The Age of Abundance: When AI Eats the Software That Ate the World

I don’t think people fully understand what’s happening right now.

We are not living through another industrial revolution. We are living through the dissolution of everything we thought industry meant. The AI age isn’t a chapter in human progress it’s the prologue to an entirely new civilization.

For the first time in history, we are entering an age of abundance. An era where scarcity itself begins to vanish.

From Scarcity to Superabundance

Every human system from economics to education, from art to architecture has been built on one foundational assumption: scarcity. There is not enough time, not enough money, not enough resources, not enough energy. Entire nations rise and fall on the premise that something, somewhere, must be limited.

Artificial intelligence dismantles that premise.

For centuries, technology has automated production making things faster, cheaper, and more accessible. But AI is doing something radically different. It is automating imagination. It is automating intelligence. And in doing so, it’s dissolving the walls that once separated producers from consumers, thinkers from doers, builders from dreamers.

This is not about replacing jobs. It’s about replacing the very logic of human work itself.

AI doesn’t simply make things — it makes making things obsolete.

The Collapse of the Departmental World

Consider marketing — the department that once connected human desire to human production. Entire industries were built around understanding what people wanted and convincing them to buy it. But when AI understands your preferences better than you do, when it can create and deliver the product instantly, the entire concept of marketing dissolves.

We will not have marketing departments in the world that’s coming. We will have ecosystems that are self-sustaining, self-correcting, self-optimizing flows of information and creation.

The same will happen across every discipline. The borders between business, science, art, and engineering are already blurring into a single continuous intelligence. The organizational chart collapses into a network. And in that network, value doesn’t move in transactions it emerges. Read more here: Human Resources Is No Longer Your Strategy

Automation of Everything

It’s easy to understand AI automating production. Machines can build, design, and distribute. That part is visible.

What’s less visible and far more revolutionary is that AI will also automate consumption and exchange.

Imagine a world where systems understand your patterns of need, preference, and context not as data to exploit, but as information to harmonize. You won’t “buy” things. You’ll simply exist within a flow of fulfillment, where goods and services move through you like air through lungs.

Now extend that one step further. The exchange of value — what we now call “currency” — becomes automated too. Digital currencies, smart contracts, and AI-managed economies will coordinate global trade without human intermediaries. Value will move at the speed of thought.

In that sense, AI is not just automating what we do. It’s automating how we live.

When Software Eats Itself

For decades, Silicon Valley has lived by a mantra: “We build software that eats the world.”

That phrase described how code replaced everything: manufacturing, media, communication, commerce. But what’s happening now is more profound.

Artificial intelligence is eating the software that ate the world.

The tools that once built empires of code are being devoured by systems that learn, adapt, and rewrite themselves. Software was our attempt to capture intelligence in lines of logic. AI is intelligence liberated from logic altogether.

This isn’t just evolution. It’s metamorphosis. The caterpillar isn’t becoming a better crawler, it’s becoming something with wings.

The End of Economics as We Know It

When production, consumption, and exchange are all automated, what happens to the economy? To work? To wealth?

We stand on the edge of a civilization where abundance renders competition obsolete. In the age of scarcity, we needed markets to allocate resources. In the age of abundance, allocation itself becomes irrelevant. Everyone has access to everything they need and more than they can ever consume.

This doesn’t mean utopia. It means transformation. It means we must redefine meaning itself because the human story has always been told through struggle and scarcity. When both disappear, we must learn to live by new myths.

The New Myth: Humanity Reversed

In my work across sustainability, and systems innovation, I’ve come to see that what we’re building is not just smarter machines. We are building machines that can think, and they are intelligent beyond our own understanding.

When machines can think, execute, and manage at this level we must ask: what is left for humans to do?

The answer is both simple and sacred: to be human.

We are going to design new ways of living that honor balance — between nature and machine, between intelligence and wisdom, between what can be made and what should be made and what do we do with our free time. Read more here: The Future of Work and the Paradox of More Free Time and here: The Future of Work: Rethinking How We Produce, Distribute, Consume, and Manage Our Daily Lives

This is why I’ve been drawn to creating frameworks and spaces that preserve and amplify our uniquely human capacity. Because in the age of automation at this scale, the age of abundance, the one thing that remains irreplaceable is humanity.

The Invitation

So here we are standing on the edge of something not even science fiction dared to imagine. The world that’s coming will not resemble the one we know. It will be different. Unimaginably different.

But that’s not something to fear.

It’s something to build. We are building our future.

Those who understand what’s unfolding — who recognize the shift from scarcity to abundance, from systems of control to systems of flow — will become the architects of the next human epoch.

We are entering the age where humanity reclaims its creative birthright not as laborers of the world, but as designers of reality itself.

This is different.

Think different. Live different.

🤝🆙

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