the zero cost world is coming & it’s going to break your brain

There are many theories on how in the long run AI will allow us to build some utopian neo-communist society where everything is basically free because labor and production are close to zero (see Fully Automated Luxury Communism for example), but in the short term this is all just useless speculation.

Even if this utopian dream will manifest (and I a... See more

In its desperate hunger for clicks, much of the media has decided to endorse a maximalist interpretation of what AI might do. I’ve cataloged them before: disrupt every industry, eliminate poverty and need, send us off of into the stars, end death. Or, alternatively, threaten everything we’ve built, provoke dystopia, exterminate humanity. Take your ... See more

What happens when the consensual vision around how AI minimizes work time and maximizes leisure time is in fact, wrong. And what happens in reality, when those that are already productive, only work so much more? And as individuals become much more empowered, how does one stop oneself from working, that now the opportunity cost of not working becom... See more

Frase argues that we are facing a paradoxical crisis of both scarcity (ecological catastrophe) and abundance (AI & automation) at the very same time. Under these twin pressures, he argues, capitalism is going to end. The question is what will replace it. On intersecting axes of scarcity/ abundance and hierarchy/equality, he maps out a 2 × 2 gri

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