the fact that we waste so much of the time we have. Seems some things haven’t changed since the first century AD. But we’ll close with some words from the great American philosopher, Sebastien Bach, who posed this concept in a series of questions:
```
Is it all just wasted time?
Can you look at yourself,
When you think of what you left behind?
Is it all just wasted time?
Can you live with yourself,
When you think of what you've left behind?
```
Techno-Communism and The Things Will Cost Nothing Fallacy

January 31st, 2025

One of the oft-repeated talking points erupting from the mouths of futurists and tech leaders alike is claiming that things will cost nothing in the future. As if we are to believe all of these people are in the business of making something for nothing. The entire claim is a gross absurdity that charlatans like Ray Kurzweil conjured out of thin air, and others parrot at every opportunity. This claim is made with such confidence that it is rendered self-evident, and to question it means you are an out-of-touch dolt lacking the religious fervor necessary to create the techno-utopia.

But these responses are a smokescreen to dispel the very rational questions this claim evokes. None of these people can explain exactly how this will work in practice or are willing to admit just how bad things will get, which seem like consequential details to omit considering the plan to rework the social contract of most of the world.

The claim promises us a Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) where all of our needs are not only met but propels us into a life of luxury. However comforting the concept, the reality may be closer to Fully Automated Digital Breadlines (FADB). I know, how dare I poo-poo the utopia.

The False Choice

We are often given a false choice. We are told that if we don’t allow companies carte blanche to raw-dog technology all the way to utopia, then humanity will vanish. Either grow or die, as the mantra goes. Given this, a minuscule number of people are trying to rework the social contract and reimagine society without society’s input.

We can have cures for cancer and other illnesses without destroying art, stealing people’s work, or removing humans from the creative process. However, curing cancer is a hard problem, and imitating humans is easy. So we get AI slop machines instead of cures for Alzheimer’s.

Maybe I’m just an idiot, but I fail to see how LLMs will make humans immortal. Immortality is one of the many promises if we only just let it happen, even though there’s absolutely no evidence for this.

Also, if you read Andreessen’s Techno Optimist Manifesto from October of 2023, you may notice his crediting of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the Fascist Manifesto. Marinetti was a futurist, but his position as a futurist and someone who had complete disregard for the past led him to embrace fascism as a logical vehicle for technocracy.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty in Andreessen’s manifesto that I agree with. We are a society built on technology, and this has brought some of our greatest achievements. There certainly are regulations that seem pointless and get in the way. There are groups inside organizations that have become politicized and create unnecessary obstacles. I also agree with the critique of communism. These are all true. However, Adreessen’s mistake assumes that multiple things can’t be true simultaneously.

Even though these are extreme views that some have labeled techno-authoritarianism, understand that they are the average view of the e/acc community. Andreessen also invokes the perils of communism multiple times while also driving humanity into techno-communism, but to each their own, I guess.

I love technology and believe, as Andreessen does, that technology will deliver the best future. It’s because of technological advancement that we’ll cure cancer and reduce suffering around the world. However, I don’t believe a better society results from discarding ethics and principles and disregarding voices different from our own in the pursuit of generating a cornucopia of innovation porn. We in technology seem to constantly make this mistake, only to be disappointed by our ignorance of the complexities of the real world and the jobs and perspectives of others.

Ethics and principles aren’t obstacles or roadblocks. They are guideposts that ensure what we build aligns with our values and vision of the world we want to create. We, in this case, meaning society as a whole and not just a couple of dudes sharing technology with their friends.

The Claim

If you have escaped these claims, here’s a recent example from Marc Andreessen below.

You read that right. We need to hurt you before we can help you. It’s the sort of pitch you’d hear from a sadistic boyfriend who insists he needs to tear a partner down before building them back up. The we have to break it before we can fix it mantra is applied to almost everything, including humans and the environment. This is the core premise of the Effective Accelerationist (e/acc) movement.

But Andreessen is hardly the only one making these claims.

That’s right, Google is in the business of giving you things for free. We’ve learned this lesson a long time ago. Yes, Google makes its money off of ads for its “free” services. However, in a future where things are worth nothing and people don’t have an income stream, it seems likely that advertising budgets will be zero as well.

I blame much of this on Ray Kurzweil. For years, he’s been peddling this nonsense. I addressed this very same claim in my post on his latest book in the “Things Will Cost Nothing” and “Jobs and Wages” sections of the article. Despite this, I wanted to explore this topic further.

These people claim we shouldn’t worry about losing our jobs to AI because AI will make companies so good that goods and services will essentially be cheap or free. But both on the surface and upon reflection, the claim is absurd.

Nobody can describe exactly how this is supposed to work other than sprinkling everything with AI magic. When someone does make an attempt, like Ray Kurzweil, for example, the explanations make no sense, don’t address the questions, and highlight how little about the real world these people know.

For years, I’ve been pushing back against the phrase, “AI won’t replace people. People with AI will replace people without.” This is just patently false. The moment AI is good enough to take our job, it will. I mean, it doesn’t even have to be that good.

So, no job, no income. This is our baseline. It doesn’t matter how cheap things get if you have zero.

But AI, Tho

Before we get too far, let’s address the counterargument. For all the issues I’m about to raise, the answer is, “But AI, tho.” The response involves invoking the name of AI like a magician conjuring a spell. We are told that AI will be so great and powerful, rising to the status of deity, and no matter what the encountered issue, AI will figure it out. But merely spouting an incantation doesn’t make it a reality.

This answer is a complete copout that leaves the questioner unsatisfied. Whenever someone invokes the But AI, Tho defense to real questions, continue to ask them for more specifics. Don’t allow the oversimplification of a vast and complex problem space. AI isn’t god, and they aren’t prophets.

The “Sucks To Be You” Gap

Remember, we need to be broken before we can be fixed. This means there will be a gap between the damage incurred and any mitigation strategies. I call this the Sucks To Be You gap. There is no telling how long this gap will stay open or what mitigations will be implemented to remedy it.

Unemployment is unlikely to hit something like 90% all at once. This would mean that early people displaced by automation would be the most harmed since they would be unable to support themselves and their families and have no real recourse for their situation. How long will this drag out? My guess is years, possibly a decade or more, depending on how slow the adoption is and any difficulties implementing mitigations.

The amount of harm caused by this gap is unfathomable. This gap brings pain, suffering, and death. If you think I’m being dramatic, think about it for a moment. Imagine the mental toll this takes on someone trying to provide for themselves and their family. This isn’t a matter of re-skilling. Even if people did re-skill, the competition for remaining jobs would be astronomical, with thousands of applicants for a single position. This isn’t p(doom) it’s p(shit).

It’s easy to see how self-harm could result from this situation, but that’s not the only scenario where mortality is concerned. Not working leads to a lack of benefits, meaning you can’t make co-pays on doctor visits and prescriptions. This doesn’t include all of the potential harm from algorithmic decision-making mistakes. Deaths will result, and we know this because we’ve seen it happen on a smaller scale with people not being able to afford insulin.

No Intelligence Explosion

All of the claims of a near-future techno-utopia are predicated upon an intelligence explosion. This is the condition in which AIs will recursively improve, creating even better AIs that morph into superintelligence. Advocates claim this attainment of superintelligence fuels this world of comfort and abundance. But what if it doesn’t manifest this way? What if we get the Diet Coke of AGI? Just one calorie, not intelligent enough.

The assumption is that superintelligence brings massive productivity gains, but what if, instead, we get algorithms that are purely good enough, leading to human workers being displaced and productivity staying relatively the same? For example, an agent can work 24 hours a day, but what if that 24-hour-a-day agent produces the same productivity as a human working 8 hours a day? This could happen because of needing to account for errors, wait times for additional reasoning, running tasks multiple times, and other issues relating to the complexities of seemingly simple tasks. It’s easy to see how this can stretch out when we factor in additional difficulties of completing complex tasks.

This human replacement could result in cost savings but would be far from driving costs to zero. Also, this would be less of a complete human replacement and more of a human staff reduction. Now, you have a displaced workforce and a company with similar productivity. This doesn’t seem like a recipe for a utopia. It’s a recipe for problems.

This is a very real possibility, especially given all of the hype around LLMs. I know everyone is losing their mind about DeepSeek at the moment, but I don’t believe LLMs are a path to AGI, much less ASI. However, it’s important to realize that we don’t need this level of intelligence to apply these technologies to specific tasks successfully. It’s entirely feasible that a company would take a shitty LLM with repeatable failures over a human worker if they could save money.

What’s The Point of Things Costing Nothing?

I’m not sure anyone gets out of bed in the morning with dreams of creating a company that delivers goods and services that cost nothing. It’s even absurd to say out loud, so you might wonder why people at the largest companies in the world are making this claim. Investors are the same way. Nobody is investing in a company so they can deliver zero-cost goods and services. In the Sucks To Be You gap, the first affected suffers the most harm, but the opposite happens with companies.

Nobody is investing in a company so they can deliver zero-cost goods and services.

Tech leaders and investors aren’t considering what happens to their companies after this so-called intelligence explosion. They are thinking of all the money they will make leading up to it. This is why these staunch capitalists are so comfortable forcing everyone into techno-communism. Now that I think of it, the thought of an algorithmic Stalin hunting kulaks is terrifying.

Stagnation

Counterintuitively, this condition could lead to stagnation. The very opposite of what proponents claim. This doesn’t strike me as a competitive environment where companies and people are stepping up to create new solutions due to a lack of incentives. I guess someone could make the argument that people’s lives will suck so bad that they’ll be incentivized to create something better. Fair enough, but it seems like these bigger initiatives would cost more money, putting them out of reach by these very people. Not to mention, this is an odd flex for the techno-utopians. “Your life will suck so bad you’ll be dying to create something better.”

The price of stagnation for a majority of the population is that they remain in the mire of the Sucks To Be You gap for a much longer time. Even if basic necessities are met, it will be miles away from a good life, much less luxurious.

Things Will Still Cost Something

The core premise of the argument that things will be zero or low cost is absurd on its face, so much so that it’s remarkable that nobody seems to push back. A whole host of things won’t be free or low-cost. Consider rent and property, the means to generate electricity, medical treatments, and, most importantly, food. Even extracting and refining raw materials is going to cost something. Imagine being monitored every moment with everything in your home subscription-based, requiring a micro transaction for nearly everything you do. Now, that’s the utopia we’ve all dreamed of!

Regarding food, Kurzweil claims that advancements in vertical farming will make abundant, nutritious food freely available. This highlights Kurzweil’s cluelessness on a variety of topics. Vertical farming took a hit last year, making MIT Technology Review’s list of the worst tech failures of 2024. Score another “L” for Kurzweil.

As I mentioned, companies and investors aren’t in the business of giving things away for free. These companies will adjust to the conditions imposed upon them. When have we ever seen a company that gets hit with higher taxes or additional tariffs responding with, “Well, sucks to be us. I guess we’ll have to make less money now.”

This condition may level out at some point. After all, if nobody has any money to buy your products, that’s not a good business strategy either. I’m saying that this leveling out could take some time, especially if a segment of the population continues to remain employed.

New Risks

New architectures, technologies, and automated processes will bring new risks. Due to our complete dependence on these systems, these risks will have a much larger direct impact. The vertical farming example is instructive because it raises new risks and considerations. For example, damage can spread quickly in these new architectures, creating cascading failures.

In reality, the company’s lettuce was more expensive, and when a stubborn plant infection spread through its East Coast facilities, Bowery had trouble delivering the green stuff at any price.

And this is just one of the many potential examples. Whenever potential challenges such as this are raised, the But AI, Tho defense is invoked as some sort of benevolent deity here to deliver our salvation and absolve us from our sins. “AI will just figure it out.” This is not an answer.

Techno-Communism and Techno-Welfare

Let’s acknowledge that these companies aren’t willing to part with their money. It’s not like they will be so successful that they’ll start sharing their profits with us. Even if they half the cost of goods and services or even reduce by 90%, we’ve got zero dollars, which makes these cheap necessities still out of reach. This begs a couple of questions.

How do companies make money from people who don’t have any?

It seems unlikely to be profitable in this environment, so companies raise prices for those who can afford their products to cover gaps. This situation actually makes it worse for displaced workers, as I mentioned previously in the adjusting to market conditions section.

What’s the remedy?

Some have proposed an automation tax that funds a Universal Basic Income (UBI) program. This sounds good on paper but may not be so great in practice. We will tax people who are making less money; hence, there will be less recovered in taxes. Not to mention, I’m only considering the United States here. What about goods and services from other countries? After all, we have a global economy. This requires tariffs on goods and increased taxes on digital goods, which will require companies to raise costs even more.

There is the impression that the techno-welfare provided by some universal basic income will have us jet-setting around the globe. This is the premise of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). This is flat-out bullshit when you consider the realities on the ground. UBI’s benefits are a social welfare program and will be commensurate with similar programs.

Nobody on a social welfare program lives it up on their yacht, sipping champagne and wondering when their Ferrari will be out of the shop. These people worry about basic necessities constantly. Any small hiccup can result in major consequences. This future techno-welfare program will be far more like today’s social welfare than some government-funded luxurious lifestyle. So, yes, it is much more like Fully Automated Digital Breadlines (FADB) than FALC.

Not to mention, this very same social welfare program will be administered by the very system systems that displaced these workers in the first place, leaving the door open to a whole host of technical issues and challenges that will affect the people in the program, adding to risks.

The thing that pisses me off about people like Kurzweil is that the very foundation of their arguments is not only so disconnected from reality that they don’t make sense, they are dehumanizing. But for people like Kurzweil, this is a feature, not a bug.

The response to hungry children comes off as, “Just shut up and eat your amino acid paste, you ungrateful little shits. Don’t you realize how much more compute you have access to? You couldn’t even run stable diffusion locally when I was a kid!” When you are hungry, it’s hard to eat your computer.

Reduced Agency and Helplessness

What does it mean to be human in an age without work and agency? Do we resign ourselves to being helpless and needy? This is hard to pin down in advance. Humans are indeed incredibly adaptable creatures, but there’s a limit to this adaptability. But more importantly, why should we settle for this vision of the future?

These systems turn us into robots, shoving us into predictable buckets, reducing our agency, and making us dependent. This is necessary to increase the accuracy of predictions. The result is we end up as helpless schmucks standing on the sidelines, waiting to be told what to do and where to go at the mercy of every algorithmic decision. Technology should work for us, not the other way around, a point that gets lost in the shuffle and hype.

With every new risk that surfaces, we’ll be helpless to intervene. We need to take it on faith that what we built will automatically do something about it, as the world we construct becomes far too complex for us to understand. In some instances, humans may not be informed of impending dangers due to their lack of ability to do anything about them. We remain blissfully aware until the asteroid strikes.

We should insist on better. We deserve something better—technology that works for us, not us working for technology.

Technological advancements require tradeoffs, which will benefit humans as a whole. For example, suppose self-driving cars worked as advertised and delivered on promises. In that case, giving up manual driving for the benefit of safer roads may be a worthwhile tradeoff that most of society accepts. However, today, we are being asked to pre-purchase a tradeoff where it’s unclear what we get and what we lose.

Does This Sound Like Utopia?

I don’t know about you, but this scenario doesn’t sound like a slam dunk in the utopia basket. At best, this sounds like human-forced retirement with a monumental cut in income and benefits. At worst, it’s suffering and death, far from the promised life of luxury. It likely won’t be either of these extremes, but it will be something like a Fully Automated Digital Breadlines scenario I mentioned where the role of humans is needy and dependent.

I’m not sure exactly where I fall on the utopia scale above except to say I am probably not in the upper half. Not a precise measure other than to say away from the luxury lifestyle.

Can we achieve artificial superintelligence quickly and solve the world’s problems by creating a world of abundance? Yes, it’s certainly possible that everything snaps into place perfectly, and governments and corporations work hand in hand to create a world of abundance free from suffering. Possible, just not probable, or at least probable in a reasonable amount of time. For this to be the winning scenario, things must work perfectly the first time with advancements free from issues. We should know from history this is rarely the case.

Even if we eventually reach a reasonable utopia, we’ll have years, if not decades, of pain and misery as humans do their best to adapt and deal with less-than-perfect technology, governments, and companies. All of these challenges are incurred by humans while simultaneously being stripped clean of our agency and purpose.

By some estimations, communism is responsible for 100 million deaths in the twentieth century. Although some dispute this number, even on the lower side, we’re still talking about 50 million people. But hey, what’s 50 million deaths among friends? Something about one death being a tragedy and a million being a statistic. And yes, I know Stalin didn’t say that, but it’s relevant here.

Although I don’t think techno-communism will cut that wide a path, I do believe that some will view resulting deaths and misery as the cost of progress. However, progress is subjective, and despite often being linked, innovation and progress aren’t the same thing.

Conclusion

I hope that none of my predictions come true, that I am wrong, that some fluke happens, and everything magically snaps into place without issue. Thankfully, much of the hot takes on social media can be written off as bros sharing vibes. Also, I don’t think the current crop of LLMs will cause mass unemployment, create large destabilizing effects in the workforce, or create immortality. However, I’m not as confident about this prediction, well, other than the immortality piece.

The real question for LLMs is how much better this buggy, insecure, black-box technology needs to get to start disrupting a larger part of the workforce. We’ve seen this happen in the creative domains, but the cost of failure is low in these use cases. Let’s hope there are no plans to hook ChatGPT up to air traffic control or the nuclear arsenal, but there are still plenty of other jobs without such high failure costs. Only time will tell.

The attempt by a few to change the social contract raises many questions: Who sets the rules? Who changes the rules? Who or what makes the important decisions affecting humanity? These are good questions to have answers to before wading into the slough.

This situation can’t be described as a Faustian bargain since most people won’t gain any true advantage. At least Robert Johnson received amazing guitar skills. Many of us will get digital breadlines and an endless feed of slop.