What Abundance Actually Looks Like

The Imagination Gap

Here is a strange fact about being human: we are very good at imagining more of what we already have, and very bad at imagining the thing itself becoming free.

Ask someone in 1985 to imagine the future of the phone book and they'll describe a thicker phone book, delivered faster, maybe with color. They will not describe a world where the entire concept of looking up a stranger's number dissolves because everyone carries every number, every map, every library, and a camera in their pocket — and the marginal cost of one more copy of all of it is essentially zero. The future didn't make the phone book better. It made the scarcity the phone book solved disappear.

That is the shape of the thing we're bad at. Not "faster horses" — we can imagine faster horses. What we can't imagine is that the horse stops being the constraint.

Real talk: this is where most of us are right now with abundance. We can picture cheaper solar panels. We struggle to picture what happens to everything when energy costs almost nothing. We can picture a smarter chatbot. We struggle to picture what happens to law, medicine, education, and white-collar work when expert-level reasoning costs a fraction of a cent. We're imagining a thicker phone book while the ground under the whole idea of "expensive" shifts.

And here's why the gap matters. The more tightly we cling to scarcity-era habits while the scarcity itself lifts, the more unnecessary harm we cause on the way through. Not harm from the technology. Harm from us — from hoarding what's about to be abundant, from defending moats around things that no longer need defending, from moving zero-sum in a world that's turning positive-sum, from institutions too slow to catch people as the ground moves under them. The transition doesn't have to be cruel. We make it cruel when we run old software on new hardware.

So this piece has one job: help you actually see it. Not to sell you a destiny — there is no destiny here, and anyone who tells you the good ending is guaranteed is lying to you or to themselves. Just to close the imagination gap enough that you can lead through it well, and hurt fewer people doing it.

What Abundance Practically Looks Like

A note before the tour: abundance does not mean "everything is free and nobody works." It means the cost floor of a thing collapses — the raw price of producing one more unit falls toward zero — and when that happens, the entire structure built on top of the old price starts to wobble. Scarcity doesn't vanish everywhere at once; it moves. Some things get radically cheaper while attention, trust, judgment, land, and status stay scarce or get more scarce. Watch for that pattern in every domain: the floor drops, the constraint moves.

Energy — when the price of a kilowatt-hour keeps falling

The clearest, best-documented collapse we have is solar. A solar module cost around $106 per watt in 1976; by 2024 it was roughly $0.10 per watt — a fall of more than 99%. This follows a learning curve so consistent it has a name, Swanson's Law: roughly a 20% cost drop for every doubling of cumulative capacity. Batteries are walking the same road — lithium-ion pack prices fell from about $1,200/kWh in 2010 to $108/kWh in 2025, roughly a 90% decline.

The honest caveat: the module is not the system, and the cost of firming intermittent sun into reliable power is the biggest asterisk on every "cheapest electricity in history" headline. But even so, IRENA found that in 2024 solar averaged 41% cheaper than the cheapest new fossil option, and 91% of new renewable capacity undercut every fossil alternative. What it looks like when this keeps going: energy stops being a line you optimize and becomes a thing you assume. The constraint moves from generating power to storing, moving, and timing it.

Intelligence & knowledge — when reasoning gets cheap

This is the fast one, and the one people most underestimate. The price to run a GPT-3.5-level model fell from about $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to roughly $0.07 by late 2024 — more than a 280-fold drop in about 18 months. Meanwhile the compute needed to reach a given level of performance is halving roughly every eight months through algorithmic progress alone.

Here's the part that matters for leaders: the floor and the ceiling are moving in opposite directions. The cost of yesterday's frontier capability collapses toward zero, while the cost of training tomorrow's frontier is rising about 2.4× per year. Abundance at the floor, concentration at the frontier. And a new scarcity rises in its place: judgment. When answers are cheap, knowing which questions to ask, which answers to trust, and what's wise becomes the rare thing. (This is the bet in one line: wisdom is the scarcest resource in an age of cheap intelligence.)

Labor & productivity — when the same person does far more

The early studies are unusually consistent. AI assistance raised customer-support productivity about 14% on average — but 34% for the least-experienced workers. A writing study found task time fell 40% and quality rose 18%. Developers completed a task 56% faster. The robust finding isn't "AI makes everyone a bit faster." It's that AI compresses the skill distribution — it lifts the novice most. That's genuinely hopeful: the person with the least training gains the most. It's also destabilizing: if a novice with AI performs like an expert, what happens to the wage premium the expert spent a decade earning?

The honest caution: don't confuse the lab with the economy. US labor productivity has not yet shown a clear AI surge. Which brings the most important historical lesson in this whole piece: capability shows up years before measured productivity does. The lag is the norm, not the exception.

Goods, healthcare, education, food, finance

The same rhythm repeats. Robots getting cheaper and more general (density doubled in seven years; Amazon crossed a million warehouse robots). Diagnostic capability that used to live only inside expensive specialists becoming a near-free first layer for anyone with a phone. A patient tutor that never tires, adapts to each learner, and costs fractions of a cent — the closest thing to a silver bullet education's access problem has ever had. Cheap energy plus AI-optimized agriculture pushing toward abundant, local food. And when the cost of moving money and coordinating strangers falls toward zero, the expensive intermediaries built on those frictions get repriced.

A Probabilistic Timeline — a Map, Not a Prophecy

Everything below is a probability map, not a prophecy. No one — not the labs, not the economists, not this document — knows the timing. What follows is an honest attempt to attach rough odds to ranges, grounded in the cost curves above and in the one thing history is actually clear about: transformative technology shows up as capability years, often decades, before it shows up as broad, measured prosperity.

The best-documented case is electrification. Electric power was demonstrably useful by the 1880s. Yet by 1899 electric lighting reached only about 3% of US homes. The productivity payoff didn't arrive until the 1920s — roughly forty years later — and only after factories stopped bolting electric motors onto steam-era layouts and redesigned the whole building around what electricity made possible. The lesson: the technology working is not the hard part. Reorganizing everything around it is the hard part, and that's where the years go.

Near horizon (~0–5 years)

Base case. Cheap intelligence diffuses fast into knowledge work; energy and battery costs keep falling; robotics stays mostly behind factory walls. Measured economy-wide gains stay modest and hard to see — the reorganization lag is real. Displacement begins at the edges faster than new roles appear. Optimistic: a genuine productivity surge shows up early as the novice-lift effect scales. Pessimistic: gains concentrate hard and fast; the people hit first have the least cushion.

Mid horizon (~5–15 years)

Base case. Where the electrification analogy predicts the real payoff starts — organizations, not just tools, get redesigned around cheap intelligence. Distribution of those gains is the open question, and on current trajectory it tilts toward concentration unless something deliberate changes it. Optimistic: broad-based abundance becomes visible and felt across energy, education, healthcare access, and goods. Pessimistic: the frontier/floor split hardens into permanent structure; gains flow overwhelmingly to capital. This is close to what happens by default.

Long horizon (~15–30+ years)

Honesty demands humility here: beyond ~15 years, confidence collapses. Two genuinely different worlds are both live. The abundance world: cost floors fall so far that material scarcity for basic needs becomes a solved engineering problem; meaning, relationship, and wisdom become the whole human economy; the greatest reduction in human suffering ever. The concentration world: the same technical abundance exists, but it's captured — material goods cheap, access and dignity withheld. Not a machine dystopia. A human one.

Which world we get is not determined by the technology. The technology produces the abundance either way. Whether it becomes a gift or a catastrophe is a question of choices — about distribution, about power, about who we decide counts. If the outcome were fixed, there'd be nothing to lead. It isn't fixed. So there is.

Where the Harm Comes From

If abundance is coming, why would anyone get hurt? The instinct is that more of everything means fewer people in need. But the transition is not the destination, and the harm in a transition comes less from the new world than from the old habits we drag into it. Old software, new hardware. Specifically:

Hoarding what's becoming abundant. When something is scarce, holding it is prudent. When it's about to be abundant, holding it — restricting access, gating it behind old prices — actively withholds from people who could benefit now at almost no cost to you. The gap between what a thing costs to provide and what we still charge for it becomes a measure of harm.

Defending obsolete moats. Every dollar and law spent defending a moat around something that no longer needs to be scarce is a dollar spent manufacturing scarcity that didn't have to exist — and someone downstream pays, usually the person who could least afford the old price.

Zero-sum moves in a positive-sum world. Many goods now going abundant are network goods — more valuable as more people share them. Playing zero-sum with a positive-sum good destroys value that would have compounded for everyone, including you.

Institutions too slow to catch people as the floor moves. Displacement can move at software speed; safety nets move at institutional speed. That gap, at scale, is suffering. Not malice — latency.

And who gets hurt first? The same people the old scarcity systems already left at the bottom. The top 1% of Americans holds about 31.9% of the wealth; the bottom 50% holds about 2.5%. Since 1979, net productivity grew about 92% while typical worker pay grew about 34%. The IMF's read on AI specifically is blunt: about 40% of jobs globally are exposed, and it "will likely worsen overall inequality."

The default path of a productivity revolution, on the evidence we already have, is concentration. This is the tragedy the mission exists to fight. Not the machines — us, running scarcity habits in an abundance world, and letting the people who can least afford it pay the transition costs. The harm is not inevitable. But it is the default. And the default is what happens when no one who can see it decides to lead.

The Decision Framework — Five Checks

This is the part to bookmark. Run any significant decision — a product call, a pricing choice, a hire, an automation, an investment, a strategy — through these five checks, in order. None is a formula that decides for you. Each surfaces the scarcity-era reflex before you act on it.

The Incentive Case — Why This Is Also Just Smart

Everything above could read as a moral appeal. It's also, on the merits, the pragmatic play — the case for the leader who is a realist first and a saint never.

Early honest movers compound; moat-defenders decay. Defending a melting moat is negative-return work; the moat melts anyway, and you spent your best years slowing it down instead of building the next thing. Positive-sum goods punish zero-sum players — hoarding a network good caps its value and hands the compounding advantage to whoever shares it more openly. Aligned incentives are cheaper to run than misaligned ones; the structure does the work willpower otherwise has to. Trust is the scarce asset of the abundance age — when everyone can generate a confident-sounding answer, being right and being trusted is the rare thing. And the tail risk cuts toward decency: a world where most people are economically unnecessary to the owners is not a safe world to be wealthy in. Helping the most isn't only the right bet. Across the full distribution of outcomes, it's the robust one.

The Bridge

So here's where I've landed, and I'll give it to you straight.

I think abundance is likely coming, and coming faster than most of us can picture. Not guaranteed — I won't tell you it's guaranteed, because it isn't, and anyone who promises you the good ending is selling something. But the cost of the things that used to be scarce is falling in front of our eyes, and most people can't yet see what that actually means. That's the imagination gap. And in that gap, real people get hurt — not by the technology, but by the rest of us clinging to old habits while the ground moves.

That's the whole reason this work exists. Not to predict the future — to help bridge it. The vulnerable get hurt first in every transition in history. They don't have to this time. But "don't have to" only becomes "didn't" if the people who can see it early decide to lead.

I'm not writing this from a mountaintop. I'm not technical, I don't have it all figured out, and plenty of what's here will be wrong in places and get updated as the ground shifts. I'm just someone who looked at where this is going, felt the weight of how much good and how much harm are both on the table, and couldn't not try.

And I'll name the quiet thing underneath all of it, because leaving it out would be its own kind of dishonesty. I believe every good thing — the abundance included — flows from a Source. We use business as a tool to serve God's ends and the people He loves, especially the most vulnerable. Not God as a tool to serve the business. That order matters, and it's the keystone that holds the whole thing up: the moment you flip it, you're back to running scarcity software, just with nicer language on it. I'm not asking you to share the faith to use the frameworks; they stand on their own. I'm just telling you where I actually stand, because you deserve the true version.

So: run the five checks. Move early, but not reckless. Keep the vulnerable at the center, not the afterthought. Point your incentives the same direction as the people you serve. And when it's not clear, say so, pray on it if that's your way, and take the wise shot anyway.

Even if we get it wrong in places, we have to try. And I don't think we're going to fail — because when we play, we play to win, and the win here is a world where abundance actually reaches the ones who've always been last.

Point it toward the good. Hold the door for the next person in.
The house fills one person at a time.

— by [AUTHOR — CONFIRM] · The ReThink