What Is the Cost of Abundance?
In a recent full-length interview with The Economist, Elon Musk laid out his vision of the next decade with characteristic confidence: within roughly five years, he predicts, artificial intelligence will exceed the sum of human intelligence. Pair that digital mind with millions of humanoid robots, and you get what he calls a “quasi-infinite economy” — an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of. Money, he says, won’t matter by 2036. Work will be optional, something like gardening: you don’t have to grow your own tomatoes, but it’s a nice touch when you do.
It is a seductive picture. It is also, I’d argue, an incomplete one — because it answers the economic question while ignoring the human one. The real question isn’t whether abundance can feed, house, and entertain us. It’s what abundance does to us.
The Necessity That Built Us
Consider what scarcity has quietly given every generation before ours. A young person pursues an education not merely to collect knowledge, but because a good life depends on it. A man works hard at his trade because his family depends on it. And in the process of all that striving — the studying, the failing, the getting up early, the mastering of difficult things — he is not just earning a living. He is building himself. The discipline shapes his character. The learning shapes his brain. The responsibility rounds him into someone capable of carrying weight.
Necessity, in other words, has always been humanity’s silent teacher. Struggle is not a bug in the human condition; it is the mechanism by which we become fully formed people.
Now remove it. If AI and robots provide everything — food, housing, income, even ideas — what compels a young person to endure the hard years of learning a craft? Musk’s gardening metaphor assumes people will still choose meaningful effort for its own sake. Some will. But hobbies are chosen precisely because they are pleasant, and the growth that matters most has rarely come from pleasant things. Nobody gardens their way into the kind of resilience forged by real stakes.
The Atrophying Mind
The biological concern is not hypothetical. The brain operates on a use-it-or-lose-it principle: neural pathways strengthen with demand and prune away without it. Effortful learning, problem-solving under pressure, and delayed gratification are exactly the activities that build cognitive capacity and executive function. A civilization that outsources its thinking, its labor, and its struggle to machines risks raising generations who are materially rich and developmentally underbuilt — comfortable, entertained, and slowly diminished.
We already have a preview. What did abundant calories do to our bodies? What did abundant entertainment do to our attention spans? Abundant convenience has consistently produced atrophy in whatever capacity it replaced. There is little reason to believe abundant intelligence will be the exception.
Notably, even Musk doesn’t dismiss the turbulence. He concedes the road will be bumpy, admits he swings between exhilaration and terror about AI sometimes within a single day, and still places the odds of catastrophic outcomes at a level most of us would never accept in any other technology. His answer is that the momentum is unstoppable — so enjoy the ride.
The Bill Comes Due
Perhaps abundance’s greatest cost is this: it removes the very friction that made us who we are, and offers nothing in its place. A society can survive losing its jobs. Whether it can survive losing its reasons — to learn, to build, to become — is the question no robot can answer for us. Purpose has never been abundant. It has always been earned. The task of the abundant age, if it truly arrives, will be finding a way to keep earning it when nothing requires us to.
The cost of abundance may not be paid in dollars at all. It may be paid in the kind of people we stop becoming.
Watch the full-length Economist interview the article responds to:
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