Is the abundance brought by AI a trap?
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Is the abundance brought by AI a trap?
Economist: Wealth distribution is the biggest challenge.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Ben Spies-Butcher
Translation: Metaverse Heart
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a defining technology of our era, yet how it will ultimately shape our future remains highly contested.
For technological optimists, AI is seen as a tool to improve lives and heralds a future of material abundance.
However, this outcome is far from certain. Even if AI realizes its technical potential and solves previously intractable problems, how will this "abundance" be used?
In Australia's food economy, we can already see this contradiction on a smaller scale. According to Australian government data, the country wastes approximately 7.6 million tonnes of food annually, amounting to about 312 kilograms per person.
At the same time, one in eight Australians experiences food insecurity, primarily because they lack sufficient money to buy the food they need.
What does this reveal? It shows our inability to fairly distribute the abundant outcomes promised by the AI revolution.
AI Could Break Existing Economic Models
As economist Lionel Robbins articulated when laying the foundations of modern market economics: economics studies the relationship between "ends (what we want)" and "scarce means which have alternative uses (what we have)."
The logic of markets is considered to be "allocating scarce resources among unlimited wants." Scarcity influences prices—the cost people are willing to pay for goods and services—and the necessity of spending to meet basic needs forces (most) people to earn money through work, while simultaneously producing more goods and services.
The promise of AI—bringing abundance and solving complex medical, engineering, and social problems—stands in irreconcilable tension with this market logic.
This also directly relates to concerns that "technology will lead to millions losing their jobs." If paid work disappears, how will people earn money? And how will markets function?
Meeting Our Needs and Desires
Yet, job losses are not caused solely by technology. A relatively unique feature of market economies is that even when resources appear plentiful, widespread unmet needs can still occur through unemployment or low wages.
As economist John Maynard Keynes revealed: recessions and depressions may be products of the market system itself, leaving many in poverty even when raw materials, factories, and labor sit idle.
Australia’s most recent economic downturn was not triggered by market failure but by a public health crisis due to the pandemic. Yet this crisis revealed a potential solution to the economic challenges posed by technology-driven abundance.
Government policies such as increased benefit payments, suspension of work tests, and relaxed means testing significantly alleviated poverty and food insecurity, even as economic output declined.
Similar measures were adopted globally, with over 200 countries introducing cash transfer programs. This experience during the pandemic further strengthened calls to link technological progress with universal basic income.
The Australian Basic Income Lab, a joint initiative by Macquarie University, the University of Sydney, and the Australian National University, is focusing research on this very issue.
If everyone received a guaranteed income sufficient to cover basic needs, market economies might transition more smoothly, and the benefits of technological advancement could be more widely shared.
Welfare or Entitlement?
When discussing universal basic income, we must be clear about definitions. Some versions of basic income schemes could still result in vast wealth inequality.
My colleagues at the Australian Basic Income Lab, Elise Klein, and Stanford professor James Ferguson argue that basic income should not be designed as "welfare," but rather as an "entitlement."
They contend that wealth created through technological progress and social cooperation is the collective product of human labor and should be equally accessible to all as a fundamental human right—just as we regard a nation’s natural resources as collective property.
Debates around basic income predate the current issues raised by AI. In early 20th century Britain, similar concerns emerged: industrialization and automation drove economic growth but failed to eliminate poverty, instead threatening employment.
Earlier still, the Luddites sought to destroy new machines that suppressed wages. While market competition may drive innovation, it also demonstrates extreme imbalance in distributing the risks and rewards of technological change.
Universal Basic Services
Beyond resisting AI, another solution is to transform the socioeconomic system through which AI's benefits are distributed. British writer Aaron Bastani proposes a radical vision of "fully automated luxury communism."
He welcomes technological progress, believing it should raise living standards while granting people more leisure time. His vision is a radical version of the "modest goal" described in the recently popular book *Abundance*, favored by the UK Labour government.
Bastani prefers not universal basic income, but universal basic services.
Rather than giving people money to purchase what they need, why not provide essential goods directly—such as free healthcare, care services, transportation, education, and energy?
Of course, this would mean changing how AI and other technologies are applied—effectively "socializing" their use to ensure technology meets collective needs.
Utopia Is Not Inevitable
Proposals like universal basic income or universal basic services show that even under optimistic assumptions, AI alone is unlikely to bring utopia.
Instead, as Peter Frase argues: the combination of technological advancement and ecological collapse may produce vastly different futures. These differences lie not just in our collective productive capacity, but in how political decisions determine "who gets what" and "under what conditions."
Technology companies run by billionaires wield immense power, suggesting a future closer to what former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis calls "techno-feudalism," where control over technology and online platforms spawns new forms of authoritarianism.
Waiting for a technological "nirvana" risks missing real possibilities available today. We already possess enough food to feed everyone and already know how to eradicate poverty. None of this requires AI to tell us so.
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