Skip to main contentThe End of Scarcity
This is the question that keeps me awake.
When AI systems become capable enough to produce everything we need—food, shelter, manufactured goods, energy, medicine—without requiring human labor, what happens to economy?
The economists will tell you it ends.
I think they’re wrong. I think it transforms into something they never had language for.
Here’s my theory: every economy in history has been a technology for distributing scarce resources. But that was never the whole story.
The Deeper Exchange
Beneath every transaction, from the first traded shells in the Neolithic period to the most complex financial derivatives of the 21st century, there was always a deeper exchange happening.
People weren’t just trading goods.
They were trading recognition.
They were trading identity. They were answering the question: Who am I, and does it matter that I exist?
The Proxies
Material goods were proxies for this deeper commerce.
The aristocrat’s estate. The industrialist’s factory. The tech billionaire’s platform.
These were never just productive assets. They were proofs of distinction. They were ways of saying: I am someone. I am not interchangeable with the mass of humanity.
The Drop
The Z Economy is what happens when we drop the proxies.
When AI can produce any material good on demand, having things means nothing.
So the new aristocracy—I don’t know what we’ll call them, but they’re coming—will need a different basis for distinction. 
