"It seems to me that something fundamental about the social contract may have to change." - Sam Altman (@sama)
Every epoch hides a picture of the “good life” inside its machines. For ours, the picture has been ease: less friction, fewer decisions, more throughput. We’ve already traced the downside of that arc in previous articles - how optimization mechanizes attention and turns comfort into dependence. This piece asks a different question: what would a positive end-state look like, with the human being at the center?
Imagine intelligence that coordinates the basics of living so well that money is no longer the gatekeeper for survival or dignity. Not indulgence-on-demand, not synthetic simulation, but shared sufficiency that is guaranteed and verifiable: energy, food, shelter, care, education, compute, connectivity, mobility. When the floor is secured by such systems, human effort can return to craft, inquiry, relationship, and stewardship rather than wage against scarcity.
The ultimate potential of AI is to create a significantly better future for all human beings - and for all other species. If this isn't the shared goal of all who are building it, then perhaps we shouldn't be building it at all.
A future “without money” in this sense is not a fantasy of boundless consumption. Abundance does not mean infinite pleasure loops - we’ve seen where that leads. It means that the basics are unpriced and accountable.
This is a wholly different use of AI - to remove price from essentials so human attention can move back to what machines cannot touch: perception, care, judgment, the intelligence that is not merely calculation.
It is the ending of comparison for the basics - no bidding for electricity to boil water, no auction for a clinic visit, no paywall for education or the network itself. It can be well argued that the desire for money and for status are both movements that keep the mind in conflict. If the essentials are guaranteed, we remove a large field of comparison and allow our efforts to move away from acquisition.
The means is already the end
A trap in articulating any positive vision is the belief that a future goal excuses present methods. It doesn’t. Means and end are one; wrong means produce wrong ends. If the end we seek is a society grounded in clarity and care, then the stack we build must be open, inspectable, and locally governable now - no black-box allocation, no extractive control points, no persuasion theater about “community” while decisions are hidden.
Do the systems we're currently building cultivate attention or automate it? Do they make power legible or obscure it? Is profit the sole driver, or do they contribute a vision for a better future?
This inquiry requires complete honesty about ourselves, to ourselves. The task, then, is twin:
- Outward: build infrastructures for shared sufficiency that can be audited by anyone who is affected by them.
- Inward: watch the movement that still seeks stimulation, dominance, and escape - and end it as it arises, because that movement will rebuild scarcity even in abundance.
The machinery of thought can optimize the known, but it cannot found a different quality of living; that begins in observation without motive, here, not in the projected “someday".
A closing inquiry
If machines do what thought does, the opening for the human being is not to become more like the machine but to stop living as one. The positive vision is stark and practical: retire price from the basics through verifiable systems; keep the stack open; refuse capture; and, at the same time, end in ourselves the movement that would turn abundance back into scarcity.
Everything else - policy, engineering, logistics - follows from whether we can hold that line without compromise.
An editorial by @0x1164
Previous Article - When AI Gives Us Everything: https://www.hozk.io/the-verifier/when-ai-gives-us-everything
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