Unshackled From Money, Free to Pursue Our Dreams

Lionel Robbins defined economics in 1932 as "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses," and this definition remains highly influential today. If you treat scarcity as a permanently binding condition across all important goods, then money and prices appear permanently necessary because they are among the institutions market economies use to organize exchange and allocate scarce resources. It's important, though, to not become trapped in this bubble. Many people, both older and younger, remain anchored to assumptions formed under economic conditions that have existed for most of human history, including the belief that scarcity will always remain meaningfully binding across the goods and services that matter, and that money must therefore remain permanently necessary. I do think this broader scarcity-based argument is internally consistent, but I also think it becomes exponentially weaker as technology makes most goods and services deemed important or necessary dramatically less scarce. A small example is LLMs being able to provide tutoring, legal drafts, medical guidance, translation, and code, with practically no limits and at extremely low marginal cost and enormous scale, for any human with an internet connection (or even without one, if you run your own LLM, which is completely free on solar energy). It's similar to how printed books once turned scarce manuscript copies into abundant ones. We are still extremely early and have yet to see AI take over most physical/labor-involving tasks via robotics (this will be especially transformative).

In economics, scarcity means that available resources are limited relative to the uses people have for them. This condition can weaken or disappear for particular goods as technology changes what it costs to produce another unit. Digital copies of a song or a piece of software are non-rival. Once the first one exists, the marginal cost of another copy is close to zero, which is why copyright, DRM, and licensing create legal excludability around something that is technically easy to reproduce. Air is scarce in a submarine and abundant in a field. Insulin remains scarce because production capacity, regulation, market structure, distribution, and access constraints make supply limited or costly, not because its material inputs are inherently rare. If intelligence, energy, and matter can be arranged cheaply enough, an expanding class of goods can stop being meaningfully scarce at the margin, and the claim that every essential good must always be rationed by price begins to look less like physics and more like a contingent feature of the modern-day economy.

Money solves a practical problem created by barter: a trade can only happen when each person happens to want what the other is offering. A common, abstract medium of exchange removes the need for that exact match. But its usefulness is conditional. If a shirt or a meal could eventually be produced from energy, feedstock, and a design file at extremely low total cost (or literally for free), price would become considerably less important (or even obsolete) as an allocation mechanism for those goods, although fixed costs, infrastructure, maintenance, and other scarce inputs could still matter. Keynes already saw a version of this in 1930, in "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," when he argued that if capital accumulation and technical efficiency kept going, the economic problem of subsistence could be solved within a century and a fifteen-hour work week might be enough. He may have been optimistic about the timing and about how much new demand would emerge, but the direction of the claim was not unrealistic at all. Money survives largely because scarcity survives, and if technology progressively removes most of the scarcity that money exists to navigate, then money becomes largely obsolete.

I also want to be very clear that I’m not only saying money shouldn’t remain central to nearly every part of life simply because it might become largely unnecessary. Money is remarkably sophisticated for an ancient civilization and remarkably primitive for an advanced one. It places the same abstract measure between people and almost everything they actually want in life. Food, shelter, medicine, education, travel, comfort, entertainment, and countless completely different human needs are all ultimately filtered through the question of whether someone has enough money to access them. For most of history, that was an extraordinarily useful way to organize civilization. I really find it difficult to believe that it should remain our final one, even if it works. Just because something does technically work does not guarantee an absence of better options. Combustion-powered cars work, but EVs are significantly more efficient and come with a whole lot of other benefits. Amputating an arm with a tumor successfully gets rid of the tumor, but now you're left without an arm. A civilization with advanced, highly-capable, multimodal artificial intelligence, extreme automation, enormous general technological capability, and the potential for practically infinite material abundance should be able to imagine something better than making nearly every part of human life depend on accumulating the same primitive, abstract form of wealth that essentially determines and controls your entire quality of life.

The need to charge for groceries can disappear if the full cost of producing and distributing another meal becomes negligible or zero. This doesn't require pretending that every scarcity dies. Land in a city is permanently finite, and a specific painting is (practically) permanently unique. A (largely) post-money world is therefore not a world without allocation, but a world where the allocation problem has been pushed away from many of the goods and services that currently determine whether people can survive and thrive, and towards the things that remain truly scarce. It therefore goes without saying that some mechanism of allocation may therefore remain necessary for things that, at least for now, remain naturally or inherently scarce. Money may continue to exist primarily within these limited domains, such as land or (artificially) scarce luxury goods, or it may eventually be replaced there by some other mechanism. In either case, it would play a much narrower role than it does today.

To be clear, as some may have this assumption, none of this implies the disappearance of personal ownership. It should go without saying that people should be able to own homes, jewelry, rare objects, or anything else they value. I believe any other suggestion is anti-human. What I want to disappear is money as a category of power over whether someone can meet their basic needs and have a good quality of life.

Today’s artificial intelligence can already push toward greater abundance by making many kinds of cognitive work dramatically cheaper, and we are still at the very beginning of that process. Gains, as mentioned, in writing, coding, translation, customer support, and analysis are only the first visible examples of a much broader reduction in the human effort required to produce goods and services, with diagnosis, logistics, tutoring, scientific research, engineering, and robotics still far less mature. When you pair powerful AI models with robotics, cheaper energy, and automated fabrication, you get a plausible path toward more goods and services whose marginal costs fall dramatically, possibly to zero.

This is why I think The Orville's economic premise deserves to be taken far more seriously than science fiction usually is. It imagines a civilization where matter synthesizers can produce food and physical objects on demand at no cost, making large categories of material goods effectively infinitely abundant. Money did not disappear because people became less ambitious, but because technology made it increasingly unnecessary, just as I've been explaining. In one scene of The Orville, Commander Kelly Grayson is asked by an alien a question that still sounds almost childish inside a wage economy. If nobody has to have a formal job under an employer, why does anyone do any kind of work anymore? Her answer, in the season 3 finale "Future Unknown", is "Used to be that way on Earth too. Until the invention of the matter synthesizer. It was the single most transformative moment in our history. When all your material needs are provided for at no cost, it changes the entire game."

Two seasons earlier, in "New Dimensions", she tells Lieutenant John LaMarr that money did not vanish because humans outgrew greed. It vanished because the thing money was for went away. "It became obsolete with the invention of matter synthesis. The predominant currency became reputation." And then, more importantly, she says, "Human ambition didn't vanish. The only thing that changed is how we quantify wealth. People still want to be rich, only now rich means being the best at what you do." Seth MacFarlane has said outright that this was the cue he took from Gene Roddenberry, that money is too primitive to be a factor and that reputation becomes the main form of currency in its absence, both views I strongly agree with. The disappearance of money from most areas of life does not imply an inherent disappearance of wealth, ambition, competition, ownership, or status. I actually think it would do the opposite in many cases; it would amplify passion and ambition, because the definition of wealth has now changed. In a civilization like this, being "rich" means being extraordinarily respected for what you discovered, created, built, mastered, or contributed to humanity. I believe this is far better for each individual person as well as for our species as a whole, in terms of well-being, happiness, prosperity in nearly every aspect, advancement of knowledge, and much more.

Human passion would have far more room to matter, because today, it is forced to compete with financial necessity. People can deeply care about science, art, history, engineering, exploration, or almost anything else, yet still have to organize most of their lives around whatever will reliably pay them. I truthfully find it disgusting, because financial necessity has, at this point, become (in many cases) known for destroying the dreams, passions, and aspirations of many people for how they can contribute to the world, or at least making those goals far more difficult to pursue than they need to be, diverting attention away from them, or forcing people to significantly reshape or (at least temporarily) entirely abandon them because of practical financial constraints. If survival were no longer tied to income, this conflict could largely disappear, and I'd expect it to free people in many regards.

The Orville is honest about the other half of this, as any argument like this has to be. Later in "Future Unknown," Lysella looks at a matter synthesizer, asks for a glass of water, and points out the fact that one machine could save millions of lives on her planet, including entire countries without clean water. Kelly's response is: "If someone had landed on Earth during our 20th or 21st centuries and given us something like this, you know what would've happened? It wouldn't have been made available to everyone. The rich and powerful would've found a way to exploit it for financial gain. Someone would have had to benefit materially from its use. The idea of everyone benefitting equally would've been... inconceivable to them." Then, she says "Technology and societal ethics have to progress hand in hand, each one supporting the other incrementally. Anything else is begging for disaster."

She then shows Lysella Gendel 3, a planet the early Planetary Union tried to pull into the future and help it skip the growing pains that every civilization seemingly has to go through, by sharing advanced technology, after which nation-states fought for the advancements and nine billion people were gone in five years. The "economic impossibility" (money cannot die) is what incumbents will keep saying while they try to bolt a price onto something that no longer needs one. The physical fact does not care. Elon Musk has a line that captures the distinction: "Physics is the law, everything else is a recommendation. Anyone can break laws created by people, but I have yet to see anyone break the laws of physics." That is essentially the hinge of this argument. Physical scarcity has to be respected. Scarcity created by laws, institutions, business models, or technological limits can change. As technology pushes more goods and services towards practically infinite abundance, price no longer has to be the primary mechanism for rationing output once the actual scarce inputs needed to sustain production become negligible.

Separate from this but still related, the last line of Kelly's speech to Lysella is a part that should survive even if every prediction above is too early, too kind, or outright wrong. "The only life considered poor is one that's wasted on apathy." If that sounds like moralizing, I think it is actually a description of what is left when survival is no longer the plot (in a largely post-money world). Money was never truly the plot, but rather the constraint. Remove the constraint and you do not get a blank or empty future; you get the question we have been postponing for as long as we have had prices, which is what the purpose of life is when you no longer have to spend most of it earning an abstract currency just to survive. I would also expect that this freedom would substantially improve happiness and productive activity, and perhaps leave people with more capacity to care about one another and about the long-term future of our species, on Earth and eventually beyond.

With all that said, I’m not sure our civilization today is ready for what I’ve been discussing above. We are not in The Orville’s century. We are in the century they were warning about, the one that would treat a matter synthesizer as a business model. AI is already making many kinds of work less scarce, but lower scarcity does not automatically mean broader access.

My point, ultimately, is not that Robbins' definition becomes false. Scarcity, fundamentally, will obviously survive wherever finite resources still have competing uses. That is quite literally its meaning, and I'm not arguing that the sky isn't blue. The more exciting possibility is that technology can shrink the domain in which scarcity is economically important. If enough necessities and important goods/services become free to make and abundant enough to access, money may stop being necessary for allocating them, even if it has potential to remain useful elsewhere. A moneyless society is therefore not ruled out by economics as a matter of principle.

I think the direction of technological progress is already carrying us toward something closer to the world The Orville imagines. AI, automation, cheaper energy (which can be made entirely free with solar), and increasingly capable fabrication are steadily weakening forms of scarcity that once seemed permanent. That does not mean we can simply assume the rest will happen on its own. If we want abundance to translate into greater freedom, access, and human prosperity, then we have to keep building toward it and adapt our institutions as those technologies develop. I believe the future The Orville imagines is not a fantasy we have to wait for. It is a direction we are already moving in, and one we should deliberately keep moving towards, if we want to maximize prosperity for all people on Earth and ultimately beyond.