Wikipedia Deep Dive

Post-scarcity

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Imagine a world where the morning alarm doesn't signal the start of another workday, but rather the beginning of whatever you want to do. Where the question "what do you do for a living?" becomes as quaint as asking someone which well they fetch water from. This is the promise of post-scarcity—and whether you find it utopian or unsettling says a lot about how you think about human nature.

Post-scarcity is exactly what it sounds like: an economy where scarcity—the fundamental problem that economics was invented to solve—largely disappears. Not completely. You still can't have a beachfront mansion on a planet with finite coastlines. But the basics? Food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education, entertainment? All of it becomes as abundant and cheap as tap water in a developed nation today.

The concept sounds like science fiction. That's because, for most of human history, it was.

The Machines That Make Things

The road to post-scarcity runs through automation. This much is obvious. What's less obvious is how far down that road we might already be.

Consider the humble factory robot. The first industrial robot, Unimate, was installed at a General Motors plant in 1961. It did one thing: it moved hot metal pieces from a die-casting machine. Sixty years later, robots weld car frames, paint vehicles with micrometer precision, and assemble electronics too small for human fingers to manipulate. Each generation of automation displaces workers while simultaneously making goods cheaper and more abundant.

But factory robots are just the beginning. The truly radical vision involves machines that can make other machines—including copies of themselves.

Adrian Bowyer, a British engineer, thought carefully about what self-replicating machines would mean for economics. In 2005, he launched the RepRap project, an open-source effort to create a three-dimensional printer that could print most of its own parts. The logic was elegant: once you have one self-replicating machine, you can have as many as you want. And if the machine can print other useful objects? Well, then you've fundamentally changed the economics of production.

Here's the key insight. In a normal market, manufacturers compete on price. They try to produce goods more cheaply than their competitors. But there's a floor: you can't sell something for less than it costs to make. With self-replicating machines, that floor drops dramatically. The cost of the machine itself approaches zero, because the machines make each other. The only remaining costs are raw materials and energy.

This is where things get interesting.

Energy and the Question of Limits

Even with perfect automation, you still need to feed the machines. They require energy to operate and raw materials to work with. This is the most common objection to post-scarcity visions: we live on a finite planet with finite resources.

The objection has merit. But post-scarcity advocates have responses.

Take solar power. The sun deposits more energy onto Earth's surface in a single hour than humanity uses in an entire year. Not in a decade. Not in a century. In a single hour. The limiting factor has never been the energy itself—it's been our ability to capture and store it cost-effectively. As solar panel prices continue their steady decline (they've dropped by roughly 99 percent since the 1970s), that limitation weakens.

Now imagine self-replicating machines building solar panels. Each machine makes more machines. Each machine also makes solar panels. The exponential growth that makes compound interest so powerful starts working in your favor. Given enough time and raw materials, you could carpet the Sahara with solar collectors—though you probably wouldn't need to go that far.

Raw materials present a different challenge. We're not going to run out of atoms. The Earth contains enormous quantities of iron, aluminum, silicon, carbon, and most other elements we need. But extracting and processing those elements has environmental costs. Mining scars landscapes. Smelting releases pollution. Even recycling requires energy.

One solution looks upward.

Mining the Sky

Asteroid mining sounds like the premise of a science fiction film, and indeed it has been the premise of several. But the economics are surprisingly compelling once you work through the numbers.

A single metallic asteroid a few hundred meters across might contain more nickel, cobalt, and platinum-group metals than humanity has extracted from Earth in all of recorded history. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter contains millions of such objects. Even near-Earth asteroids—ones that pass close to our planet and would be easier to reach—number in the thousands.

The catch, of course, is getting there. Space launch costs have historically been prohibitive. But those costs are falling, dramatically, thanks to companies like SpaceX developing reusable rockets. And here's where self-replication becomes relevant again: you don't need to launch mining equipment for every asteroid. You launch one self-replicating mining system. It copies itself using materials from the first asteroid. Then those copies spread to more asteroids. The exponential growth that makes biological life so successful starts working for industrial production.

This vision—automated, self-replicating mining operations extracting resources from space—remains speculative. No one has demonstrated the full technology stack. But each component is advancing: rocket reusability, robotic automation, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence. The question isn't whether it's physically possible. The question is when and whether we'll make the investments to develop it.

What Would Marx Think?

Long before anyone was building three-dimensional printers, a German philosopher was thinking about what automation would mean for society. Karl Marx is usually remembered for his critique of capitalism and his advocacy of communist revolution. But buried in his notes—specifically, in a section of his rough drafts that came to be known as the Fragment on Machines—he explored something different: what happens when machines do most of the work?

Marx's analysis was characteristically dense, but the core insight was simple. Capitalism, he argued, depends on exploiting workers. Owners of capital—factories, machines, land—profit by paying workers less than the value those workers create. The difference between what workers produce and what they're paid is surplus value, and it's the engine of capitalist accumulation.

But what happens when machines replace workers? If a factory requires no human labor, where does the surplus value come from? Marx saw this as a fundamental contradiction within capitalism. The system drives toward ever-greater automation to increase profits, but automation undermines the very source of those profits.

In a post-capitalist society, Marx suggested, this contradiction resolves beautifully. Without the need for surplus extraction, automation becomes purely liberating. The necessary labor of society—the work required to keep everyone fed, housed, and healthy—shrinks to a minimum. Everyone gains abundant leisure time. People pursue science, art, and creative activities not because they must earn a living, but because these pursuits are intrinsically fulfilling.

The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.

This is Marx at his most utopian—and his most prescient. He was writing in the 1850s, extrapolating from steam engines and power looms to envision a world of abundant machine production. We're considerably closer to that world than he was, and the questions he raised remain unresolved.

The Anarchist Vision

Not everyone who imagines post-scarcity arrives there through Marx. Murray Bookchin, an American political theorist, took a different path.

Bookchin came out of the anarchist tradition, which is suspicious of all forms of hierarchy and centralized power—including the revolutionary state that Marxist-Leninists historically used to organize the transition to communism. In his 1971 collection of essays, appropriately titled Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin argued that advanced industrial societies already possessed the technological capacity for abundance. The problem wasn't production. It was distribution and political organization.

Where Marx saw the need for a transitional period of state ownership and central planning, Bookchin envisioned something more decentralized: libertarian municipalism. Communities would govern themselves through direct democratic assemblies. Confederations of communities would coordinate on larger issues. The state—with its bureaucracies, its police, its prisons—would wither away not through some future revolution but through people building alternative institutions in the present.

Bookchin was also an early ecological thinker, and he worried that industrial abundance achieved through environmental destruction wasn't abundance at all—it was borrowing from the future. Genuine post-scarcity, he argued, required harmony between human technology and natural systems. Solar power instead of fossil fuels. Closed-loop recycling instead of extraction and waste. Cities designed around human needs rather than automobile traffic.

His vision hasn't been realized. But elements of it have influenced everything from the organic food movement to experiments in local democracy to the design philosophy of sustainable technology.

The Problem of Surplus

There's a heterodox economic perspective that flips the usual framing entirely. Mainstream economics starts from scarcity: there isn't enough of everything to satisfy everyone's wants, so we need mechanisms—markets, prices, property rights—to allocate limited resources. But what if the real challenge isn't scarcity but abundance?

Surplus economics, as this approach is sometimes called, argues that modern capitalist economies already produce more than enough to meet everyone's basic needs. The problem isn't insufficient production. It's that our economic system is designed to manage scarcity even when scarcity doesn't exist. We create artificial scarcity through intellectual property, through planned obsolescence, through marketing that generates new wants as fast as production satisfies old ones.

From this perspective, modern capitalism doesn't allocate scarce resources efficiently. It absorbs and destroys surplus. Advertising convinces people to buy things they don't need. Fashion cycles make last year's perfectly functional clothes feel shamefully outdated. Products are designed to break so they'll need replacing. An enormous amount of economic activity exists not to create genuine value but to soak up the productive capacity that would otherwise leave us with more than we know what to do with.

If this analysis is correct, the transition to post-scarcity isn't primarily a technological problem. It's a social and political problem. The machines are ready. The institutions aren't.

Imagining Abundance

Science fiction writers have been exploring post-scarcity for decades, and their visions illuminate possibilities that dry economic analysis might miss.

Consider Star Trek. The Federation economy runs on replicators—devices that convert energy directly into matter, producing whatever you want on demand. Want tea? Earl Grey, hot? The replicator makes it. Want a new shirt? Same process. In this world, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard explains in one film, "the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force of our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

It's a lovely sentiment. But Star Trek largely waves away the interesting questions. If anyone can have anything, what motivates people? How are truly scarce goods—a captain's chair on a starship, a beachfront apartment in San Francisco—allocated? The shows occasionally gesture at these puzzles but rarely grapple with them seriously.

The Scottish author Iain Banks thought harder about these problems. His Culture novels depict a far-future civilization of trillions of beings spread across thousands of star systems, supported by artificial intelligences called Minds that manage virtually all production and governance. Money doesn't exist. Property—beyond personal possessions with sentimental value—doesn't exist. People live on massive orbital habitats or spacecraft, pursuing whatever interests them: art, scholarship, sports, hedonism, adventuring in less-developed civilizations.

Banks, who was politically sympathetic to the left though skeptical of organized radical politics, used the Culture to explore what genuine freedom might look like. Without economic coercion—work or starve—what would people choose? His answer was optimistic: most people would find meaningful pursuits. Some would struggle with the absence of external structure. A few would deliberately seek out danger and conflict, perhaps joining the Culture's covert intervention agency that meddles in less-developed civilizations. Banks' friend and fellow novelist Ken MacLeod observed that the Culture realizes something like Marx's vision of communism while remaining agnostic about how to get there from here.

Other writers have been more sardonic. Frederik Pohl's 1954 novella The Midas Plague inverts our usual assumptions about wealth. In Pohl's world of energy abundance and robotic overproduction, the poor must frantically consume to keep up with what the machines produce, while the rich enjoy the luxury of simplicity. It's a pointed satire of consumer culture, and one that feels uncomfortably relevant when you consider how much modern economic activity exists simply to create demand for things we don't really need.

Cory Doctorow's novel Walkaway imagines a nearer-term path to post-scarcity. Advanced three-dimensional printers, machines that can fabricate other machines, and automated systems for reclaiming waste materials allow people to simply walk away from mainstream society. They build communities outside the money economy, producing what they need without bosses or wages or rents. The title is both literal—people physically leave cities for abandoned countryside—and metaphorical. They walk away from the assumptions that seemed so inevitable: that scarcity is natural, that hierarchy is necessary, that someone must be in charge.

When?

Predictions about when post-scarcity might arrive range from the comfortably distant to the disconcertingly soon.

A World Future Society report analyzed how capitalism historically responds to scarcity. When resources become scarce, prices rise. Rising prices incentivize technological innovation to use resources more efficiently. Those innovations eventually drive costs down—sometimes dramatically. The report projected that following a period of increasing resource scarcity, the world would enter a post-scarcity age sometime between 2050 and 2075.

That timeline assumes gradual technological progress and successful adaptation to resource constraints. It might be too pessimistic if artificial intelligence advances faster than expected, enabling automation that current projections don't anticipate. It might be too optimistic if climate change, political instability, or resource conflicts derail technological development.

The honest answer is that no one knows. Post-scarcity depends on technologies that don't fully exist yet, deployed at scales we haven't achieved, organized through institutions we haven't invented. Any of those dependencies could prove more difficult than optimists hope—or easier than pessimists fear.

The Questions That Remain

Even if we solve the technological challenges, the social questions loom large.

What happens to meaning when work becomes optional? For many people, jobs provide not just income but identity, structure, purpose, and community. Would post-scarcity liberate people to pursue their passions, or leave them adrift in a sea of choice?

How do you handle positional goods—things valued precisely because others can't have them? No amount of abundance makes everyone the world's greatest violinist or the owner of an original Rembrandt. Status hierarchies might persist even when material hierarchy disappears.

What motivates people without economic necessity? Optimists point to artists, scientists, and volunteers who work without financial incentive. Pessimists point to studies of lottery winners and trust-fund heirs, not all of whom flourish without the need to earn a living.

How do you get there from here? The transitions could be wrenching. Automation that doesn't quite achieve post-scarcity might create mass unemployment without providing the abundance to support those displaced. The political conflicts over distribution during that transition could be severe.

And perhaps most fundamentally: what do we want? Human desires are famously elastic. Give people enough food and they want better food. Give them shelter and they want nicer shelter. Give them everything and they might still want more—or at least different. Post-scarcity might not be a destination but a moving target, always receding as our appetites expand to match our capabilities.

These aren't questions with easy answers. They're the questions we'll spend the coming decades—or centuries—working through. The machines may be ready before we are.