this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2026
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Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.
This is one of the most infuriating arguments AI proponents make. It is absolutely ridiculous on its face if you think about it for more than a second.
Yesterday someone quoted Elon at me, which go fuck yourself but I digress, saying "we'll have universal basic abundance". Who? Not me and you, that's for fucking sure because we literally have enough RIGHT NOW. So where is it? Rhetorical question of course because the same dickhead making these absurd claims about a tech utopia is also actively fighting against systems that would make it harder for people like him to hoard so much wealth.
Goddamn it.
In reality things are becoming more scarce because of AI and I‘m afraid we‘ve only scratched the surface. And all that when we barely have any actual use cases for it.
It's like global malnutrition/hunger, it's not that we don't have enough food (I believe total global calorie per capita per day output might be significantly above the recommended 2,500 or so calories); it's the distribution where the problem lies.
We absolutely have the resources to solve those distribution issues, there just isn't an economic incentive to allocate them that way.
Yup, distribution as in social choices around allocation strategies as opposed logistics (which is mostly solved, some bottlenecks do exist though).
Which to OPs point is a socio-political problem. We have the technology and means to distribute it globally, or ensure it’s created closer to the need, it’s just not being done.
Except we still can't solve this in the US, where that distribution is orders of magnitude easier
We can, the ruling class just chooses not to
100 years ago people believed that productivity will rise so much, that we will work for 20 hours week, yet here we are.