The Beach House Problem
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2003113239216116019?s=20
Another day, another Elon Musk quote from X.
I shouldn’t be surprised that someone so heavily vested into AI and robotics is talking up an imagined future. That means, according to Musk, that money won’t have any value in the future.
The economy has transcended physical needs. Welcome to Post-Scarcity Paradise™️.
If they think scarcity will die so easily, and people believe it, we’re closer to scarcity of thought rather than the scarcity of physical objects. Let me explain more in more detail than a Tweet can ever go into.
The Myth
The end of material scarcity is simply a myth. Because everything wrong (and right) with society isn’t about having physical material items.
We are already in a situation where scarcity is about space, time, attention and the soul-crushing human need to be better than someone else.
If AI gifts us infinite PlayStations and tofu burgers, there’s still only so much coastline, sunlight, and human contact with developers who haven’t yet burned out and fled to a cabin.
Because housing is a basic need with constraints.
Currently those constraints have produced our current world. Everyone cannot live by the sea since they need to get to work (that commute), and there is a limited amount of land to live in near the sea. Even if you remove the work constraint the amount of land is a very real limit on what might be done. AI won’t terraform more California coastline. Robots can’t widen a cliff.
So when everyone suddenly has infinite purchasing power (or no money matters at all), how do we divide the limited oceanfront property?
We won’t all be sharing like nice little children, let me tell you that.
Algorithmic Favoritism?
In this shimmering utopia, maybe money is gone. Great. Now your worth is decided by some GoogleBrainGPT-9000 score that evaluates your helpfulness, cleanliness, and the number of times you’ve said “have a great day” to the AI overlords
AI doesn’t remove scarcity. It reshuffles the deck and tells you the game has changed. But the house still wins. Much like removing the barriers to software development through AI, removing the on-ramp for junior developers and then realizing the code becomes a buggy mess (that needs to be fixed by junior developers).
Where the deck lies is not yet clear, but I guess none of it will favor The Secret Developer in the end.
The Answer?
I’m not here to save humanity. I’m just here to point out the bug in your system design. If your future society doesn’t think hard about governance, social contracts, and who decides access to limited things, you’ll just swap capitalism for algo-feudalism.
And yes, there will still be billionaires. Which is why one particular billionaire is pushing this stuff on us. It’s just a pity people are simultaneously hero-worshiping them, but you can’t have it all.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer says that the little things make them so happy, they just want to live by the sea.