Doomsday is easy to imagine, maybe because our brains are hardwired this way. This is what’s happening to us watching the AI scene develop. ‘AI is going to take all our jobs’, this is the rhetoric, from Dario and Altman to boardrooms and factory floors, this is voiced both as fear and as inevitability. In the world of economics, they call it the lump of labour fallacy.

Among us there are those who refuse to play zero-sum games. They create new knowledge, which creates net new wealth, which creates abundance. This has been the quiet engine of civilization. It is the mechanism that keeps making the pie bigger, it gives humans what they want, and then makes sure they WANT MORE!

History’s ledger is longer than its fears. When the tractor arrived, it didn’t just displace the farmhand, it freed him. When the sewing machine was invented, it didn’t kill the clothier, it gave birth to an entire textile civilization. The internet didn’t shrink commerce, it unlocked a whole new internet economy. In each case, the false flags of displacement were technically right, yet historically wrong.

The plummeting cost of compute and intelligence will not result in having less work but rather more. This will lead to a new form of knowledge economy. Problems that once demanded decades and institutions will yield to months and small teams. Abundance that required geography, capital, and credentialing will become permissionless.

We’ll have more for less.