Can AI Make Us More Human?
Realizing Polanyi's Promise in a Post Scarcity World
Introduction
Advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are rapidly driving the cost of producing goods and services toward zero, heralding the possibility of a post-scarcity economy. In such a future, basic needs could be met with minimal human labor, fulfilling the utopian vision where “anything and everything [is] available for practically nothing”. As early as 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes imagined technological progress enabling a 15-hour workweek and pondered how people would find purpose with so much leisure. This essay argues that as material abundance frees humanity from survival labor, people will seek meaning through age-old human constants: rituals, craft-making, and intentional community. In a world where survival is assured, value will gravitate toward that which is rare, unique, and imbued with human touch – echoing anthropological patterns across history. We will draw on insights from economic history, anthropology, art theory, and technology studies – from Karl Polanyi’s vision of an embedded economy to Hannah Arendt’s distinctions of human activity, David Graeber’s critique of “bullshit jobs,” Kevin Kelly’s post-scarcity value theory, and Marshall McLuhan’s cultural foresight – to explore why craft and culture may become paramount in an age of abundance. Finally, we address the strongest counterpoint: the risk that limitless comfort could breed apathy or nihilism instead of a creative renaissance, and examine why human nature and social design may avert that fate
From Scarcity to Abundance: The Economic Trajectory
Human economies have always been structured around scarcity – the struggle to allocate limited resources. Post-scarcity theory suggests this paradigm is poised to shift. Emerging technologies like advanced AI, robotics, renewable “free” energy, and molecular manufacturing are steadily reducing the marginal cost of many goods and services to near zero. In the digital realm, this is already evident: information can be copied and distributed essentially for free. Futurist Kevin Kelly observes that “when copies are super abundant, they become worthless; [when] copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied”. In other words, as production becomes frictionless and automated, economic value shifts away from the products themselves and toward intangible qualities – trust, authenticity, uniqueness. This foreshadows an economy where mass-produced material goods are cheap or free, and uniqueness becomes the chief source of worth.
Economic historian Karl Polanyi would recognize this moment as an opportunity to re-embed the economy in social relations. Polanyi observed that in pre-market societies, economic activities like production and exchange were governed by social needs, reciprocity, and ritual, rather than pure profit motive. “Man’s economy,” he wrote, “is submerged in his social relationships,” and he warned that a society that lets market mechanisms alone dictate human fate would suffer a “demolition of society”. The Industrial Revolution’s drive for efficiency uprooted traditional crafts and communal bonds, subordinating social values to market prices. Yet Polanyi’s “double movement” theory suggests that society pushes back: when market forces disembed the economy from human needs, people seek to re-align economic life with social well-being. A post-scarcity age – where material prosperity no longer demands constant toil – could enable a grand re-embedding. Freed from serving the market for survival, economic activity can be repurposed to serve societal and cultural needs. In Polanyi’s terms, we may shift “from an economy of having towards an economy of being,” using material plenty as a means to richer social ends.
Already today, we see hints of this shift. The rise of the “sharing economy” (however imperfect in practice) and open-source production points to a collaborative ethos beyond ownership. Jeremy Rifkin argues that by mid-21st century, the dominant “arbiter of economic life” could be the Collaborative Commons, wherein networks of individuals share and create value collectively as centralized capitalist structures wane. While skeptics note that current “sharing economy” platforms often perpetuate traditional profit models, the broader trend Rifkin highlights is a move toward decentralized, abundant provision. In a sense, this harks back to older modes: commons-based resource management and gift economies. The essential point is that as scarcity recedes, the basis of value and motivation changes. What happens when profit and survival are no longer the main drivers? The thesis here is that humans will redirect their striving toward cultural, creative, and social pursuits that reaffirm their humanity.
Anthropological Constants: Ritual and Craft in Human Societies
Anthropology teaches that throughout history, in every culture, humans have created meaning through ritual, art, and communal endeavors, regardless of material circumstance. Even in societies with scarce resources, people devote significant time and energy to symbolic and aesthetic pursuits – festivals, ceremonies, craftsmanship, storytelling, and art. These activities satisfy deeper psychological and social needs: cohesion, identity, the experience of the sacred or sublime. In fact, when early observers assumed that hunter-gatherers lived lives of unrelenting struggle, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins overturned that notion with his insight of the “original affluent society.” Hunter-gatherers, Sahlins showed, often met their needs with moderate effort and then chose not to maximize production, instead valuing leisure and social life. Their affluence was not about having endless material goods, but about not needing more than what sufficed. Rather than accumulate surpluses, many foraging societies optimized for free time to spend on leisure, ritual, socializing and play. In these cultures, once subsistence was secured, hours were dedicated to community dances, elaborate mythologies, beadwork, body art, and oral storytelling – all activities rich in meaning but unrelated to increasing material output. As one anthropological summary puts it, for many hunter-gatherers the goal was not continuously increasing production, but to enjoy “plenty of time for leisure, ritual, social relations, and entertainment”. This suggests that the impulse to craft meaning beyond material necessity is a human constant. When basic needs are met, we turn to culture.
History provides many parallels of material plenty enabling a flourishing of craft and culture. Ancient Athens, to take a famous example, built its Golden Age on the backs of abundant resources and slave labor that freed its citizens for philosophy, drama, and civic life. Hannah Arendt notes that the Greeks distinguished the banausic labor needed for survival from the higher pursuits of work (poiesis, the creation of lasting things like art or architecture) and action (engagement in the public realm). In The Human Condition, Arendt updates this distinction to modern terms, warning of a society fixated on labor at the expense of more meaningful activities. She foresaw that automation – effectively a realized post-scarcity of labor – could liberate humanity from toil only to confront us with an existential challenge: “a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and [which] no longer knows of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won”. In other words, if we do not remember how to engage in art, craftsmanship, citizenship, and thought (Arendt’s “work” and “action”), the victory of automation could be hollow. The lesson from both ancient and modern thinkers is that material liberation must be accompanied by cultural and ethical renewal. Fortunately, the seeds of that renewal may lie in our very past and nature – as anthropologist David Graeber observed, humans find joy in doing things that have tangible meaning, in being the cause of an effect in the world.
Across cultures, craftsmanship has been a reservoir of human meaning. Making things by hand – whether pottery, weaving, carving, or coding open-source software – is often more than an economic act; it is a ritual of creation. Craft traditions around the world embed stories, lineages, and spiritual significance into the objects produced. Before industrial mass production, a crafted object carried the signature of the maker and the heritage of the community. Even in highly developed market economies, we see recurrent “arts and crafts” movements that rebel against the impersonality of industrial goods. The late 19th-century Arts and Crafts Movement (figures like William Morris and John Ruskin) valorized medieval-style craftsmanship as a response to the dehumanizing effects of factories. They argued that the value of an object lies not just in its utility but in the human creativity and care invested in it – the “human touch.” In our own time, decades into mass consumer society, there has been a marked resurgence of interest in artisan goods: farm-to-table food, handmade furniture, bespoke clothing, analog vinyl records, you name it. Sociologist Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, suggests that craft – the dedication to doing something well for its own sake – provides intrinsic satisfaction and a sense of mastery and meaning that standardized mass-production jobs often do not. All this indicates that even when cheaper, easier options exist, people often prefer the difficult, slow, or skillful path because it is rich in meaning. In a post-scarcity future, the hypothesis is that this preference becomes even more pronounced: we will choose the meaningful over the merely efficient.
Rarity, Uniqueness, and the Value of the Human Touch
As AI and automation flood society with inexpensive commodities and flawless digital goods, what will we value most? Kevin Kelly’s insight offers a clear answer: we will prize what cannot be easily copied or automated. When every song, book, or design can be replicated infinitely at no cost, authenticity and rarity become the new gold. We already see this in digital culture – for example, the rise of limited-edition digital art and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) can be viewed as a clumsy early attempt to instill uniqueness and ownership in a world of endless copyability. Kelly enumerates “generative” values that are “better than free”: things like immediacy, personalization, trust, and authenticity. All of these relate to a human dimension that mass replication can’t supply. Immediacy means a relationship in time (e.g. live experiences). Personalization implies a human understanding of another’s needs. Trust is inherently social and earned. And authenticity – perhaps the most poignant – refers to the aura of the original and the real.
The concept of “aura” was famously discussed by art theorist Walter Benjamin. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), Benjamin argued that mechanical mass production diminishes the aura of art – the unique presence that an original artwork has by virtue of its authenticity and ritual context. A painting has an aura; a perfect print of it does not. As reproduction technologies advanced, Benjamin saw art’s ties to ritual and tradition (the sources of aura) being eroded. In a sense, the scenario of AI manufacturing and ubiquitous 3D printing is the extension of mechanical reproduction to all goods and services – potentially eroding the “aura” of everything. One can imagine a future where any design, from a Gucci handbag to a gourmet meal recipe or even a legal brief, can be generated or duplicated by AI on demand. The cost of each additional copy is virtually zero, but at the same time, copies have no story. They lack the narrative of who made them and why, the human intention and effort that give objects social meaning. We already recognize this implicitly: a mass-produced chair from a factory might be perfectly functional, but a hand-carved chair made by a grandfather is treasured, even if the factory chair is cheaper and flawless. Its flaws and quirks are part of its value – evidence of a human story.
In a post-scarcity economy, what is abundant has little value; what is scarce is precious. Paradoxically, authentic human presence and labor may become scarce. When AI can produce most things more efficiently than people, human-made items will become luxury goods – valued not for their perfection, but for their inefficiency and individuality. We see a foretaste of this in the market for handmade or artisanal products today, which command premium prices precisely because they are not mass produced. There is also a renewed interest in “the experience economy” – people are spending more on unique experiences (travel, festivals, workshops) rather than on accumulating goods, indicating that singular moments and memories are valued over generic products. Post-scarcity theorists often highlight that intangibles – creativity, design, brand, story – will dominate value creation when production is cheap. Indeed, as Marshall McLuhan presciently noted, when technology creates a global village, we do not all become homogeneous – we often reach for distinct identities and tribal affiliations. McLuhan predicted that electronic connectivity would retrieve aspects of an earlier oral and tribal culture. We can observe this in phenomena as varied as the surge of craft beer breweries, local farmers’ markets, handmade soap boutiques, vintage barbershops and bespoke cocktails – a whole artisanal hipster subculture that values the local, the crafted, and the intentional over the mass-produced. “His Global Village is happening everywhere,” one commentator writes of McLuhan’s vision, “It’s in every craft beer you drink, every food truck you eat at, [every] artisanal soap [you] buy… The craft and artisanal resurgence is [here]”. These trends suggest that the more high-tech our world becomes, the more people cherish the low-tech, the slow, and the rare. It is a form of cultural counter-balancing: digital oversaturation breeds a hunger for analog authenticity.
Art, too, may undergo a transformation. With AI capable of churning out competent images, music, and writing in seconds, one might think human artists will become obsolete. Yet an opposite reaction is likely: human art could become more valued than ever, precisely because a human chose to make it when they didn’t have to. Consider the 21st-century resurgence of analog photography and vinyl records – these media are objectively less convenient than digital photos or streaming music, but they have an aura of realness that appeals to enthusiasts. The act of choosing a slower, more laborious process can itself be seen as a meaningful ritual. Similarly, rituals and performances that involve live human presence (from theater and concerts to spiritual ceremonies) may gain heightened significance as “real” in contrast to perfectly simulated virtual experiences. In a post-scarcity society, participation and co-creation might become key markers of value: people will pay not for the product (which they can get free) but to be part of its making or to have a bespoke interaction. This aligns with Kelly’s point about generative values – for instance, embodiment (the value of a live experience with others, impossible to download) and patronage (the desire to support a creator) become economic drivers. When AI can write a poem on demand, the reason to attend a poetry reading is to experience a human spirit communicating something personally felt. The content might be replicable, but the context – the human presence and authenticity – is unique.
The Return to Craft and Art as Core Human Endeavors
With the drudgery of basic labor lifted by machines, humanity may experience a renaissance of craft, art, and other “labors of love.” Some futurists envision a society of “creators and curators” rather than laborers. In this optimistic trajectory, the energies that were once consumed by mundane work are redirected to creative projects, scientific exploration, caregiving, lifelong learning, and community building. Crucially, these activities would be pursued not for pay but for purpose – “work” becomes redefined as that which one chooses to do for fulfillment, rather than has to do for survival”. We can expect a blossoming of craftsmanship in both old and new forms: from pottery, woodworking, and textile arts to digital crafts like indie video game development or open-source hardware tinkering. The common thread is that the process of creation, the skill and care involved, will be a source of pride and identity.
In economic history, periods of increased leisure and wealth often spur cultural flourishing. The wealthy merchant classes of the Renaissance funded art and became hobbyist scholars; the post-World War II boom saw an explosion of popular music and youth culture when a generation had free time and resources. We may see something analogous on a broad scale: Maker culture and DIY (do-it-yourself) pursuits could shift from a niche hobby to a dominant ethos. If robots handle the farm-to-table supply chain, more people might take up gardening simply as a meaningful pastime. If AI manages construction, individuals might engage in building unique homes or community spaces as a creative outlet. The intentional community movement – groups that form communities around shared values or lifestyles – might also grow when people are not bound to jobs in specific cities. Already, we see experiments in eco-villages, co-living spaces, hacker collectives, and online communities that often have quasi-ritualistic gatherings (from Burning Man festivals to weekly maker meetups). With material scarcity gone, people will still crave belonging and shared purpose, so they will likely engineer new forms of community and ritual. Anthropologist Victor Turner noted that communal rituals create “communitas”, a special bond and equality among participants that transcends everyday social structure. In a post-scarcity future, humans may design new secular rituals – perhaps collaborative art projects, virtual reality shared adventures, or civic ceremonies – to fulfill the need for collective experience. The continuation of sports, even in wealthy societies, is a good example: sports are ritualized contests, not essential for survival, yet they command enormous passion and provide identity and community to millions. One can imagine future “rituals” taking forms we can scarcely predict (mass games, creative competitions, collective scientific endeavors framed ceremonially, etc.), but their function will rhyme with the oldest religious festivals: to bind people together and impart a sense of meaning larger than the self.
It’s important to emphasize that this cultural resurgence is not automatic or trivial – it will require education and values that encourage people to develop their capacities. Hannah Arendt’s challenge remains: if society does not remember “those other higher and more meaningful activities,” simple liberation from work could lead to emptiness. But there is reason for optimism. Even today, there is evidence that when people are given free time or a basic income floor, they do not all lapse into complacency. Pilot programs with Universal Basic Income (UBI) or shorter work weeks have shown many individuals using their freed hours to invest in family, hobbies, education, or creative entrepreneurship. The recent “Great Resignation” of 2021–2022, when millions of workers voluntarily left unsatisfying jobs, underscored that people hunger for meaningful engagement and will seek it out when they can afford to. We have an innate drive to learn, to play, to socialize, to make our mark – attributes that a well-designed post-scarcity society can harness. As David Graeber argued, much of the modern economy forces people into “bullshit jobs” that feel purposeless. Remove the need for those make-work positions, and an explosion of human creativity could result. Graeber noted that humans find great happiness in “being the cause” – in seeing their actions produce real effects in the world, and that when this capacity is taken away by meaningless roles, the result is depression and “listlessness”. By contrast, meaningful making – whether it’s crafting a table, writing open-source code, volunteering to mentor youth, or contributing to a community theater – provides that sense of agency and impact that Graeber and psychologists identify as key to well-being. In a future where machines handle necessity, it will be incumbent on individuals and communities to cultivate these avenues of meaningful action.
The Threat of Apathy and Nihilism: A Counterpoint
Not everyone shares this hopeful view of a craft-and-ritual renaissance. A serious counterpoint argues that human nature might instead lead us into stagnation, triviality, or despair when faced with endless abundance. Thinkers from Friedrich Nietzsche to C.G. Jung have voiced the worry that without the spur of necessity or struggle, humans could lose their sense of purpose and vitality. Nietzsche, for instance, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra caricatured the “Last Man” – a complacent being who lives in comfortable mediocrity, with no great ambitions or profound attachments, seeking only easy pleasure and security. This was meant as a cautionary image of what humanity might become in a scenario of fulfilled material needs but spiritual emptiness. Science fiction and literature have often echoed this fear: in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, society has stability and plenty, but at the cost of art, family, and true freedom; citizens dull their discontent with the drug soma, hinting that abundance can breed passivity and shallow hedonism. The animated film WALL-E likewise portrays humans in a post-scarcity future as infantilized consumers, morbidly obese in floating armchairs, amusing themselves to death with screens while robots do all the work.
These scenarios reflect a genuine psychological concern. Research in psychology draws a distinction between hedonic well-being (pleasure, comfort) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning, fulfillment). A society of effortless comfort might excel at providing the former but risk starving people of the latter. Without careful cultural scaffolding, one could imagine people indulging in endless entertainment, virtual reality escapism, or even chemically enhanced bliss – a perpetual distraction that leads to stagnation rather than growth. Behavioral scientists talk about the “hedonic treadmill”: when conditions get too comfortable, people often adapt and become restless or bored, seeking ever more stimulation to feel satisfied. In a world of ubiquitous plenty, that could translate into manufacturing new artificial “problems” or descending into anxiety and nihilism despite living in paradise. Indeed, some critics of UBI fear that without the structure of a job or external demands, some individuals would struggle with aimlessness, addiction, or despair. The Wired review of Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs notes this “faith” that people left to their own devices will find happiness, but cautions that freedom has its casualties, and some might make choices (like substance abuse) that lead to misery. This is a valid caution: history shows that when communities lose shared norms and challenges, social decay can follow. Emile Durkheim’s classic study of suicide, for example, found higher rates in societies where individuals felt anomie (normlessness) despite material wealth.
Another facet of this counterpoint is the danger of “distractive nihilism.” With infinite entertainment and information at our fingertips, people may lose the ability to concentrate on meaningful endeavors. The shallow dopamine hits of social media and video games might crowd out the deeper satisfaction of craft or study. We see early evidence of this in our current high-tech society: many worry that young people (and adults alike) are increasingly glued to trivial digital content, doomscrolling or binge-watching rather than engaging with the real world. If in the future you could spend all day in a perfectly curated virtual reality – a personally tailored fantasy more attractive than messy real life – would many choose to “plug out” and, say, volunteer at the local community center or painstakingly learn to play the violin? The counterpoint argues that without economic pressure, humans might not spontaneously strive for self-actualization; instead, many might take the path of least resistance, enjoying a life of effortless distractions provided by technology. The extreme version of this is a kind of mass apathy or even nihilism – a feeling that life is pointless because all challenges are gone, every material wish is granted instantly, and one is left confronting the abyss of meaning. This fear is encapsulated in the phrase some have used: “boredom in utopia.” Will abundance ironically bring a plague of boredom and depression?
Why Culture and Craft Will (Likely) Prevail
While the counterpoint is compelling and cannot be dismissed, there are strong reasons to believe that humans are not destined to become passive lotus-eaters. First, our evolutionary and historical background suggests that we are wired for challenge and creativity. Even when extrinsic pressures are removed, people often generate new goals for themselves. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, after all, noted that once basic physiological and safety needs are met, humans turn to “higher” needs: belonging, esteem, self-actualization. The entire field of positive psychology finds that people derive lasting satisfaction from growth, mastery, and connection, not from idle pleasure alone. Moreover, many of the dire predictions assume a scenario where culture remains static as technology leaps forward. In reality, society is likely to adapt its values and institutions to the new conditions. Already, thinkers and policymakers are considering how to cultivate purpose in an age of automation. This might involve educational systems that emphasize creativity, critical thinking, and arts from an early age (since rote professional training may become less relevant). It might involve new social norms that celebrate contributions in any field – whether one is an excellent parent, a community volunteer, or an open-source coder – as much as we today celebrate professional or financial success.
Importantly, preliminary evidence from real-world experiments undermines the assumption that people invariably become slothful when given free sustenance. The basic income experiments in places like Finland or Canada did not find recipients lapsing into indolence; many continued working on passion projects or improved their education and well-being. As cited earlier, when people gained free time in the pandemic-era Great Resignation, they often used it to search for more meaningful work or lifestyles. Humans, it turns out, want something to do. As one analysis succinctly put it, people need something to strive for and someone to share life with, even if a paycheck is no longer the motive. Long-term unemployment studies show life satisfaction drops if individuals do not replace work with other purposeful activity. In other words, boredom and aimlessness are painful for us, and so we are driven to alleviate them. That drive can indeed be hijacked by trivial entertainment, but it can also be guided towards constructive ends.
The task for a post-scarcity society will be fostering intrinsic motivation at scale. This is a cultural design problem: how to encourage each person to find a passion or project that excites them for its own sake. Here is where the return to craft, ritual, and community is so vital. These domains naturally generate intrinsic reward. Making art or mastering a craft yields a sense of competence and creative joy. Participating in communal rituals or collaborative projects provides relatedness – a sense of belonging and being valued by others. Being part of an intentional community working toward a shared goal (whether it’s running a local makerspace, conserving a piece of land, or putting on a festival) gives structure and meaning to one’s days. Self-Determination Theory in psychology tells us that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are key ingredients to human motivation and well-being. A world without enforced labor can actually enhance autonomy – people can choose their pursuits freely. If society also supports avenues for people to develop competencies (through education, apprenticeships in crafts or arts, etc.) and to form communities (through clubs, co-ops, communal spaces), then those psychological needs can be met in new ways. In such conditions, the majority of people are likely to flourish rather than flounder.
It is also worth noting that distraction and nihilism are not new problems – they exist today too, even under scarcity. Yet many people resist them and seek meaning. Consider that despite the availability of mindless entertainment, millions still dedicate themselves to challenging hobbies like ultra-marathons, intricate cosplay, citizen science, or competitive chess. We create voluntary hardships (like marathon races or mountain climbing or NaNoWriMo novel-writing month) precisely to challenge ourselves. This supports the view of existential philosophers like Nietzsche and Camus who suggested that if given paradise, humans might create struggle to imbue life with meaning (Camus’ metaphor of Sisyphus finding happiness in the struggle comes to mind). In a post-scarcity era, many may intentionally undertake arduous crafts or ambitious projects as their chosen “struggle.” Far from everyone dissolving into apathy, we might see new heights of human achievement – artistic, scientific, even spiritual – as individuals push boundaries not because they must, but because they feel called to. There will always be some who succumb to easy pleasures or existential angst (just as there are today), but with supportive cultural frameworks, they could be the exception rather than the rule.
Conclusion
As we stand on the brink of a world where machines and algorithms deliver unprecedented abundance, we are forced to confront fundamental questions of purpose and value. History and cross-disciplinary insight converge on a hopeful thesis: when survival is assured, humans will not simply languish – we will seek higher forms of fulfillment that reconnect us with timeless sources of meaning. Anthropologist David Graeber observed that our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense” – jobs and products that do not satisfy our deeper needs. The coming post-scarcity transition could sweep away much of that nonsense. Freed from compulsion, humanity can refocus on what really matters to us: our relationships, our creativity, our curiosity, and our communities. Karl Polanyi’s vision of re-embedding the economy in social relations may come full circle, as we use our material riches to strengthen social bonds and cultural expression rather than letting market dictates run rampant. Hannah Arendt’s “higher activities” – work as creativity and action as public spirit – may once again take center stage when the “fetters of labor” are broken.
Value, in the economic sense, will increasingly align with values in the human sense. Rarity, uniqueness, and human touch – whether in a handcrafted object or a face-to-face ritual – will be cherished in a way that mass-produced abundance cannot rival. We may measure wealth not by the accumulation of identical things, but by the diversity of experiences and creations one has cultivated. Influential tech writer Kevin Kelly sums it up: in a world of free copies, people will pay for what’s “better than free” – the experiences and artifacts that are generated in particular, local, love-infused ways. The human touch is the ineffable “better” in that equation.
To be sure, the road to this post-scarcity renaissance is not guaranteed to be smooth. It requires intentional choices: investing in education and cultural infrastructure, redefining social status to esteem creators and caregivers as much as financiers or tech executives, and perhaps most importantly, resisting the numbing allure of comfort. But if we succeed, the payoff is extraordinary. Imagine a civilization where art and craft are not peripheral, but central to life – where neighborhoods hum with workshops, studios, gardens, and gathering halls, and where the most admired achievements are in humanistic domains. Such a world echoes the past (when festivals, art, and ritual were the heartbeat of community) yet also transcends it, enabled by technological liberation. It is a world where, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins might smile to recognize, we have regained the leisure of the “original affluent society” and used it not for mere idle pleasure, but for a grand flourishing of culture.
In the end, the post-scarcity future confronts us with a question that is spiritual as much as economic: What is the purpose of prosperity? This essay has argued that the answer will be found in the enduring human impulses to create, to consecrate, and to connect. We will craft rare artifacts not because we need to, but because in doing so we assert our individuality and skill. We will engage in rituals – whether ancient ceremonies or new secular traditions – to weave ourselves into something greater, to find sacredness in the midst of plenty. We will form intentional communities to give structure to our values and to belong to a tribe of our choosing, even in a global village. Far from heralding the end of history or a slide into triviality, the age of AI and robotics might free humanity to, at long last, be fully human. And being human, as ever, means seeking meaning – and finding it in our creativity, our rituals, and each other.
Sources:
Pelligra, V., & Sacco, P.L. (2023). Searching for meaning in a post-scarcity society. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1198424. (Definition and implications of post-scarcity society)
Rifkin, J. (2014). The Zero Marginal Cost Society. (Technological forces driving production costs to near-zero)
Kelly, K. (2008). Better Than Free. Edge.org. (Value of uncopyable qualities in an age of free copies)
Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. (Economy embedded in social relations; reciprocity and redistribution vs. market mechanism)
Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. (The vita activa: labor, work, action – and the challenge of meaningful activity after automation)
Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs. (Many modern jobs lack meaning; humans crave roles that have a tangible impact)
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media. (Global village and retribalization; modern resurgence of craft/tribal culture)
Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Aura of authenticity vs. mechanical reproduction)
Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone Age Economics. (Original affluent society thesis: hunter-gatherers prioritize leisure and ritual once subsistence needs are met)