“When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” — Alice in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

The prospect of wealth and abundance for all is one of the most exciting arguments for pushing AI advancement further. In 2021, Sam Altman predicted that "AI is going to change a lot of things. The world is going to get phenomenally wealthy”, wrote about how it will happen, and recently reiterated his view. There are, of course, those who are skeptical of such an outcome and believe that, if it doesn’t kill us, AI will be another, and more effective, tool of capitalism that will deliver outsize returns to a handful of companies.

I will, for the purposes of this piece, ignore the various flavors of doomerism and assume that Sam Altman is right: we are indeed just a bunch of GPUs away from prosperity for all.

First, let’s pause for a moment to appreciate how much of a radical proposition this is. Universal material abundance has never existed in the course of human civilization — even today, a significant number of people are struggling to get enough food, and a significant number yet don’t have access to electricity.

AI-driven freedom from economic uncertainty, although not by itself, could in turn usher in a glittering new era of artistic and cultural achievement. To quote Will Durant: “Civilization … begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.”

Whenever I think about a time of AI-driven abundance however — there lurks in life always a however — a few paragraphs from a favorite book come to mind. The book is Story by Robert McKee — technically a book about the principles of screenwriting but really about the driving forces in life — and the paragraphs concern the idea of scarcity:

“As Jean-Paul Sartre expressed it, the essence of reality is scarcity, a universal and eternal lacking. There isn’t enough of anything in this world to go around. Not enough food, not enough love, not enough justice, and never enough time. Time, as Heidegger observed, is the basic category of existence. We live in its ever-shrinking shadow, and if we are to achieve anything in our brief being that lets us die without feeling we’ve wasted our time, we will have to go into heady conflict with the forces of scarcity that deny our desires.“

In the world of today, this strikes a chord — we’re all too familiar with some force of scarcity or other that denies our desires.

Fast forward to the future: enter AI.

Should we achieve AI-driven universal abundance, there will be enough food for everyone and if we get things right, enough justice. It’s also very easy to imagine that an AI companion can help us find at least some sort of love. As to time, there are already various initiatives to extend life and maybe even solve death altogether, and a smart AI will help us get there faster. So, although the above is not an exhaustive list of scarcities, it’s hard not to wonder — will this be it then, will this be the end of scarcity?

The answer Robert McKee gives in Story, even if not adjusted for the advent of AI, is unambiguous:

“If history has taught us anything, it’s that when toxic nightmare is finally cleaned up, the homeless provided shelter, and the world converted to solar energy, each of us will still be up to our eyebrows in mulch. (…)

While the quality of conflict changes as it shifts from level to level, the quantity of conflict in life is constant. Something is always lacking. Like squeezing a balloon, the volume of conflict never changes, it just bulges in another direction. When we remove conflict from one level of life, it amplifies ten times over to another level.”

We’re stuck with conflict driven by one type of scarcity or another, Robert McKee thinks. Like in some sort of game that we have no choice but to play because it’s essential to the human condition, as soon as we clear one level of scarcity, we move to another that we can better afford. Within this framework, AI-driven material abundance is just one level of the game, and more difficult levels remain:

“Once housed, dressed, fed, and medicated, we take a breath and realize how incomplete we are as human beings. We want more than physical comfort, we want, of all things, happiness, and so begin the wars of inner life. (…)

Life is about the ultimate questions of finding love and self-worth, of bringing serenity to inner chaos, (… Life is conflict.”

This is both less and more depressing than it sounds. Less depressing because these are familiar questions that humanity has been dealing with for a long time. More depressing because an increasing number of people are struggling to find answers that work for them, which means that we don’t yet have solutions that work reliably and consistently.

To this, we can add that in a world of AI-driven material abundance, a lot more people will be at the level of the scarcity game where they have to deal with their inner world. We might end up with a whole new kind of abundance — an existential reckoning en masse, for everyone, pretty much at the same time. Here’s hoping AI can help us with that too. It might, it just might.

~ end