3The Prophets

Portraits, left to right: Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei — and, as the chorus's unlikely ancestor, John Maynard Keynes.

Every prediction on this page is a forecast, made by people with money, careers, or both riding on the outcome. Treat the dates as claims. What matters for this essay is the shape of the claims — because the shape is Marx's.

Keynes, the respectable ancestor

The chorus has a pedigree that predates Silicon Valley. In "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930), John Maynard Keynes predicted that the standard of life in progressive countries would be "between four and eight times as high" a century on, mused that "three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while," and worried — seriously — that humanity's permanent problem would be what to do with its leisure. The productivity forecast landed roughly on target. The fifteen-hour week did not; critics like Jason Hickel argue the gains were appropriated by capital instead. File that discrepancy; part six is about it.

Kurzweil sets the clock

Ray Kurzweil has spent two decades defending two dates: human-level AI by 2029, and the Singularity — the point where humans merge with their machines — around 2045. His engine is the Law of Accelerating Returns: information technologies improve exponentially because each advance eases the next. In The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) he offers datapoints like computing power per dollar increasing 11,200-fold between 2005 and 2024, and has long argued the result is a "new economics of abundance," with nanotechnology and AI driving the cost of goods toward zero. Reviewers note what he skips: distribution, safety, and who captures the gains. Source

Diamandis names the mechanism

Peter Diamandis, with Steven Kotler, gave the movement its handbook: Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012). Four forces — exponential technologies, DIY innovators, technophilanthropists, the "rising billion" — converge to make scarce goods abundant. His "6 Ds" framework tracks how technologies end in demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization: they get so cheap they stop being priced at all.

In Africa today a Masai warrior on a cellphone has better mobile communications than the President did 25 years ago… Just 20 years ago these same goods and services would have cost over $1 million.

Diamandis & Kotler, Abundance, 2012 · source

Read that against the Gotha Programme's "springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" and the rhyme is hard to miss. Demonetization is what Marx's higher phase looks like on a spreadsheet.

The AI executives join in

Sam Altman's essay "Moore's Law for Everything" (March 2021) concedes the classic Marxist premise in its opening move: AI will shift power "from labor to capital." His remedy is to tax capital and land into an American Equity Fund — by his own arithmetic, about $13,500 a year for every American adult a decade on — while "everything — housing, education, food, clothing, etc." becomes "half as expensive every two years." A capitalist proposing a citizen's dividend, funded by expropriating a slice of capital, to survive the automation of labour: Marx would have asked for co-author credit.

Dario Amodei's "Machines of Loving Grace" (October 2024) sketches "powerful AI" compressing a century of progress into a few years across biology, health, economics, and governance — "most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be." Demis Hassabis speaks of "radical abundance." The popular shorthand for the destination is Star Trek: a society that has quietly stopped using money. Aaron Bastani, from the left, calls the same destination Fully Automated Luxury Communism. The engineers and the communists are, at minimum, describing the same building.

A chorus is one thing; a soloist with shareholders is another. The purest performance of the whole argument happened in a single interview, in July 2026, at a car factory in Texas.