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.