post scarcity

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pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Cardinal De Retz Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Six Characters in Search of a Future I. Chaos under Heaven 1.The Great Disorder 2.The Three Disruptions 3.What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism? II. New Travellers 4.Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labour 5.Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy 6.Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources 7.Editing Destiny: Age and Post-Scarcity in Health 8.Food without Animals: Post-Scarcity in Sustenance III. Paradise Found 9.Popular Support: Luxury Populism 10.Fundamental Principles: The Break with Neoliberalism 11.Reforging the Capitalist State 12.FALC: A New Beginning Bibliography Index Acknowledgements Special thanks are due to Leo Hollis, my editor at Verso.

While the Second Disruption was marked by a relative freedom from scarcity in motive power – coal and oil rather than muscle and wind moving wheels, pulleys, ships, people and goods – the defining feature of the Third Disruption is ever-greater abundance in information. For some this signals the completion of the Industrial Revolution, marking an era in which machines are increasingly able to perform cognitive as well as physical tasks. This new situation of post-scarcity underpins what will be referred to as ‘extreme supply’, something not only limited to information, but – as a consequence of digitisation – labour too. Here, continuous improvements in processor power, in combination with a range of other technologies, means machines will be capable of replicating ever more of what was, until now, uniquely human work.

For Marx, communism was a condition of abundance, a society where labour and leisure dissolved into each other, and where our natures were developed in a manner consistent with play. This was a world where scarcity – or as Keynes refers to it, ‘the economic problem’ – would finally be vanquished. In 1930 Keynes speculated about something remarkably similar and, amazingly, even had the confidence to put a date on it – foreseeing the arrival of post-scarcity as soon as 2030. Other than Keynes’s stated disdain for Marx’s class-based politics in ‘preferring the mud to the fish’, what was it precisely that separated the two? The answer is the relationship between progress and politics. Unlike Marx, Keynes viewed capitalism as inevitably shifting to greater abundance, this resulting from its ability to become ever more productive over time while reducing the demand for labour.


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Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism by Peter Marshall

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, David Graeber, different worldview, do-ocracy, feminist movement, garden city movement, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Howard Zinn, intentional community, invisible hand, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land tenure, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, open borders, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, the market place, union organizing, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery

., p. 188n; Theodore Roszak, quoted on the back cover of Murray Bookchin’s Remaking Society (Montréal & New York: Black Rose Books, 1989) 2 Bookchin, Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 280 3 Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 68–9 4 Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 4 5 Ibid., pp. 94, 127 6 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 21 7 Bookchin, ‘Thinking Ecologically: A Dialectical Approach’, Our Generation, 18, 2 (March 1987), 11–12 8 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 64; Ecology of Freedom, op cit., p. 237 9 Ibid., p. 11 10 Ibid., pp. 353–4 11 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 109 12 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 355 13 See ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., pp. 6–7; Bookchin, ‘Freedom and Necessity in Nature’, Alternatives, 12, 4 (1986); The Modern Crisis, 2nd edn.

., p. 102. See also Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 130–3 23 Ibid., p. 251 24 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 40 25 Ibid., p. 70 26 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 352; cf. Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 60 27 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 276, 278, 272. See also The Modern Crisis, op. cit., p. 25 28 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 78 29 See ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., pp. 3–4; ‘The Crisis in the Ecology Movement’, Green Perspectives, 6 (May 1988), pp. 1–5 30 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 19 31 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 26, 93, 70 32 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 276, 279 33 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., p. 20; see also ‘The Crisis in the Ecology Movement’, op. cit., pp. 5–6 34 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 218 35 ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., p. 10 36 See Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 71n; Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 59 37 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., pp. 35–6; Remaking Society, op. cit., p. 201 38 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 320 39 See ibid., p. 218 40 Ibid., p. 312 41 Ibid., p. 344 42 Ibid., p. 266 43 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 81 44 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 29, 193 45 Ibid., pp. 201, 202.

., p. 218 35 ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., p. 10 36 See Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 71n; Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 59 37 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., pp. 35–6; Remaking Society, op. cit., p. 201 38 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 320 39 See ibid., p. 218 40 Ibid., p. 312 41 Ibid., p. 344 42 Ibid., p. 266 43 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 81 44 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 29, 193 45 Ibid., pp. 201, 202. See also Remaking Society, op. cit., p. 136 46 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 188. See also Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 208, and The Modern Crisis, op. cit., p. 168 47 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., p. 222 48 Ibid., pp. 126, 118 49 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 167 50 Ibid., pp. 19–20, 221 51 Ibid., p. 21 52 Toward an Ecological Society, op. cit., pp. 259, 245 53 Ibid., pp. 264, 274 54 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., pp. 119, 115 55 Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), p. 75, quoted in ‘Social Ecology’, op. cit., p. 12; The Modern Crisis, op. cit., p. 119 56 Ecology of Freedom, op. cit., p. 315 57 Ibid., p. 342 58 ‘Thinking Ecologically’, op. cit., p. 36; Remaking Society, op. cit., p. 203 59 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, op. cit., p. 116 60 Ibid., p. 119 61 Ibid., p. 130 62 See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964).


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The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

Not in the late 1800s, as the Industrial Revolution gave us a middle class and the beginnings of mass consumerism, not in the early 1900s with Henry Ford’s Model T, not in the 1950s with dishwashers, fridges, and A/C for all, and not in the twenty-first century’s mass luxury business. In some respects, our constant quest for the meaning of life (which becomes more possible in a post-scarcity society where we have time to ponder and pursue more existential questions because we know we have food for dinner) has confused matters even more. For the aspirational class, post-scarcity society has allowed them to invest in practices that at first seem constructive: motherhood, exercise, acquisition of cultural capital. Ostensibly, these activities should make people happier, but they too have become status markers and signs of achievement, and in that process have created more pressure and less happiness, not so dissimilar from material signifiers of social position.

Starbucks may stamp “fair trade” on its pounds of coffee, but Intelligentsia buyers actually become friends with their coffee farmers and fly them to Los Angeles to meet the rest of the staff (and some of their customers). THE RISE OF CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION This latter point is the key to understanding not only Intelligentsia but also the rise of a social and economic consciousness and awareness emerging across the Western world and its cultural, post-scarcity goods. The rise in specialty coffee is really the story of conspicuous production and it can be seen at grocery stores, clothing boutiques, farmers’ markets, and restaurants across the world. Conspicuous production goods are a key type of aspirational class consumption. For the aspirational class, we are what we eat, drink, and consume more generally, and this is why for some goods the opaque process of production has been replaced by transparency for every step.

Finally, after centuries of diametrical opposition, these two groups have banded together as the aspirational class, and they want and value the same things.3 The emergence of conspicuous production in the twenty-first century revolves around three key forces: the backlash against globalization, the rise of information and the premium on transparent information, and the luxury to care about these things as a result of a post-scarcity, postmodern society and its values. We see this transformation in where we buy groceries, the restaurants we frequent, what we wear, and even our toothpaste. Capitalism, historically dividing the capitalist from the proletariat, has been turned on its head. MORE THAN JUST ARUGULA: FOOD AS CONSPICUOUS PRODUCTION We may thank Starbucks for introducing the idea of the $5 cup of fair trade Kenyan coffee, but Whole Foods is the mainstream, mass-produced leitmotif of the conspicuous production movement.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

The left was largely without a meaningful and desirable economic programme, having focused primarily on the critique of capitalism rather than the elaboration of alternatives. This is a crisis of utopian imagination, but also of cognitive limits. A series of emerging contemporary phenomena must be thought through carefully: for instance, the causes and effects of secular stagnation; the transformations invoked by the shift to an informational, post-scarcity economy; the changes wrought by the introduction of full automation and a universal basic income; the possible approaches to collectivising automated manufacturing and services; the progressive potentials of alternative approaches to quantitative easing; the most effective ways to decarbonise the means of production; the implications of dark pools for financial instability – and so on.

It would mean building upon the post-nation-state territory of ‘the stack’ – that global infrastructure that enables our digital world today.26 A new type of production is already visible at the leading edges of contemporary technology. Additive manufacturing and the automation of work portend the possibility of production based on flexibility, decentralisation and post-scarcity for some goods. The rapid automation of logistics presents the utopian possibility of a globally interconnected system in which parts and goods can be shipped rapidly and efficiently without human labour. Cryptocurrencies and their block-chain technology could bring forth a new money of the commons, divorced from capitalist forms.27 The democratic guidance of the economy is also accelerated by emerging technologies.

Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory (London: Pluto, 2007), p. 20. 8.While we remain unconvinced of the large-scale prospects for direct democracy in its face-to-face and/or consensus-driven forms, this certainly does not preclude thinking about how participative democracy might be conceived along more complex, technologically mediated lines. 9.Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004), p. xxviii. 10.Ibid., p. 58. 11.Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), p. 11. 12.The origin of the form of consensus decision-making used in contemporary left activism is generally thought to have been with the Quaker religious movement around 300 years ago.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

He inspired me to blog that we could now create new competitors. “Small is the new big,” I wrote. At the same moment, Godin, similarly inspired, wrote the same line on his blog (and he beat me to using it as the title of a book). “Get small,” Godin blogged. “Think big.” The post-scarcity economy We are entering a post-scarcity economy in which Google is teaching us to manage abundance, challenging the bedrock rule of economics, first written in 1767: the law of supply and demand. Many industries built their value on scarcity. Airlines, Broadway theaters, and universities had only so many seats, which meant they could charge what they wanted for them.

Google Rules New Relationship • Give the people control and we will use it • Dell hell • Your worst customer is your best friend • Your best customer is your partner New Architecture • The link changes everything • Do what you do best and link to the rest • Join a network • Be a platform • Think distributed New Publicness • If you’re not searchable, you won’t be found • Everybody needs Googlejuice • Life is public, so is business • Your customers are your ad agency New Society • Elegant organization New Economy • Small is the new big • The post-scarcity economy • Join the open-source, gift economy • The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches • Google commodifies everything • Welcome to the Google economy New Business Reality • Atoms are a drag • Middlemen are doomed • Free is a business model • Decide what business you’re in New Attitude • There is an inverse relationship between control and trust • Trust the people • Listen New Ethic • Make mistakes well • Life is a beta • Be honest • Be transparent • Collaborate • Don’t be evil New Speed • Answers are instantaneous • Life is live • Mobs form in a flash New Imperatives • Beware the cash cow in the coal mine • Encourage, enable, and protect innovation • Simplify, simplify • Get out of the way If Google Ruled the World Media • The Google Times: Newspapers, post-paper • Googlewood: Entertainment, opened up • GoogleCollins: Killing the book to save it Advertising • And now, a word from Google’s sponsors Retail • Google Eats: A business built on openness • Google Shops: A company built on people Utilities • Google Power & Light: What Google would do • GT&T: What Google should do Manufacturing • The Googlemobile: From secrecy to sharing • Google Cola: We’re more than consumers Service • Google Air: A social marketplace of customers • Google Real Estate: Information is power Money • Google Capital: Money makes networks • The First Bank of Google: Markets minus middlemen Public Welfare • St.

We also have new ethics and attitudes that spring from this new organization and change society in ways we cannot yet see, with openness, generosity, collaboration, efficiency. We are using the internet’s connective tissue to leap over borders—whether they surround countries or companies or demographics. We are reorganizing society. This is Google’s—and Facebook’s and craigslist’s—new world order. New Economy Small is the new big The post-scarcity economy Join the open-source, gift economy The mass market is dead—long live the mass of niches Google commodifies everything Welcome to the Google economy Small is the new big Mind you, big is still big. Wal-Mart is the largest company on earth. Bigbox stores such as Home Depot continue to drive mom-and-pop hardware shops out of business.


AI 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee, Chen Qiufan

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, active measures, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital map, digital rights, digital twin, Elon Musk, fake news, fault tolerance, future of work, Future Shock, game design, general purpose technology, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, job automation, language acquisition, low earth orbit, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, mirror neurons, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, OpenAI, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, smart transportation, Snapchat, social distancing, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, trolley problem, Turing test, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

PLENITUDE: A TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED INEVITABILITY “Post-scarcity” describes a world where nothing is scarce, and everything is free. In “Dreaming of Plenitude,” we encounter a future world in which countries are moving toward post-scarcity, although at different paces. In the last story, Australia, a highly developed country, is wealthy enough to give everyone basic necessities and comfortable living (through the BLC card). Poorer countries, we can infer from the story, would reach a state of plenitude sometime later. Because the timetable will vary for different countries, I prefer the term “plenitude” rather than “post-scarcity.” Also, strict post-scarcity will never be achieved.

For the first time in human history, developed countries could eradicate poverty and hunger. If this happens, would money be phased out? If so, what would take money’s place to motivate people to live purpose-filled lives? Would any economic theory apply anymore? This story, set in Australia, explores a futuristic society that has introduced two currencies for a post-scarcity world: a card that provides for citizens’ basic needs, and a new virtual currency for building reputation and respect through service to the community. In my commentary I will discuss how plenitude nullifies economic theories, and explore what might be next after plenitude: singularity. STANDING IN THE foyer, Keira looked her new surroundings up and down.

As the cost of energy, materials, and production fall at historic speed, we can look forward to plenitude. “Plenitude” is the word I have chosen to denote a new phase of human life, in which all people are entitled to a comfortable life, as goods prices approach free, and work becomes optional. Others have called it “abundance” or “post-scarcity.” But in “Dreaming of Plenitude,” a society that at first seems like it might possess all the ingredients of a utopian paradise, in which everyone’s basic needs are met (thus leaving people free to pursue higher purposes with their lives), is revealed to bring about as many problems as it solves.


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Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Just as Captain Picard’s often-repeated command of “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot” instantly conjures up the proper drink, a molecular fabricator might someday create nearly anything we desire. Among some techno-optimists, the prospect of molecular manufacturing is associated strongly with the concept of an eventual “post-scarcity” economy in which nearly all material goods are abundant and virtually free. Services are likewise assumed to be provided by advanced AI. In this technological utopia, resource and environmental constraints would be eliminated by universal, molecular recycling and abundant clean energy. The market economy might cease to exist, and (as on Star Trek) there would be no need for money.

The Beijing Genomics Institute has collected thousands of DNA samples from people known to have very high IQs and is working on isolating the genes associated with intelligence. The Chinese might be able to use this information to screen embryos for high intelligence and drive their population to become smarter over time. * You can watch Michio Kaku discuss the post-scarcity economy in the video “Can Nanotechnology Create Utopia?,” available on YouTube. Chapter 10 TOWARD A NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM In an interview with CBS News, the president of the United States was asked if the nation’s dire unemployment problem was likely to improve soon. “There’s no magic solution,” he replied.

Eric, 241–242, 243, 244–245, 246, 247 driverless cars, See autonomous cars drone-based delivery, 190n drug prices, 170–171 Drum, Kevin, 188 Dunning, David, 18–19 dystopian future, automation and predictions of, 31–32, 219–220 Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), 271, 277 eBay, 16, 76 economic argument for guaranteed income, 264–267 economic growth, 65, 212–215 economic mobility, decrease in, 46–47 economic policy, 57–58, 217–218 Economic Policy Institute, 127, 158 economic recoveries, jobs created during, 49–50 economics, mathematical models and, x, 205–206 economic trends bear market for labor/bull market for corporations, 38–41 declining incomes and underemployment for college graduates, 48–49 effect of information technology on, 58–61 income inequality, 46–48 job creation, jobless recoveries, and long-term unemployment, 43–46 labor force participation, 41–43 polarization and part-time jobs, 49–51 stagnant wages, 34–38 economists on impact of automation, 60 on income inequality, 202–206 economy complexity of, 211–212 defined, 266n effect of climate change on, 282–283 post-scarcity, 247 e-Discovery software, 124 Edison, Thomas, 234 education basic income guarantee and, 263 collaboration with machines and, 121–128 diminishing returns to, 250–253 effect on income, 48–49 nature of unemployment problem and, 249–250 See also higher education educational robots, 7 edX, 132, 133, 137 Egypt, 46 EITC.


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Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Quoted in Gallup, “Gallup Reveals the Formula for Innovation,” Gallup Management Journal, May 10, 2007, http://gmj.gallup.com/content/27514/Gallup-Reveals-the-Formula-for-%20Innovation.aspx. 5. Dov Frohman and Robert Howard, Leadership the Hard Way: Why Leadership Can’t be Taught—and How You Can Learn It Anyway (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), p. 7. 6. Quoted in Ronald Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet: Economist Paul Romer on Growth, Technological Change, and an Unlimited Human Future,” Reason Online, December 2001, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28243.html. 7. Ronald Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet”; and Paul Romer, “Economic Growth,” both in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, edited by David R. Henderson (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2007), http://www.stanford.edu/~promer/EconomicGrowth.pdf.

“Israel’s Future: Brainpower, High Tech, and Peace,” Harvard Business Review, November 1991. Avnimelech, Gil, and Morris Teubal. “Venture Capital Policy in Israel: A Comparative Analysis and Lessons for Other Countries.” Research paper. Hebrew University School of Business Administration and School of Economics, October 2002. Bailey, Ronald. “Post-Scarcity Prophet: Economist Paul Romer on Growth, Technological Change, and an Unlimited Human Future.” Reason Online, December 2001. http://www.reason.com/news/show/28243.html. Ball, Julie. “Israel’s Booming Hi-Tech Industry.” BBC News, October 6, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7654780.stm.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We’ve lived with scarcity for so long, have so long enshrined it at the very heart of our assumptions about value, choice and necessity, that it’s difficult to imagine the contours of a life unmarked by it. It doesn’t take any particular clairvoyance, though, to see that the psychology of everyday life, the structure of the economy, and the form of our cities all stand to be utterly transformed in a post-scarcity world. The ability for any individual to make more or less whatever they want, whenever they wanted it, would sunder the long-established circuit between advertising’s provocation of desire and the market’s sovereign capacity to fulfill it. While this would by no means necessarily mean an end to consumerism and its familiar arsenal of tools aimed at the manipulation of desire, it would tend to undercut their sustaining logic.

At present, the great majority of digital fabricators on Earth remain sequestered in limited-access workshops like these, or still harder to get at facilities belonging to universities and private research institutions. Despite their operators’ best intentions, many of these spaces still intimidate the people who would most benefit from using them, their very language, branding and framing confronting more than a few would-be users with an insuperable psychic challenge ramp. Any vision of post-scarcity utopia that is predicated on distributed, democratized production would require such sites to be not merely free and formally open but actively welcoming, and that has yet to be achieved just about anywhere. What about the ability to work with a usefully wide variety of materials? Though 3D printing techniques have been successfully extended to concrete, food-grade edible materials and even living tissue,11 at the moment a boxfresh Replicator 2 can only print with PLA and ABS plastic.

As one reads, it’s impossible to avoid thinking of our own world, of the 300,000 discrete objects said to be contained in the average North American home. This is our own embarrassment of riches: even objectively poor people in the global North live with an absolute standard of daily material comfort that would have been aspirational for most of history’s wealthy. In any raw material sense, we already live in a post-scarcity world, even before any particularly elaborate digital fabrication capacity is brought on line. And yet we still seem to suffer from a pervasive sense of want and lack. And this points out a profound confusion that’s seemingly shared by everyone from Bowyer to Srnicek, Williams and the stalwarts of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.


pages: 405 words: 103,723

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism by Ruth Kinna

Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, complexity theory, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Herbert Marcuse, intentional community, John Gilmore, Kickstarter, late capitalism, means of production, meritocracy, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, New Journalism, Occupy movement, post scarcity, public intellectual, rewilding, Steven Pinker, Ted Kaczynski, union organizing, wage slave

In the latter part of the decade he developed the concept of post-scarcity, finding a foothold in the countercultural movements that blossomed in the 60s. In 1971 he co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, and started teaching at the liberal arts Ramapo College of New Jersey, becoming a full professor in 1977. In the 1960s and 70s Bookchin lectured across the US and Canada and was active in number of anti-nuclear, civil rights and anti-Vietnam War campaigns. He wrote nearly thirty books, including the collection Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), Urbanization without Cities (1992) and Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (1995).6 TOM BROWN (1900–1974) Brown was an anarchist syndicalist born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in the north-east of England.

Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 71 Rebecca Solnit, ‘Worlds Collide in a Luxury Suite: Some Thoughts on the IMF, Global Injustice, and a Stranger on a Train’, Huffington Post, 22 May 2011, updated 22 July 2011, online at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rebecca-solnit/worlds-collide-in-a-luxur_b_865307.html [last access 27 November 2011]. 72 Rebecca Solnit, ‘Democracy Should Be Exercised Regularly, On Foot’, Guardian, 6 July 2006, online at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jul/06/comment.politics [last access 27 November 2011]. 73 Murray Bookchin, ‘Listen, Marxist!’, in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2004 [1970]), p. 135 [108–43]. 74 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Social Ecology?’, in Social Ecology and Communalism (Edinburgh and Oakland: AK Press, 2007), p. 45 [19–52]. 75 Murray Bookchin, The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (London: Verso, 2015), p. 71. 76 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 70. 77 Murray Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose, 1992), p. x. 78 Guy-Ernest Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, ch. 7: ‘The Organization of Territory’, para. 174, online at http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/24 [last access 4 June 2018]. 79 Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities, p. 3. 80 Bookchin, Preface to Urbanization Without Cities, p. x. 81 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 66. 82 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, in Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 66. 83 Bookchin, The Limits of the City (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974), p. 137. 84 Bookchin, ‘Radical Politics’, p. 61. 85 Bookchin, The Next Revolution, p. 87. 86 David Graeber, ‘Enacting the Impossible (On Consensus Decision Making)’, Occupy Wall Street, 29 October 2011, online at http://occupywallst.org/article/enacting-the-impossible/ [last access 2 December 2017]. 87 Murray Bookchin, ‘What is Communalism?


pages: 424 words: 119,679

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear by Gregg Easterbrook

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, Crossrail, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, factory automation, failed state, fake news, full employment, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, uber lyft, universal basic income, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

European Union nations spend less per capita on health care than the United States, yet achieve as good or better outcomes, in part because their systems are less stressful, and stress does medical damage. Whether single-payer could happen under US political conditions is a book unto itself. But however desirable, single-payer emphatically would not be “free.” There was never a Good Old Days when health care services were both high-quality and cost nothing, and there never will be, unless a post-scarcity economy someday can be achieved. Today’s Medicare and Medicaid, financed mostly on the “somebody else pays” premise, may be what keep their recipients alive to take Bertrand Russell’s advice and complain. In 2017, the Wall Street Journal quoted seventy-nine-year-old Carole Siesser of Delray Beach, Florida, who needs a specialized drug, saying, “They really take advantage of seniors” because she must cover $5,600 of the drug’s annual $26,000 price.

Suppose he’d earned $1 million, with the yield evenly distributed to Honeywell employees. Each would have received $268. There just isn’t enough in CEO windfalls to alter the basic equation of equality. Until such time as there may be a fundamental breakthrough in the structure of economics, such as a post-scarcity economy, market forces are in everyone’s interest, which may mean tolerating a few individuals who end up with far more than they’ve done anything to deserve. So if executive pay restrictions won’t solve inequality, what about taxing the rich? THE US UPPER CLASS, THE top quintile, received 53 percent of the nation’s income and paid 69 percent of the nation’s federal taxes; the poor and working class, the bottom quintile, received 5 percent of the nation’s income and paid just shy of nothing in federal income taxes, according to Congressional Budget Office data on the most recent year for which statistics are available.

An entire world living at the Western standard would bring stress and materialism to the whole world, and not even the rosiest optimist knows where all the cars will park. But society can succeed at a universal Western standard or can fail, and success is a lot more appealing. If the entire world had the living standards, longevity, and education levels of the West, the conditions required for a serene post-scarcity economy might come about. * * * THE REASON SO MANY PROBLEMS seem unsolvable is that we have not yet attempted to solve them. The past holds innumerable difficulties that seemed as if they could never end. Then they did. Being sanguine about the human prospect does not justify laissez-faire—“I don’t need to worry because things will work out.”


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The humans are kept company and aided by vastly superior and extraordinarily indulgent machine intelligences, and they lead lives of perpetual indulgence. As Banks put it in a 2012 interview, “It is my vision of what you do when you are in a post-scarcity society, you can completely indulge yourself. The Culture has no unemployment problem, no one has to work, so all work is a form of play.”[cclxxxviii] Abundance The Star Trek economy is the post-scarcity economy, the economy of radical abundance. In their 2012 book “Abundance: the future is better than you think”, Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler argue that this world is within reach in the not-too-distant future, thanks largely to the exponential improvement in technology.


pages: 242 words: 73,728

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Well, AI and replicator machines have functionally eliminated resource constraints and the necessity of cost for the vast majority of goods and services in this universe. Need something? Print it on your replicator. For those things that do remain scarce, and to help smooth transactions within the socialist society, there are Federation Credits. These at one point allow the government to bargain for access to a wormhole, for instance. The economy is post-scarcity, post-profit, post-deprivation, post-inequality, post-exploitation, and post-money. Neither Keynes nor The Jetsons dwells on the economic particulars, alas. But the famed British macroeconomist was imagining a future iteration of our capitalist society. In that world, facing mass technological unemployment, a permanently lowered demand for labor, and great material abundance, individuals might work fifteen hours a week, he wrote.

“Labor cannot be distinguished from leisure”: Manu Saadia, Trekonomics: The Economics of “Star Trek” (New York: Inkshares, 2016). “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren (1930).” help smooth transactions: Matthew Yglesias, “The Star Trek Economy: (Mostly) Post-Scarcity, (Mostly) Socialism,” Slate, Nov. 18, 2013. dystopian visions: Yglesias, “The Economics of The Hunger Games,” Slate, Nov. 22, 2013. “The future is already here”: Pagan Kennedy, “William Gibson’s Future Is Now,” New York Times, Jan. 13, 2012. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor for The Atlantic.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 52 Cox and Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor, 49. 53 Romer’s ideas are widely discussed, but perhaps the most interesting current summary can be found in Sebastian Mallaby, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ending Poverty,” The Atlantic, July–August 2010, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/07/the-politically-incorrect-guide-to-ending-poverty/8134/. 54 Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 352. 55 Ibid., 14–15. 56 Ronald Bailey, “Post-Scarcity Prophet,” Reason, December 2001, http://reason.com/archives/2001/12/01/post-scarcity-prophet/1. 57 Max More, “The Myth of Stagnation,” in Death and Anti-death, ed. Charles Tandy, vol. 7 (Palo Alto, CA: Ria University Press, 2010), www.maxmore.com/mythofstagnation.htm. CHAPTER 5 1 Rahul Bedi and Kate Devlin, “Indian Woman Has First Child at Age of 70,” The Telegraph, December 8, 2008, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/3684395/Indian-woman-has-first-child-at-age-of-70.html. 2 Lisa Belkin, “70-Year-Old Woman Gives Birth,” New York Times, December 9, 2008, http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/pregnant-at-70/. 3 William Saletan, “Motherhood at 70: Meet the World’s Newest Oldest Mom,” Slate, December 9, 2008, www.slate.com/id/2206334/. 4 Andy Beckett, “Time, Gentlemen,” The Age, May 8, 2006, www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/time-gentlemen/2006/05/07/1146940408372.html. 5 Lawrence M.


pages: 297 words: 83,651

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

It is an escape route, a way to connect with someone who isn’t there; or is only there as a written trace, a ghost in the machine. The fantasy of plenitude, the superabundance of online shit, may allow us to experience our social poverty as affluence, as in the fantasy that the internet and the social industry are ‘post-scarcity’.35 Like many fantasies, this has some basis in reality when not just ‘free stuff’, but even affection and romantic excitement can be accumulated in an objectified form as ‘likes’ and ‘matches’. But as with so many fairy tales, it is the fantasy, the wish fulfilment, of the poor. Social media are not the cause of this social impoverishment, any more than drugs are.

Jean Twenge, iGen - Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – And Completely Unprepared For Adulthood, Atria Books: New York, 2017. 34. It is no accident . . . Darian Leader, Hands: What We Do With Them – And Why, Penguin Random House: London, 2016, Kindle Loc. 686. 35. . . . ‘post-scarcity’ . . . for one version of this fashionable theory, see Jeremy Rifkin, ‘The Rise of Anti-Capitalism’, New York Times, 15 March 2014. 36. The literary critic Raymond Williams . . . Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Routledge: London and New York, 2003, pp. 19–21. 37. The psychoanalyst Colette Soler . . .


pages: 561 words: 167,631

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

And actually do it, too, in the Yggdrasil. When so much space is available… so much everything, really. I mean, we’re in what people call post-scarcity. So I don’t get it. You talk about motive, but in a physiological sense, there isn’t a motive for stuff like this. I suppose that means that evil really does exist. I thought it was just an old religious term, but I guess I was wrong. It’s making me sick.” The inspector’s attractive little face creased in a slight smile. “Sometimes I think it’s only in post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too.

When you combine political inadequacy with the physical problems of being in space, it may be too much. We may be trying to make an impossible adaptation out here.” “So what do we do?” she said again. Genette shrugged again. “Hold the line, I guess. Maybe we need to understand out here that post-scarcity is both heaven and hell at once. They are superposed, like options in a qubit before its wave function collapses. Good and evil, art and war. All there in potentiality.” “But what do we do?” Genette smiled a little at that, shifted and sat cross-legged on the table before her, looking like a garden Buddha or Tara, slim and stylized.


pages: 360 words: 101,636

Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

augmented reality, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, post scarcity, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski

In the 1950s it was where the best tales of space exploration were forged; in the 1960s it was the heart of near-Earth science fiction; in the 1980s it was the radical centre for the British drive to the new space opera; and in the 1990s, with the arrival of both quantum mechanics in science fiction and the singularity, it was the basis for Kim Stanley Robinson's meticulous and demanding Mars trilogy, Greg Egan's explorations of human consciousness, and Charles Stross's post-scarcity space operas. This, however, is the 21st century and I think things are becoming more complicated and complex. Science fiction no longer subscribes readily to a single view of its own history. There's far more to our past than the Gernsback continuum, or indeed more recently the Gibson continuum (the past and future history of cyberpunk), and science itself seems to be an ever more wriggly and complex beast as we come to better understand the universe in which we find ourselves.

There's far more to our past than the Gernsback continuum, or indeed more recently the Gibson continuum (the past and future history of cyberpunk), and science itself seems to be an ever more wriggly and complex beast as we come to better understand the universe in which we find ourselves. Frankly quantum mechanics often sounds indistinguishable from magic. We're also well into the Fourth Generation of science fiction: the genre has been born, passed through adolescence, into adulthood, and is moving into a post-scarcity period of incredible richness and diversity. That impacts on everything in our field, from the diversity of the people who write science fiction to whom and about what they choose to write. We've also long since accepted that science fiction writers aren't back-room nostrodamusses reading tealeaves and predicting the future.


pages: 104 words: 34,784

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

Some of the shared values Florida goes on to list include individuality, meritocracy, diversity and openness. On the face of it, these seem like exactly the kinds of values a just and fair class identity should be based on and are in line with the principles expressed by most existing progressive organizations and people. However, in a section of his book called ‘Post-Scarcity Effect,’ Florida looked at the work of Ronald Inglehard, a political science professor at University of Michigan who conducted his own world-values survey that found there was ‘a worldwide shift from economic growth issues to lifestyle values, which [Inglehard] sometimes refers to as a shift from “survival” to “self-expression” values.’


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

These freewheeling new statelets are the locus of much of this innovation, themselves representing the biggest experiment in statehood since the birth of the nation state. As vast photovoltaic sails pitched around the Earth suck up more and more of the Sun's rays, we approach Type I status. After this, things get murkier. Type II Ideas (medium-term ish) A stellar civilisation finally sees the creation of a post-scarcity society, a new economic, social and political domain, with a wholesale rewriting of the legal and social-scientific framework around it. Old notions of the economy are redundant. Political ideas like left wing and right wing are ancient and irrelevant relics by now, and instead a series of new oppositions has arisen.

Rogers 332 Homo omnis (Homni) 300 Honjo, Tasuko 58 Hooke, Robert 333 Horgan, John 118, 168 Hossenfelder, Sabine 121–2 Howard Hughes Medical Institute 322 Howes, Anton 24, 172 hubris 122 Huebner, Jonathan 77–9, 81, 86, 91, 94, 97 Hugo, Victor 27 human frontier 7–19, 27, 40–1, 147–8, 156, 158, 249, 277–8, 336, 342–3 and artificial intelligence 250 diminishing returns of the 98 getting stuck at the 45 moral 132, 138 putting to rest 42 and science 123, 124 slowing down at the 14, 86–7, 131 and women 269 hydrogen 145 Hypatia of Alexandria 304 IBM 33, 184, 240, 265, 296, 312 Idea Paradox 178–9, 187, 191, 217, 226, 250, 254, 283–4, 301, 312, 342 ideas ‘0-I’ ideas 31 and economic growth 88, 89–92 nature of 17–18 protection 89 and research and development 90–1 slowdown 90–1 spread of 89–90 world-changing 5–6 see also big ideas illiteracy 277 imagination 16, 236 immunotherapy 57–61 income global 278 median 95 incrementalism 34, 71, 279 India 44, 71, 213, 264–8, 275, 277, 279–80, 284, 294–5, 308, 313, 326–8 individualism 282 Industrial Enlightenment 27 Industrial Revolution 242–3, 252–3, 295, 301 First (IIR) 79–81, 253, 259, 289, 306, 325 Fourth (4IR) 82, 86, 253–4 Second (2IR) 79–80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 104, 253, 289 Third (3IR) 81–2, 83–4, 86, 92, 253–4 inequality 251 infant mortality rate 10, 54 influence 28, 32–3 Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) 95 Inklings 124, 295 innovation 16, 18, 25, 31, 96, 98, 161, 183–5, 214, 274, 286, 288, 296–7, 298, 339 age of 5 breakthrough 32–3 curve of 77–9 disruptive 34 epochal 31 and human capital 277 and industrial revolution 84 and military technology 316–17 normal rates of 177–8 normalisation of 172 parasitic 194 radical 95 risky nature 335 scale 83 slowdown 83, 85 society's attitude to 17, 18 Innovation Illusion 13 institutional revolution 286–301, 309–10, 328–32, 337–8 Intel 92, 253, 272 intellectual, the, death of 110 intellectual property (IP) 89, 195–6, 251, 331 intelligence 247, 299 collective 339 ‘intelligence explosion’ 238 limits to 166–79 interconnectedness 274, 299–300 interest rates 95 International Exhibition of Modern Art, The 103 International Mathematics Olympiad 276 International Space Station 70 Internet 85, 128–9, 183, 185, 196, 246–7, 253–4, 265–6, 272, 274, 297, 300, 315, 329 invention 11, 15, 16, 156–8, 274, 286, 288, 339 and Bell Labs 180–4 and cities 270–2 industrial 24–5 macro- 31, 81 micro- 31 and military technology 316–17 and patents 97 IP see intellectual property IPOs see Initial Public Offerings iron oxide 89 Islam 133, 340 Islamic caliphate 259, 260 Islamic State 305 ITER 146 Jackson, Andrew 67 Jainism 108 Japan 264, 266, 268, 279, 296, 305 Jefferson, Thomas 211 Jenner, Edward 47 Jesus 24, 216, 303 jet engines 69–70 jetpacks 71, 72 Jiankui, He 255–7, 280, 285 job automation 228 job destruction 96 Jobs, Steve 159, 186 Jones, Benjamin F. 156, 158–9, 160–1 Jones, Charles I. 90–1, 93, 94, 152 joy 170–1 Joyce, James 103, 166 Jung, Carl 104 Justinian 304 Kahn, Bob 253 Kahn, Herman 129 The Year 2000 9, 12, 13 Kaku, Michio 337 Kardashev, Nikolai 337 Kardashev Scale 337–43 Kauffmann, Stuart 203 Kay, John 24–5 Kelly, Kevin 300 Kelly, Mervin 182, 206 Kepler, Johannes 36, 229 Khmer Rouge 305 Kim Il-Sung 114 Klimt, Gustav 188 Knossos 153 knowledge ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 human frontier of 7–19 Koch, Robert 38 Kodak 184 Koestler, Arthur 36, 39 Kokoschka, Oskar 188 Korea 138, 266, 268, 305 see also North Korea; South Korea Kremer, Michael 274 Kristeva, Julia 111 Kuhn, Thomas 29, 30, 159 Kurzweil, Ray 79 Kuznets, Simon 31 labour 88 Lakatos, Imre 121 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 35, 164 Langley, Samuel Pierpont 66 Laozi 108 Large Hadron Collider (LHC) 118, 233, 239 Latin America 266–7, 275, 295 Latour, Bruno 111 Lavoisier, Antoine 29, 34 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 234–5, 296 Lawrence, D.H. 103 lawyers 205–6 Lazarsfeld, Paul 189 Le Figaro (newspaper) 64 Le Mans 64 Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) 99, 100–2, 104 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van 231 left wing politics 113 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 25 Lem, Stanisław 44–5 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 188 lenses 231 Leonardo da Vinci 155 Lessing, Doris 152 Lewis, C.S. 124 LHC see Large Hadron Collider Li, Danielle 317–18 liberal democracy 111–12 life expectancy 52–5, 57, 93–4, 169 lift 65 light 75–7 Lilienthal, Otto 62, 335 Lister, Joseph 332 literature 103, 108, 124 Locke, John 25, 137, 138 Lockheed Martin 184, 296 London 133 loonshots 31–2 Loos, Adolf 103, 188 Lorenz, Edward 163 low-hanging fruit paradox 149–54, 167, 178 Lucretius 35, 155 Lulu and Nana (genetically edited twins) 255–7, 264 Luther, Martin 230 Lyell, Charles 34, 35 Lynn, Vera 105 M-theory 120 Mach, Ernst 188 machine learning (ML) 225–7, 233–4, 237, 243, 338 Madonna 105 magnetism 74–7 Mahler, Gustav 188 mail order 84–5 Malevich, Kazimir 103 Malik, Charles 134–6, 140 Malthus, Thomas 35 managerialism 204–5, 206–7 Mandelbrot, Benoit 163 Manhattan Project 119, 144–5, 148, 289, 296, 315, 317–18 Manutius, Aldus 253–4 Mao Zedong 328 Maoism 114 Marcellus 4 Marconi, Guglielemo 216, 289 Margulis, Lynn 203 Mars 218, 296, 318, 338, 341 Marx, Karl 36, 329 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 88, 146, 184–5, 296, 314, 316, 327 see also MIT Technology Review materials science 234–5 Maxwell, James Clerk 74–7, 79, 80, 166 Demon (thought experiment) 76 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism 74–7 Mayan civilisation 43 Mazzucato, Mariana 185, 194, 318 McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen 24 McCormick, Cyrus 11 McKeown, Thomas 53 McKinsey 34, 246 medicine 45, 46–62, 70–3, 93–4, 98, 124–6, 217–18, 338 see also drugs mega-authored papers 157 Meister, Joseph 48 Mendeleev, Dmitri 149 Menlo Park lab 286–7, 293 Merton, Robert 328 Mesopotamia 25, 291 Mesoudi, Alex 164 micro-organisms 49–51 microscopes 49, 232 Microsoft 33, 265 Middle East 138 migration 272–3 military technology 3–4 Minecraft 86 Minoans 43, 153 Minsky, Marvin 227 Mises, Ludwig von 189 MIT see Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT Technology Review 255 Mitchell, Joni 104 modern art 103 modernity 11, 80, 81, 83–4, 85 Mokyr, Joel 25, 31, 44, 68, 81 molecule libraries 56 Mont Pelerin Society 329 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 335 Montgolfier brothers 65 Moon missions 70, 71, 218, 263, 315, 316 moonshots 8, 59, 136, 214, 317 Moore, Gordon 92 Moore's Law 55, 84, 92, 93, 97, 240 Morgan, J.P. 287, 288 Morris, Ian 260–1, 306 Morse, Samuel 289 motor vehicles 68–71, 95, 107–8, 219, 289 Motorwagen 68 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 159 multiculturalism 268 multiverse 170, 342 music 99–108, 115, 188 Musil, Robert 188 Musk, Elon 71, 247 Mussolini, Benito 114 mysterians 166, 249 nanotechnology 242, 243, 245, 341 Napoleon Bonaparte 49 Napoleon III 50, 51 narratives, breakdown of grand 115 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 71–2, 233, 315–16, 319 National Health Service (NHS) 56, 57 National Institute of Health (NIH) 60, 120, 185–6, 247, 319, 322 nationalism 213 natural selection 35–6, 37, 109, 118, 244 Nature magazine 12, 121, 157, 211, 220, 229 Nazis 48, 132, 190 Negroponte, Nicholas 13 neo-Enlightenment 98 Netherlands 24, 231, 283 neural networks, deep learning 225, 227, 233 Neurath, Otto 189 neuroscience 247 new molecular entities (NMEs) 93 ‘new normals’ 32 New Scientist (magazine) 122 new technology 95 disruptive 96 New York 103, 134 Newton, Isaac 25, 29, 34, 37, 74–5, 155, 159, 232, 341 Ng, Andrew 262 NHS see National Health Service Nielsen, Michael 117 Nigeria 267, 279 NIH see National Institute of Health Nijinsky, Vaslav 99–100 Nixon, Richard 59 NMEs see new molecular entities noble gases 149 Nokia 183 Nordhaus, William 186 norms, ‘new’ 32 North Korea 305 Novacene 238 Novartis 61 nuclear fission 144, 145–6, 148 nuclear fusion 145–8, 234, 317, 341 nuclear power 85, 119, 143–8, 220, 221, 290 nuclear weapons 45, 143, 144, 311 Oak Ridge laboratory 143, 147 Obama, Barack 59 Obninsk 144 Odlyzko, Andrew 184 Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) 316–17 Ogburn, William 39 oil 80 oligopolies 96 optical devices 231–2 orbits, elliptical 36 organisations breakthrough 294–9 see also companies originality 24, 28, 31–3, 152, 177, 283 lack of 108 Ørsted, Hans Christian 74–5 OSRD see Office of Scientific Research and Development Ottomans 277, 308 Oxford University 123–6, 127, 296 Packalen, Mikko 201, 202, 321 Page, Larry 326 Paine, Thomas 137 painting 176–7 panpsychism 340 paper 230, 259 paradigm rigidity 160 paradigm shifts 29, 33, 105, 109, 130, 164, 222, 250, 339 Parfit, Derek 203 Paris 99–103, 110, 132, 135, 205 particle physics 117–18, 119, 120–1, 122 partisanship 209–10 Pasteur, Louis 46–53, 57, 60–1, 71, 77, 79, 139, 232–3, 296, 332, 338 pasteurisation 50, 51 patents 64, 83, 156–8, 194–6, 271–2, 292–3, 297 new classes 97 patronage 322 Paul, St 303 Pauli, Wolfgang 159 Pauling, Linus 118, 323–4 PCR see polymerase chain reaction peer learning 326–7 peer review 320–1 penicillin 38, 52, 125 Penrose, Roger 124 Pentagon, Naval Air War Center 77 pessimism, rational 123–31, 150 pet food 147 Pfizer 61 pharmaceutical industry 31, 55–7, 60, 70 see also drugs Philo of Byzantium 4–5 philosophy 103–4, 111–12, 115, 121, 124, 339 Photoshop 162 physics 74–7, 79, 80, 116–22, 124, 131, 140, 159–62, 166, 239, 242–3, 332, 341 Picasso, Pablo 36, 101, 152 Pierce, John R. 182 Pitcairn Island 42–3 Planck, Max 104, 160, 296 planets, elliptical orbit 36 plasma 145, 146 Plato 3, 108, 169, 291, 304 Plotinus 303 Plutarch 4 polio 53 political policy 114–15 politics 111–15, 208–13 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) 202 Popper, Karl 189 population growth 78, 79 exponential 11 populism 208, 211, 214, 280–1, 307 post-scarcity society 340 post-truth world 213, 215 Pot, Pol 114 Pound, Ezra 103 present 13 Presley, Elvis 36, 152 ‘priming’ 4 Princeton 180, 296 printing press 36, 230, 253–4 problems, catastrophic 42–4 production lines 104 productivity growth 82 profit 186 progress acceleration 8 linear 29 mirage of 5 nature of 13 protein-folding problem 223–6, 228–9 Proust, Marcel 103 Prussia 50 Ptolemaic astronomical system 30 Ptolemy 303 public bodies 205 public health policy 53 PubMed 28, 116 Punic Wars, Second 3 Pythagoras 304 PYTHIA 237 quantum computing 240–1, 263, 296, 312 quantum physics 159, 166, 341 rabies 48, 51 radiation 57 radioactive elements 149 railways 67, 69 Ratcliffe, Peter 124 rational pessimism 123–31, 150 Ravel, Maurice 101 RCA 33, 289 Reagan, Ronald 211 Rees, Martin 167–8 Reformation 230, 233, 328 refugees 220 regulatory burden 205–6 Relativity Theory, General 104, 117 religion 108, 214, 303–4, 340 Rembrandt 236 Renaissance 130, 156, 177, 230, 233, 252, 254 reproducibility crisis 121 research and development 128, 180–7, 214, 252, 286–90, 312, 339–40 agricultural 92–3 autonomous vehicles 219 cancer 59–61 Chinese 262–3 cleantech 195 drugs 55–7, 61, 92–4, 119, 161, 172–3, 217–18, 234, 245, 315, 338 and financialism 192 funding 202–3, 314–24 global spend 128 government funding 314–19 and ideas 90–1 and India 265, 266 military 314–17, 319 multipolar 258 nuclear 147 productivity 91–5, 97–8, 307 and scaling up 279 specialisation 156, 157–8 and tax credits 331 and training 158–60 and transportation 70, 72 and universities 200–4 revolution, diminishing nature 74–98 Ridley, Matt 281, 325 right wing politics 113, 211 rights 132–40 risk 193, 251, 313, 335–6 risk society 329 risk-aversion 210–11 risk-minimisation strategies 330 roads 66, 67 Rocket engine 26 Roerich, Nicholas 100 Rome 3–4, 43 fall of 151, 187, 190, 303–6 Romer, Paul 88–91, 94 Roosevelt, Eleanor 132, 133–6, 139–40 Rose, Jacqueline 111 Rosetta Stone 155 Rotten, Johnny 104 Roux, Emile 48 Royal Institution 75, 154, 292 Royal Society 25, 75, 154, 292, 326 Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce 25, 292 Russia 11, 71, 111, 150, 213, 279 see also Soviet Union Russian Chemical Society 149 Rutherford, Ernest 119, 140 S-curve model 32, 33, 35 Sagan, Carl 306, 337 Salvarsan 52 sanitation 53–4 Sarewitz, Dan 175 Sartre, Jean-Paul 110 satellites 9, 70, 153, 181–2, 272, 315–16 saturation, at the limit 166–79 Saturn 75–6 Saussure, Ferdinand de 109 Scaling Revolution 232 scaling up 255–85, 293–5, 298–9, 301–2, 308, 314–15, 317, 337–8 Schiele, Egon 188 Schliemann, Heinrich 153 Schmidt, Eric 262 Schnitzler, Arthur 188 Schoenberg, Arnold 103, 104, 188 Schrödinger, Erwin 124, 237, 332 Schumpeter, Joseph 189 science 104, 115–25, 131, 157, 159–60, 201–2, 276, 332–3 limits of 168 see also biology, chemistry; physics Science (journal) 118, 164, 175, 229, 257 Science Education Initiative (SEI) 327 Scientific American (magazine) 122 Scientific Revolution 29–30, 123, 130, 229–33, 252–3, 291 Sears Roebuck 84–5 Second World War 138–9, 143–4, 148, 296, 314, 316–17, 319 Sedol, Lee 226–7 seed drills 25 SEI see Science Education Initiative semiconductors 180–1, 245, 338 Semmelweis, Ignaz 216 sensory perception 167 sewing machines 11, 33 Shakespeare, William 169 Shannon, Claude 182, 184 shareholder returns 193, 194, 217 Shaw, D.


pages: 178 words: 47,457

A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby K. Payne

conceptual framework, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, gentrification, impulse control, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, post scarcity, War on Poverty, working poor

It, in essence, supports "the existence of a permanent `culture of poverty,' an argument first advanced in the modern American context by political scientist Edward Banfield in a 1970 book." Freedom is now defined by the amount of choice a person has and by "the development of human resources of men and women in a post scarcity society." "Results from the Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggest that the majority of these children will not escape poverty throughout their childhood, making the intergenerational transmission of poverty more likely" (Duncan, 1984, 1991). ("These" children refers to those "living in chronic material hardship.")


pages: 762 words: 246,045

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

Admiral Zheng, fixed income, Khyber Pass, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, Malacca Straits, post scarcity, South China Sea, trade route

They are curiously modern in certain respects. Because they had the basics of agriculture – squash, corn, beans and so on – and had a small population to support in a forest that provided enormous numbers of game animals and nut bearing trees, they lived in a pre scarcity economy, just as we now glimpse a technologicallycreated post scarcity state in its theoretical possibility. In both, the indi vidual receives more recognition as a value bearer him or herself, than does the individual in a scarcity economy. And there is less domination of one caste by another. In these conditions of material ease and plenty, we find the great egalitarianism of the Hodenosaunee, the power wielded by women in their culture, and the absence of slavery – rather the rapid incorporation of defeated tribes into the full texture of the state.

Whereas in the north it was completely different, first because the Hodenosaunee were able to defend themselves in the depths of the great eastern forest, never fully succumbing to either the Chinese or to the Islamic incursion from across the Atlantic, and second because they were much less susceptible to Old World diseases, possibly because of early exposure to them from wandering Japanese monks, traders, trappers and prospectors, who ended up infecting the local populace in small numbers, thus serving in effect as human inoculants, immunizing or at least preparing the population of Yingzhou for a fuller incursion of Asians, who did not have quite as devastating an effect, although of course many people and tribes did die.' Bodur moved on, thinking about the notion of a post scarcity society, which in hungry Nsara she had never heard of at all. But it was time for another session, a plenary affair that Budur did not want to miss, and which turned out to be one of the most heavily attended. It concerned the question of the lost Franks, and why the plague had hit them so hard.

'I begin to think that this matter of "late emergent properties" that the physicists talk about when they discuss complexity and cascading sensitivities, is an important concept for historians. justice may be a late emergent property. And maybe we can glimpse the beginnings of it emerging; or maybe it emerged long ago, among the primates and proto humans, and is only now gaining leverage in the world, aided by the material possibility of post scarcity. It is hard to say.' He smiled again his little smile. 'Good words to end this session.' His final meeting was called 'What Remains to be Explained', and consisted of questions that he was still mulling over after all his years of study and contemplation. He made comments on his list of questions, but not many, and Bao had to write as fast as he could to get the questions themselves recorded: What Remains to be Explained Why has there been inequality in accumulation of goods since the earliest recorded history?


pages: 271 words: 52,814

Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy by Melanie Swan

23andMe, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, banking crisis, basic income, bioinformatics, bitcoin, blockchain, capital controls, cellular automata, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative editing, Conway's Game of Life, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital divide, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, friendly AI, Hernando de Soto, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, operational security, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, personalized medicine, post scarcity, power law, prediction markets, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, sharing economy, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, software as a service, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the long tail, Turing complete, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks

Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity London: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013. 175 Swan, M. “Social Economic Networks and the New Intangibles.” Broader Perspective blog, August 15, 2010. http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2010/08/social-economic-networks-and-new.html. 176 ———. “New Banks, New Currencies, and New Markets in a Multicurrency World: Roadmap for a Post-Scarcity Economy by 2050.” Create Futures IberoAmérica, Enthusiasmo Cultural, São Paolo Brazil, October 14, 2009. 177 ———. “Connected World Wearables Free Cognitive Surplus.” Broader Perspective blog, October 26, 2014. http://futurememes.blogspot.com/2014/10/connected-world-frees-cognitive-surplus.html. 178 Lee, T.B.


pages: 532 words: 155,470

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

For more on primitivism, see John Zerzan’s Elements of Refusal (Columbia, MO: Cal press, 1999) and Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (los angeles: Feral House, 2002). Fifteen, “petroleum Distillation,” Choice of a New Generation (lookout! records, 1989), lp. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 21. This view is well put in Murray Bookchin, Post-scarcity Anarchism (Berkeley, Ca: ramparts press, 1971). With respect to “technoskepticism,” i concur with andrew ross when he describes this disposition as a necessary condition for social change in “Hacking away at the Counterculture,” Postmodern Culture 1, no. 1 (1990): 39. For one of the best analyses of the political prospects and limitations of technoskepticism, see Carol Stabile, Feminism and the Technological Fix (Manchester, UK: Manchester University press, 1994).

“introduction: impossibilities of automobilities.” in Against Automobility, edited by Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris land, and Matthew paterson, 3–16. Malden, Ma: Blackwell/Sociological review, 2006. Bonham, Jennifer. “Transport: Disciplining the Body That Travels.” Sociological Review 54, no. s1 (2006): 55–74. Bookchin, Murray. The Limits of the City. new york: Harper and row, 1974. ———. Post-scarcity Anarchism. Berkeley, Ca: ramparts press, 1971. ———. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: The Unbridgeable Chasm. San Francisco: aK press, 1995. Boothroyd, Sarah. “Spraypaint Slingers, Celebration, and a Tidal Wave of Outrage.” in Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration, edited by Chris Carlsson, 23–29.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Table of Contents About Doctorow: Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is in favor of liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, and uses some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Doctorow: I, Robot (2005) When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2006) Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) Little Brother (2008) After the Siege (2007) All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites (2005) I, Row-Boat (2006) Printcrime (2006) Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) Copyright: Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

This was, all of a sudden, a frowning but managerial kind of a place, a civil and technological kind of a place, all labs and skyscrapers, which was doing the same kind of things as the west but threatened—while the moment lasted—to be doing them better … The era when the place seemed to be in a state of confident, challenging, expansive maturity has fallen off our mental carousel. Khrushchev was so confident in his country’s growing prosperity that he predicted the USSR would overtake the US economy by 1970, reaching aspects of the fully equal, post-scarcity society of luxurious abundance and ever-shrinking requirements of labor promised by Marx—from each according to their ability, to each according to their need—by 1980. But we all know that nothing remotely like this occurred. So what stalled the Soviet economy? The economist Alec Nove, whom we have met before in this book, argues that planning inevitably leads to authoritarianism.


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I will just give you one example, but there are many. Marcin Jakubowski is an incredible man. There are plenty of people who talk about building a better world. Many have great ideas, too, futuristic visions of how the world could be, if we just wanted to. But one of them is actually building it. His goal: no less than creating a post-scarcity society, where people have to work only 1-2 hours per day to live, so that they can use the remaining time for higher purposes. He is building the foundation for the next paradigm in social evolution, and he is open-sourcing all of it. A visionary, but with solid grounding. The story is best told by Marcin himself, who spoke at TED in 2011.


pages: 313 words: 84,312

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Collage and pastiche, recombining ingredients provided by others, were central not just to Situationism but to futurism, cubism, Dadaism and pop art. The rip, mix, burn generation of Apple iPods, hip-hop music and YouTube videos is Debord’s heir. The We-Think generation is living out the hopes of the 1960s radicals for the creation of a harmonious, post-scarcity society that is free, decentralised and yet apparently egalitarian, a world in which as Fred Turner put it ‘each individual could act in his or her own interest and at the same time produce a unified social sphere, in which we were “all one”’.19 As an offspring of the 1960s the web also carries many of the congenital weaknesses that afflicted the counter-culture.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

The tools of life and business are now in the hands of everyone. Mass is quickly fragmenting into a world of niche, smaller and more distributed things. And big businesses that need a new survival manifesto need to embrace the fragmented nature if they want to stay ‘big’. We are entering the age of post-scarcity abundance. The great fragmentation isn’t just great because it’s huge or amazing — although, in fact, it really is. It’s much more than that. It’s a move to a more equalised and humane society where the power to know and the power to participate are being handed back to everyone. Both economically and socially, just about everything is being democratised for good.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

The key objective is to do everything possible to accelerate the development of this new resource while at the same time evolving our social safety net and regulatory framework in ways that will allow us to mitigate the accompanying risks and ensure that the dividends from AI are shared widely and inclusively. As we navigate this path forward, I think that the future we build may ultimately fall somewhere on a spectrum bounded by two fictional extremes. The most optimistic scenario comes from the television show Star Trek. In this post-scarcity world, advanced technology has created material abundance, eliminated poverty, addressed environmental concerns and cured most disease. No one needs to toil in drudgery at an unrewarding job simply to sustain his or her survival. People in this world are highly educated and pursue challenges that they find rewarding.


pages: 312 words: 91,835

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization by Branko Milanovic

Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, place-making, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, stakhanovite, trade route, transfer pricing, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

It is also remarkable that the writers of this period were unable to define the “new society” except negatively, that is, by what it no longer was. Hence, the proliferation of “post” prefixes in Bell’s Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973): a cursory review reveals “post-industrial,” “post-bourgeois,” “post-Marxist,” “post-capitalist,” and “post-scarcity.” 3. Limits to Growth (1972) was also the first report of the Club of Rome. The second report, Mankind at the Turning Point (1974), by Mihailo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, was even more quantitative and ostensibly scientific. 4. Sicco Mansholt, then the president of the European Commission, was a strong proponent of zero growth.


pages: 422 words: 89,770

Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

1960s counterculture, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, corporate governance, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, food desert, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Pearl River Delta, Plato's cave, post scarcity, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Cradle Will Rock. Fairfax, VA: Library of Congress Federal Theatre Project Collection at Fenwick Library, George Mason University. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Works, Vol. 16, Conspiracy and Imprisonment, 1940-1945, trans. by Lisa E. Dahill. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006. Bookchin, Murray. Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004. Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Atheneum, 1961. Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918. Ed. Olaf Hansen. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977. ———. War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919.


pages: 340 words: 101,675

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

It was, in a word, fashion. 21    INSURGENCY IN A BOX Durban, South Africa, 2027 If you’ve played a popular costume drama role-playing game such as Star Trek, today’s object might seem familiar. It’s a replicator. In classic science fiction, replicators can instantly materialize more or less any object, exemplifying late twentieth-century utopian post-scarcity thought and inspiring countless scientists and engineers—including the people who made this box. What I have in front of me isn’t a real replicator, of course; they’re still complete fantasy. But it is the first portable and high-quality scanner, a metal and plastic box a little over half a meter on each side with a door on the front.


pages: 377 words: 110,427

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz by Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, American Legislative Exchange Council, Benjamin Mako Hill, bitcoin, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, deliberate practice, do what you love, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, failed state, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, full employment, functional programming, Hacker News, Howard Zinn, index card, invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Gruber, Lean Startup, low interest rates, More Guns, Less Crime, peer-to-peer, post scarcity, power law, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, semantic web, single-payer health, SpamAssassin, SPARQL, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, unbiased observer, wage slave, Washington Consensus, web application, WikiLeaks, working poor, zero-sum game

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. His novels include Down and Out in the Magic, Kingdom, and Little Brother. James Grimmelmann is a professor of law at the University of Maryland. He studies how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. Astra Taylor is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her films include Zizek!


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Progressive thinkers have shunned such a proposition, while conservatives have endorsed it, no doubt for much the same reason; it renders familiar forms of struggle ineffective. If semiotic consumption is truly without boundaries, then the increases of productivity in the industry make little difference. Shattered are the hopes for a future of post-scarcity and the unfolding of democratic leisure. Furthermore, the demand of workers for increased purchasing power is emptied of some of its emancipating potential, and thus its legitimacy, if redistribution of wealth only serves to grease the wheels of the system. It is on this ground that Jean Baudrillard wrote his obituary notice over anti-capitalist resistance.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

No matter how much havoc the digital revolution might wreak upon commercial media business models, the Internet offered no solution at all to the core problem of funding and organizing media content. If a shrinking number of people could make a living producing content, what sort of culture would society produce? The online logic seemed as much pre-surplus as post-scarcity, as much Dark Ages as Age of Enlightenment. In short, the need for the PEC, the need to develop effective systems and policies, was and is more important than ever. Journalism I separate news media from the rest of commercial media (entertainment) for three reasons. First, journalism has developed out of a somewhat different tradition than entertainment: from the beginning of the republic, it has been a key part of the governing system and has been understood that way.


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

In 2005 Nielsen estimated that 35 million Americans were reading blogs; yet that same year, another organization estimated there were 50 million blogs in existence, suggesting more blogs than readers.10 Collectively, the blogs exerted the influence of a kind of ongoing national conversation. In his somewhat obscure way, Jeffrey Jarvis declared that “in our post-scarcity world, distribution is not king and neither is content. Conversation is the kingdom, and trust is king.”11 In 2006, Time magazine, struggling to stay hip to it all, named “YOU” as its person of the year. “Yes you. You control the information age. Welcome to your world.”12 The journalist Jon Pareles wrote that “ ‘user-generated content’ [is] the paramount cultural buzz phrase of 2006….I prefer something a little more old-fashioned: self-expression.


pages: 471 words: 147,210

Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky

experimental subject, gravity well, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, machine translation, microbiome, pattern recognition, post scarcity, remote working, side project, telepresence, theory of mind

The one piece of knowledge that would bleaken his outlook further would be to know that the mistakes of his people are a mirror for the mistakes of their creators. Lot has like-minded followers, some utopianists who fled with him, others just as desperate and lost, attracted to his almost messianic demeanour. Lot has seen a future of glory and post-scarcity. The experience has marked him out, given his body language and Guise a radiance few others can match. Certainty is not a currency the octopuses are comfortable dealing with, most of the time, but Lot’s followers have lost everything, enough that they will make the cardinal sin of following without question someone who seems to know what they are doing.


pages: 717 words: 196,908

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

The new man would learn to abandon technology and consumerism and accept his humble place in the unity of nature. “Self-assertive man,” he wrote in 1926, “whether or not he knows and wills it as an individual, is the functionary of technology.”35 Heidegger’s student Herbert Marcuse brought these assumptions to his own view of “post-scarcity society” in One-Dimensional Man. Its bold images of a technological capitalism poised to subjugate the vital energies of man as well as nature infused German cultural pessimism into the New Left. Marcuse galvanized American conservationist sentiments on the Left, which derived from the writings of figures like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir.


pages: 700 words: 201,953

The Social Life of Money by Nigel Dodd

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", accounting loophole / creative accounting, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, credit crunch, cross-subsidies, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, dematerialisation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, emotional labour, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial exclusion, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, gentrification, German hyperinflation, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Herbert Marcuse, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, informal economy, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kula ring, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mental accounting, microcredit, Minsky moment, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, Neal Stephenson, negative equity, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, payday loans, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-Fordism, Post-Keynesian economics, postnationalism / post nation state, predatory finance, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, remote working, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Scientific racism, seigniorage, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Veblen good, Wave and Pay, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

“Grassrooting the Space of Flows.” Urban Geography 20 (4): 294–302. Chaum, D. (1983). “Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments.” Advances in Cryptology: Proceedings of Crypto 82. D. Chaum, R. L. Rivest, and A. T. Sherman, Eds. New York, Plenum Publishing Corporation. Chernomas, R. (1984). “Keynes on Post-Scarcity Society.” Journal of Economic Issues XVIII (4): 1007–26. Chick, V. and S. C. Dow (2013). “Financial Institutions and the State: A Reexamination.” Monetary Economies of Production: Banking and Financial Circuits and the Role of the State, L.-P. Rochon and M. Seccareccia, Eds.. Cheltenham, U.K., Edward Elgar Publishing: 99–111.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In 2013, Godin was inducted into the Direct Marketing Hall of Fame. Recently, Godin turned the book publishing world on its ear by launching a series of four books via Kickstarter. The campaign reached its goal in just three hours and became the most successful book project in Kickstarter history. “Trust and attention—these are the scarce items in a post-scarcity world.” “We can’t out-obedience the competition.” TF: I like this so much that I wanted to mention it twice. More context next time. Be a Meaningful Specific Instead of a Wandering Generality On saying “no” and declining things: “The phone rings, and lots of people want a thing.