“Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance”
Musk said it in the way a weather report announces the hurricane already on the porch. Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance. The distant future, in this forecast, is a mild climate where the robots have finished the chores, the cost of living has thinned to a rounding error, and the index fund you have been feeding since your first paycheck can retire before you do.
Saving money for the distant future is pointless with the advent of super intelligent abundance
Abundance is a beautiful word. It sounds like a orchard. It behaves like a terms-of-service update. Superintelligence will, we are told, make food, housing, medicine, and transport so cheap that a nest egg becomes a folk custom, something your grandparents did alongside balancing a checkbook and owning a single good coat. Work becomes optional. Scarcity clocks out. Your emergency fund can stop pretending it was a personality.
The cheerful half of the sentence needs the other half, which has already started without waiting for the models to finish their homework. Call it the age of unemployment, though nobody in a keynote will. It arrives as a role that is “transformed,” a team that is “lean,” a performance review that praises your adaptability and then removes the job you were adapting inside. You are early. Early is what they call you when the option to work was supposed to be yours and turned out to be the machine’s.
Between the last paycheck and the first miracle sits the age of reliance on tech oligarchs for handouts. The same small set of people who own the models, the robots, the power, and the platforms that used to be called employment will distribute the surplus. Universal high income, rendered with the warmth of a push notification. You will stop saving, because saving is a superstition from the scarcity years. You will receive. The deposit will have a logo on it, and a dashboard, and a community guidelines page.
Picture the household budget once money has been talked out of mattering. Rent is a subscription to a company that also fields the only plumber in the zip code, who is a humanoid and does not negotiate. Groceries arrive because an app decided you looked hungry in last quarter’s sentiment score. Care is free, provided you remain in good standing with the foundation that bought the clinic. The children learn from a tutor that cannot be fired, because it was never hired. None of this is a wage. A wage implied you had done something. A handout implies you have been allowed to continue, which is a more modern benefit.
There is a dark joke in treating a post as a pension plan. The punchline is that the pension plan believed you back, for a while, and then a model took the meeting. A man for whom money has already stopped being a constraint explains that money will stop being a constraint. Everyone else is invited to arrive at that insight slightly earlier, ideally before the abundance ships. Abundance, like software, ships when it ships. If the release slips, you will have the comfort of having believed the roadmap, which is a kind of savings account denominated entirely in vibes.
Skip the 401(k). Skip the jar labeled “rainy day.” The rain has been productized, and the umbrella is a grant from the person who sold you the cloud. Superintelligent abundance may yet make bread nearly free and medicine nearly trivial. Until the nearly arrives, the arrangement is plain enough to engrave on a coin, if coins were still the point. The people who built the machines will own the machines. The people who used to save will practice a new civic skill, which is waiting politely for the deposit to clear, and calling it the future when it does.
