The Long Tomorrow: The Mirage of Abundance--AI Isn’t Magic
A gleaming futuristic city in the clouds, partly pixelated or glitching—conveying promise and breakdown at once.
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We’re being sold a story again.
A story about how artificial intelligence is about to shower us with abundance—endless productivity, wealth without work, education without effort, goods without limits. The underlying claim is simple: human labor and scarcity are on the verge of obsolescence. All thanks to large language models, synthetic data, and machines that are beginning to “think.”
There’s a part of me that wants to believe it. Who doesn’t? If you’ve spent any time thinking about the long arc of technology, there’s an emotional pull to the notion that maybe, just maybe, this time it really is different. That maybe we're on the cusp of something that breaks the old economic rules.
But here’s the thing: these claims are rarely grounded in the actual logistics of how abundance works—or fails to. And they almost never acknowledge the physical, political, and economic bottlenecks that govern real-world outcomes.
“Abundance” is not a vibe. It’s not a TED Talk. It’s a material condition built on infrastructure, resource flows, institutional trust, human competence, and incentives that align over time. And those systems don’t bend just because a startup has a faster chatbot or an AI that can generate a halfway-convincing screenplay.
We’re told that AI will solve housing shortages, reinvent healthcare, rewire education, eliminate hunger, and cure loneliness. But I’ve seen little explanation for how exactly this will happen—and what it would require. The power grids, zoning codes, tax policies, food supply chains, legal frameworks, and deeply flawed human institutions that hold it all together are not about to disappear in a puff of GPT-generated optimism.
This isn’t Luddism. I’m not dismissing the potential of AI to augment real human capacity or even transform certain domains. But the leap from “useful tool” to “world-saving abundance engine” is massive—and suspiciously hand-waved by many of its most vocal prophets.
In the coming week, I plan to dive into some of the more grounded, skeptical, and technically informed perspectives on this issue. The ones asking hard questions about energy constraints, labor displacement, wealth concentration, and the friction between software dreams and material reality. I’ll be reading voices from the worlds of economics, infrastructure, tech policy, and logistics—people who aren’t afraid to push back against what increasingly feels like a hallucinated vision of the future.
And once I’ve done that, I’ll be back with a follow-up piece: a sober look at whether this “AI-powered abundance” actually holds up—or whether it’s just another fantasy for a tired, over-leveraged civilization that’s desperate to believe in shortcuts again.
Until then, I’d love to hear from readers. What do you think about this new wave of techno-optimism? Is there real potential here, or is this just the latest chapter in the long history of magical thinking?
Drop a comment, share your perspective, or send me the best (or worst) example you’ve seen of abundance futurism gone off the rails.
We’ve got some work to do.
If the future really is being rewritten by code, we owe it to ourselves to ask: who’s holding the pen?
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