(image: Timon Studler for Unsplash)
On February 15 a technology blueprint was published online titled “ Solve Everything “. The subtitle was more interesting. It read “Achieving Abundance by 2035”. It is 92 pages long, carefully considered, well written, deeply researched. It has attracted a fair bit of both praise and derision because of the scope of its ambition. It is optimism writ large. It says, in short, AI will cure all of humanity’s ills and satisfy all our material needs and it has already started.
As I read through this document, I felt my scepticism start to glow hot. What fools, I thought, to imagine the end of history so soon, and the rise of an endless utopia for all living things. But then another realisation dawned. Many of us fall squarely on the side of AI pessimism. Mass unemployment, tech bros getting even richer, mental health collapsing, the rule of misinformation, autonomous weapons, government surveillance. The dark side of AI has taken up residence in our heads, and many of us, including those smart people who are paid handsomely to think about these things, are in various states of despair.
And now we have a couple of smart guys coming along and carefully outlining the utopian side of AI? Good on them! Let’s give them oxygen! A pox on my scepticism!
Grand designs like this pop up from time to time but what gave this one ballast is the reputation of its authors — Dr Alex Wissner-Gross and Dr Peter Diamandis. Wissner-Gross is a physicist, computer scientist, entrepreneur and investor, founder and chief scientist of Physical Superintelligence, whose work sits at the intersection of AI and the physical world. Diamandis is a serial entrepreneur and futurist, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE and the executive founder of Singularity University.
Both are respected, sought after, brimming with cred.
They are part of a loose collective called the abundance movement. This is not an organised movement so much as a recurring mood among technologists, founders, investors and futurists. Their members vary in temperament and politics, but they share a belief that most of humanity’s supposedly permanent constraints are yielding, one by one, to the ingenuity of new technologies like AI. Scarcity, in this reading, is less a law of nature than a temporary engineering failure. And scarcity, that cruel constraint of human aspiration and thriving, is about to give way to abundance.
Rather than dive into the weeds of the Solve Everything paper, consider a few takeaways from the domains in which they see an imminent “solution”.
Take a breath and skim this list -
● organ abundance
● double human healthspan
● end hunger with synthetic food systems
● AI-empowered education for all
● high-bandwidth brain-computer interfaces
● demonstrate human mind uploading
● interspecies communication and uplift
● understanding human consciousness
● disaster prediction and avoidance
● steward and upgrade Earth’s ecosystems
● clean-energy abundance
● functional high-logical-qubit quantum computers
● true nanotechnology
● permanent human expansion into Earth-Moon-Mars-asteroid ecosystem
● solve fundamental physics
The paper goes further than just listing these targets (or what some might euphemistically call stretch targets). It explains, at least briefly, exactly how AI will solve each one of them. None are, in principle, unrealistic aspirations. The only debate is timeline and our ability to equitably distribute the spoils.
The authors’ timeline is that all of these will be solved within 10 years. The future, in their reckoning, has become telescoped. And while it might be easy to throw cold water all over the blueprint, it did not arrive in a vacuum. Abundance thinking has a long intellectual heritage.
Buckminster Fuller, the maverick architect and systems thinker, was perhaps the first to argue systematically in the 1960s and 70s that humanity already possessed sufficient resources to provide a comfortable standard of living for every person on earth; the problem was not scarcity but distribution and design. His concept of “ephemeralisation” — doing more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing — planted a seed that would flower decades later.
The next important tributary was the digital revolution. Stewart Brand’s famous aphorism from the 1984 Hackers Conference, “information wants to be free,” pointed toward something economists would struggle to accommodate — a good that could be copied at zero marginal cost, a product that did not diminish when shared. The internet did not merely reduce the cost of information; it challenged the foundational premise of classical scarcity theory. Kevin Kelly, Brand’s colleague at Wired magazine and one of the most lucid early theorists of networked culture, argued in his 1994 book Out of Control that digital networks created dynamics of increasing returns rather than diminishing ones.
And then in 2012 Diamandis co-wrote a book called Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. In it he argued, with evangelical confidence, that exponential technologies were on the verge of solving humanity’s grandest challenges: disease, hunger, water scarcity, energy poverty. The book became a manifesto for a generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors. Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen and their ideological successors absorbed its central claim — that exponential growth in computing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, and renewable energy would unlock a post-scarcity world within their lifetimes.
And that was 10 years before ChatGPT and the swarm of AI innovations buzzing around us now. One can only imagine Diamandis’s satisfaction at having been an early prophet of things to come.
There is genuine empirical substance beneath the enthusiastic rhetorical confidence of the abundance theorists. The historical record of the past two centuries is, by any reasonable measure, a story of accelerating abundance — at least in aggregate. Life expectancy has more than doubled. Extreme poverty, measured as a share of global population, has fallen from above 80 per cent in 1800 to below 10 per cent today. Caloric availability per person has increased even as agricultural land use has stabilised and, in some regions, declined. The number of people who have died from famine as a share of global population has collapsed toward statistical noise. These are not small gains; they are civilisational transformations, achieved largely through exactly the mechanisms the abundance theorists celebrate — promiscuous technological innovation, the spread of information, and the harnessing of new energy sources.
In researching the abundance movement, I found plenty of smart detractors who were aggressive and surgical in their takedowns, accusing this august group of magical thinking across multiple axes.
But just this once, let’s go with it. Let’s imagine they are right. Let’s imagine the best possible future for us all. Just for today. Tomorrow we can begin to worry again.
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, Daily Friend and Currency News. His new book “It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership” is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.
Originally published at https://stevenboykeysidley.substack.com.
The Giddy Side of AI was originally published in DataDrivenInvestor on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
