The Abundance Chorus
For a century, a recognizable prediction has recurred: costs collapse, work becomes optional, scarcity ends. The cast changes — economist, inventor, physician of moonshots, CEO — but the score barely does.
The oldest voice in the chorus is an economist with no exponential curves to hand. John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930), predicted that “the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to-day,” and imagined that “three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while” — the problem being what to do with leisure. Verbatim The productivity half of the prediction held up roughly on schedule. The fifteen-hour week did not arrive, and the named counterpoint states why it matters: Jason Hickel and others argue that the gains were appropriated by capital rather than converted into leisure. Rendered Keep that asymmetry in mind; it returns in Act VII.
VERBATIM — wording confirmed in the primary source. RENDERED — a thesis as reviewers or transcripts render it, not exact wording. Every chip links to the register.
The modern chorus sings in dates. Ray Kurzweil — The Singularity Is Near (2005), The Singularity Is Nearer (2024) — maintains two of them: human-level AI by 2029, the Singularity around 2045. Verbatim His engine is the Law of Accelerating Returns, and his favorite kind of evidence is a ratio: “computing power purchasable per dollar increased 11,200 times between 2005 and 2024.” Verbatim On economics he has long argued that a new economics of abundance is coming, with nanotechnology and AI driving the cost of goods toward zero. His reviewers’ recurring complaint doubles as this act’s counterpoint: enormous optimism, thin engagement with distribution and with who captures the gains.
Peter Diamandis — who advises and invests in the exponential-technology space he describes — gave the position its book-length statement with Steven Kotler in Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (2012): four forces — exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the technophilanthropist, the rising billion — converging to make scarce goods abundant. The illustration is famous: “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.” Verbatim His “6 Ds of Exponentials” supply the chorus’s technical vocabulary — digitization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, democratization — of which the fourth is the one Marx would have circled. Rendered
Then the laboratory owners join. Sam Altman, “Moore’s Law for Everything” (March 16, 2021), argues AI will shift power “from labor to capital” and proposes an American Equity Fund by which, he estimates, “a decade from now each of the 250 million adults in America would get about $13,500 every year.” Verbatim
“[E]verything — housing, education, food, clothing, etc. — [becomes] half as expensive every two years.”
Sam Altman · Moore's Law for Everything · March 2021 · Verbatim
Note that the counterpoint to Altman’s essay is inside Altman’s essay: the shift of power “from labor to capital” is his premise, not his critics’. Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace” (October 15, 2024) compresses “a century of progress into years” across biology, health, economics and governance, arguing “most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be.” Verbatim Demis Hassabis speaks of AI-enabled radical abundance. Rendered The popular shorthand for the destination — a moneyless post-scarcity society — is Star Trek.
Two members of the chorus even perform as a duet. On Diamandis’s Moonshots podcast (2026), as Fortune reports, Elon Musk advised listeners not to worry about squirreling money away for retirement — in ten or twenty years, it won’t matter. Rendered The interview in which he sets a date for that claim gets its own act, next.
What none of the singers mention: dramatically falling costs, demonetization, the end of scarcity, work becoming optional — as Act I documented, this is the material precondition of Marx’s higher-phase communism, stated in the Gotha Programme in 1875. The chorus reaches the endpoint through exponential capitalist technology rather than revolution. Nobody cites him.
Every date and dollar figure in this act is a forecast, stated in future or conditional tense, and several of the speakers (Altman, Amodei, Musk, Diamandis) have direct financial stakes in AI. Economists cited by Fortune doubt automation will be as fast, cheap, or politically financeable as claimed. See the register for dating and sources.