Post scarcity
Encyclopedia
Post scarcity is a hypothetical form of economy
or society
, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated
systems capable of converting raw material
s into finished goods, allowing manufacturing
to be as easy as duplicating software.
by Lionel Robbins
, economics is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."
Although some argue that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth, this would generally not be termed a "post-scarcity society" unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel, a software engineer
working on open-source software
, or an editor
creating or modifying some types of wiki
pages and other user-generated content
.)
There are some exceptions to this use of the term. For example, Anthony Giddens
, uses "post-scarcity" to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on "life politics" and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth. Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity.
Most Marxists
envision later phases of a worldwide communist
society as a form of post-scarcity society.
(such as molecular assembler
s or nanofactories) raise the possibility of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy. Even before that level of technology can be achieved, fab lab
s and advanced industrial automation might be able to produce most physical goods that people desire, with a minimal amount of human labor required.
As for the raw materials and energy needed as input for such automated production systems, self-replicating
automated mining plants set loose in the asteroid belt
(see asteroid mining
) or other areas of space with huge amounts of untapped raw materials could cause the prices of these materials to plummet. New power sources such as fusion power
or solar power satellites could do the same for energy, especially if the power plants/power satellites could themselves be constructed in a highly automated way, so their number would be limited only by raw materials and energy.
Where the artifact can be captured digitally, copies have minimal reproduction costs. The same painter could create an original work with graphics software
; the sculptor might use rapid prototyping
, direct digital manufacturing, and 3D printing
; the architect CAD/CAM tools. Most of the "cost" in such works is in paying for the original design and development — for the creators' expertise and for their tools (though these also do not wear out the same way physical tools do). While the creators of such works must still labor to create the design matrix, there are virtually no raw-materials required to recreate the work once completed.
This negligible-cost reproduction raises the question, "How much should one pay for something that can be copied near-indefinitely at minimal expense?" Does a purchaser have the right to reproduce their own copy as much as they can afford to? Some people believe the purchaser does not or should not have any rights to copy or transfer ownership, and use Digital Rights Management
to try to enforce this view. Others instead feel that information should be freely distributed (see copyleft
), and that DRM measures are attempts to restore prior business models' viability by inducing artificial scarcity
.
Many advocates of open source
software and Free software
attempt to collaboratively create open-source software
programs which are intended to offer similar capabilities to their proprietary software
competitors, but with the source code
made public and permission granted for users to freely copy the software. Richard Stallman
, the founder of the GNU project
which designed the Free software GNU
operating system
, and co-founder of the free software movement
, has explicitly cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:
or planned economies
may be unnecessary in a post-scarcity age, though gift or exchange economies
may take their place once the scarcity driving earlier types of economy disappears. Post-scarcity societies might also have their market economies limited to the exchange of energy and resources, or of other scarce or even non-material things, such as status or reputation (see Whuffie
for a fictional example), real estate, or skills and expertise.
Many science-fiction variants also imagine the very concept of ownership
to weaken or disappear, as people lose attachment to all but sentimental-value items, knowing that they will always be able to receive or create replacements. Monetary systems in consequence also cease to be a factor. Many stories depict these changes as a positive advancement, freeing humanity from both toil and greed. Others posit that handing production and most other services over to machines and computers will stunt the spirit of humanity, or even lead to a loss of control over humanity's own fate, e.g., Jack Williamson's
With Folded Hands
.
s) to reduce this scarcity. This would likely further reduce (though not fully abolish) the value of an 'original' item or a specific locale to live in. Engineers have suggested megascale structures such as an Alderson disk
or Dyson sphere
to provide abundant living space and energy.
Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unavoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Ehrlich
, Albert Bartlett
, and others, exponential growth
in human population
has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel
, necessary for humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached in readily imaginable times. It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero population growth
or relatively low population growth, even though possible future technologies such as self-replicating spacecraft could theoretically maintain exponential growth far beyond earth's carrying capacity.
At present, the total fertility rate
is high in poor countries with poor health infrastructure, but it tends to drop to replacement levels or lower once a nation reaches a per capita income of roughly $10,000. In fact, virtually every wealthy OECD nation currently has a total fertility rate that is below replacement levels, implying a coming population decline for the west. Due to the decline in fertility that tends to accompany wealth (of the 233 countries listed by the CIA for fertility, 100 have fertility rates below replacement rates), human population is expected to stabilize at near 9 billion by 2050.
in the series of the same name by Wil McCarthy
, "the Festival" and agalmic economics from Singularity Sky
and Accelerando
by Charles Stross
, and the United Federation of Planets
from the Star Trek
series.
One of the earliest treatments of a transition to a post-scarcity society occurs in Pandora's Millions by George O. Smith
, in which the development of a "matter duplicator" that can replicate almost any scannable object causes an economic collapse, and a return to a barter economy for the only remaining scarce resource: Skilled human labor. Chaos ensues until the inventors of the matter duplicator discover a substance that explodes when scanned by the duplicator beam. This new substance, "Identium," serves as a new medium of exchange
for skilled labor, in a post-scarcity society otherwise primarily devoted to the pursuit of leisure, science, art, the occasional lawsuit, and the sale and exchange of "Certified Uniques" — objects whose chain of provenance
can legally establish that they have never been scanned by a duplicator beam.
Kim Stanley Robinson
's Mars trilogy
describes the beginning development of a highly automated society whose economy was to be based on caloric input/output and had only a few materials valued based on their scarcity. However, the inherent problems of such a system (such as its remaining capitalist elements or the difficulty in fixing the worth of academic work) are not resolved within the timeframe depicted in the trilogy.
An intermediate step to a post-scarcity society is shown in Neal Stephenson
's The Diamond Age
, where fabricator technology allows the growth of any item that one has design plans for - however, the poor receive a lesser amount of energy and resources per day to use, and thus have to wait longer for their items to be fabricated. Also, their items tend to be smaller, as they have no access to large-scale fabricators. This system, fueled by a centrally-distributed matter 'feed' is eventually replaced by the protean 'seed', which is able to take in raw materials from its environment to develop into whatever its program dictates. No longer bound to the aristocratically-controlled feeds, the society moves to a post-scarcity economy.
James P. Hogan
has written several works where post-scarcity plays a major role. Voyage from Yesteryear
details the society of the "Chiron
ians", embryo colonists
of Alpha Centauri
who have adopted such a lifestyle. Cradle of Saturn and its sequel The Anguished Dawn is mostly told from the perspective of the "Kronians
", a pseudo-religion who colonize Saturn
's largest satellite in the process of developing such a society. Both stories are driven by the difficulties of changing an existing economic paradigm, and postulate that a fresh start may be necessary to overcome old thinking about money and possessions.
Rudy Rucker
also dealt with this jarring transition in Realware in which humans receive an alien device that can instantiate any consumer product they have seen. This leads to a breakdown of the market, with stores blacking out their windows in a vain attempt to prevent people from 'copying' their products. Still, people who do buy the products find them instantly copied once out on the streets.
Iain M. Banks
' The Culture
stories center around an advanced spacefaring civilization that has used artificial intelligence
s to provide extremely abundant (and in daily practice unlimited) amounts of goods and services using advanced technology, describing a fully post scarcity society, which also attempts to influence other galactic societies towards the advanced cultural stage that freedom from greed and material need has allowed it. As Banks puts it in a 1994 article, "nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."
John C. Wright's novel The Golden Age
deals with a future voluntary libertarian
society spanning the solar system called the Golden Oecumene. Due to technology, nearly everyone is immortal and tremendously wealthy except those living outside society due to exile or by choice. The Sophotechs, a superior line of computer intelligences, do most of the work, research, and simulations required by the society. Throughout the book the main character, Phaethon, has to face off against a technologically superior and unknown enemy while also dealing with a post-scarcity society which is afraid of death and instability more than anything else and does not believe his plight.
In the short novel Manna, Marshall Brain
writes of a dystopian society ruined by advanced robotics as well as a utopian society enabled by it. The protagonist escapes life in a government run dormitory because his father bought shares in the fictional "Australia Project".
's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops
", Kurt Vonnegut
's Player Piano
, Frank Herbert
's Dune
, and Arthur C. Clarke
's 1956 novel The City and the Stars
. "Riders of the Purple Wage
", Philip José Farmer
's dystopia
n 1967 science fiction novella also explores some ramifications of a future wherein technology allows everyone's desires to be met. David Weber
's Honor Harrington
saga has the example of the People's Republic of Haven
, in which each citizen is due a Basic Living Stipend. With most of their population "on the dole", productivity and their economy collapse. In Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," resources and luxuries are so common, that the poor must bear the burden of consuming and disposing of the bounty, as well as working at meaningless jobs to produce more meaningless plenty; the rich, conversely, are allowed to live simple but comfortable lifestyles. In Stanislaw Lem
's Cyberiad, a central motif
is unbounded progress of technology. In The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization, the inhabitants have become passive, and the visitors have to shoo away machines trying to comfort them. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
, the Time Traveller speculates, based on the Eloi
, that mankind had been "armed with a perfected science" which reduced all dangers in nature, epitomized by the quote: "Strength is the outcome of need". The 2008 Pixar
film WALL-E
also depicts what appears to be a post-scarcity dystopia, albeit humorously imagined.
Economy
An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...
or society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated
Automation
Automation is the use of control systems and information technologies to reduce the need for human work in the production of goods and services. In the scope of industrialization, automation is a step beyond mechanization...
systems capable of converting raw material
Raw material
A raw material or feedstock is the basic material from which a product is manufactured or made, frequently used with an extended meaning. For example, the term is used to denote material that came from nature and is in an unprocessed or minimally processed state. Latex, iron ore, logs, and crude...
s into finished goods, allowing manufacturing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labor to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale...
to be as easy as duplicating software.
The scarcity problem
Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human needs and wants, in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be pursued at the same time; trade-offs are made of one good against others. As such, the term post-scarcity economics may be somewhat paradoxical. To quote a 1932 essayAn Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science
Lionel Robbins' Essay sought to define more precisely economics as a science and to derive substantive implications. Analysis is relative to "accepted solutions of particular problems" based on best modern practice as referenced, especially including the works of Philip Wicksteed, Ludwig von...
by Lionel Robbins
Lionel Robbins
Lionel Charles Robbins, Baron Robbins, FBA was a British economist and head of the economics department at the London School of Economics...
, economics is "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."
Although some argue that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth, this would generally not be termed a "post-scarcity society" unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel, a software engineer
Software engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
working on open-source software
Open-source software
Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...
, or an editor
Editing
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, and film media used to convey information through the processes of correction, condensation, organization, and other modifications performed with an intention of producing a correct, consistent, accurate, and complete...
creating or modifying some types of wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
pages and other user-generated content
User-generated content
User generated content covers a range of media content available in a range of modern communications technologies. It entered mainstream usage during 2005 having arisen in web publishing and new media content production circles...
.)
There are some exceptions to this use of the term. For example, Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is a British sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern contributors in the field of sociology, the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29...
, uses "post-scarcity" to refer to a set of trends he sees in modern industrialized nations, such as an increased focus on "life politics" and a decreased focus on productivity and economic growth. Giddens acknowledges that the term has also been used historically to mean a literal end of scarcity.
Most Marxists
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
envision later phases of a worldwide communist
World communism
World communism, also known as international communism or global communism, is the terminal stage of development of the history of communism in Marxist theory. It has also usually been equated to the Comintern . This is the meaning that typically and historically has been meant by opponents of...
society as a form of post-scarcity society.
Speculative technology
Most visions of post-scarcity societies assume the existence of new technologies which make it much easier for society to produce nearly all goods in great abundance, given raw materials and energy. More speculative forms of nanotechnologyNanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Generally, nanotechnology deals with developing materials, devices, or other structures possessing at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometres...
(such as molecular assembler
Molecular assembler
A molecular assembler, as defined by K. Eric Drexler, is a "proposed device able to guide chemical reactions by positioning reactive molecules with atomic precision". Some biological molecules such as ribosomes fit this definition. This is because they receive instructions from messenger RNA and...
s or nanofactories) raise the possibility of devices that can automatically manufacture any specified goods given the correct instructions and the necessary raw materials and energy. Even before that level of technology can be achieved, fab lab
Fab lab
A fab lab is a small-scale workshop offering digital fabrication.A fab lab is generally equipped with an array of flexible computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, with the aim to make "almost anything"...
s and advanced industrial automation might be able to produce most physical goods that people desire, with a minimal amount of human labor required.
As for the raw materials and energy needed as input for such automated production systems, self-replicating
Self-replicating machine
A self-replicating machine is an artificial construct that is theoretically capable of autonomously manufacturing a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines...
automated mining plants set loose in the asteroid belt
Asteroid belt
The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. It is occupied by numerous irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets...
(see asteroid mining
Asteroid mining
Asteroid mining refers to the possibility of exploiting raw materials from asteroids and planetoids in space, including near-Earth objects. Minerals and volatiles could be mined from an asteroid or spent comet to provide space construction material , to extract water and oxygen to sustain the lives...
) or other areas of space with huge amounts of untapped raw materials could cause the prices of these materials to plummet. New power sources such as fusion power
Fusion power
Fusion power is the power generated by nuclear fusion processes. In fusion reactions two light atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus . In doing so they release a comparatively large amount of energy arising from the binding energy due to the strong nuclear force which is manifested...
or solar power satellites could do the same for energy, especially if the power plants/power satellites could themselves be constructed in a highly automated way, so their number would be limited only by raw materials and energy.
Digital abundance
Traditionally, creators have used (and continue to use) raw materials to instantiate their works: a painter might use oil and canvas, a sculptor might work in clay, an architect might draft designs in pen and ink. Such work would result in a single copy (or "artifact"). While mass reproduction of such works ("impressions") — by processes such as printmaking or photocopying — is possible and common, such reproduction still incurs appreciable costs (for example for the paper used, and for the physical distribution of the copy).Where the artifact can be captured digitally, copies have minimal reproduction costs. The same painter could create an original work with graphics software
Graphics software
In computer graphics, graphics software or image editing software is a program or collection of programs that enable a person to manipulate visual images on a computer....
; the sculptor might use rapid prototyping
Rapid prototyping
Rapid prototyping is the automatic construction of physical objects using additive manufacturing technology. The first techniques for rapid prototyping became available in the late 1980s and were used to produce models and prototype parts. Today, they are used for a much wider range of applications...
, direct digital manufacturing, and 3D printing
3D printing
3D printing is a form of additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is created by laying down successive layers of material. 3D printers are generally faster, more affordable, and easier to use than other additive manufacturing technologies. However, the term 3D printing is...
; the architect CAD/CAM tools. Most of the "cost" in such works is in paying for the original design and development — for the creators' expertise and for their tools (though these also do not wear out the same way physical tools do). While the creators of such works must still labor to create the design matrix, there are virtually no raw-materials required to recreate the work once completed.
This negligible-cost reproduction raises the question, "How much should one pay for something that can be copied near-indefinitely at minimal expense?" Does a purchaser have the right to reproduce their own copy as much as they can afford to? Some people believe the purchaser does not or should not have any rights to copy or transfer ownership, and use Digital Rights Management
Digital rights management
Digital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
to try to enforce this view. Others instead feel that information should be freely distributed (see copyleft
Copyleft
Copyleft is a play on the word copyright to describe the practice of using copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work and requiring that the same rights be preserved in modified versions of the work...
), and that DRM measures are attempts to restore prior business models' viability by inducing artificial scarcity
Artificial scarcity
Artificial scarcity describes the scarcity of items even though the technology and production capacity exists to create an abundance. The term is aptly applied to non-rival resources, i.e. those that do not diminish due to one person's use, although there are other resources which could be...
.
Many advocates of open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
software and Free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
attempt to collaboratively create open-source software
Open-source software
Open-source software is computer software that is available in source code form: the source code and certain other rights normally reserved for copyright holders are provided under a software license that permits users to study, change, improve and at times also to distribute the software.Open...
programs which are intended to offer similar capabilities to their proprietary software
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. The licensee is given the right to use the software under certain conditions, while restricted from other uses, such as modification, further distribution, or reverse engineering.Complementary...
competitors, but with the source code
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
made public and permission granted for users to freely copy the software. Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
, the founder of the GNU project
GNU Project
The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project, announced on September 27, 1983, by Richard Stallman at MIT. It initiated GNU operating system development in January, 1984...
which designed the Free software GNU
GNU
GNU is a Unix-like computer operating system developed by the GNU project, ultimately aiming to be a "complete Unix-compatible software system"...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, and co-founder of the free software movement
Free software movement
The free software movement is a social and political movement with the goal of ensuring software users' four basic freedoms: the freedom to run their software, to study and change their software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. The alternative terms "software libre", "open...
, has explicitly cited the eventual creation of a post-scarcity society as one of his motivations:
Economic paradigm
Market economiesMarket economy
A market economy is an economy in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system. This is often contrasted with a state-directed or planned economy. Market economies can range from hypothetically pure laissez-faire variants to an assortment of real-world mixed...
or planned economies
Planned economy
A planned economy is an economic system in which decisions regarding production and investment are embodied in a plan formulated by a central authority, usually by a government agency...
may be unnecessary in a post-scarcity age, though gift or exchange economies
Gift economy
In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
may take their place once the scarcity driving earlier types of economy disappears. Post-scarcity societies might also have their market economies limited to the exchange of energy and resources, or of other scarce or even non-material things, such as status or reputation (see Whuffie
Whuffie
Whuffie is the ephemeral, reputation-based currency of Cory Doctorow's science fiction novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. This book describes a post-scarcity economy: All the necessities of life are free for the taking...
for a fictional example), real estate, or skills and expertise.
Many science-fiction variants also imagine the very concept of ownership
Ownership
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property, which may be an object, land/real estate or intellectual property. Ownership involves multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different parties. The concept of ownership has...
to weaken or disappear, as people lose attachment to all but sentimental-value items, knowing that they will always be able to receive or create replacements. Monetary systems in consequence also cease to be a factor. Many stories depict these changes as a positive advancement, freeing humanity from both toil and greed. Others posit that handing production and most other services over to machines and computers will stunt the spirit of humanity, or even lead to a loss of control over humanity's own fate, e.g., Jack Williamson's
Jack Williamson
John Stewart Williamson , who wrote as Jack Williamson was a U.S. writer often referred to as the "Dean of Science Fiction" following the death in 1988 of Robert A...
With Folded Hands
With Folded Hands
"With Folded Hands ..." is a 1947 science fiction novelette by Jack Williamson . Willamson's influence for this story was in the aftermath of World War II and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and his concern that "some of the technological creations we had developed with the best...
.
Unavoidable scarcity
Some things will remain rare even in a post-scarcity society. There is a practical limit to the number of people who can live in any specific, 'in-demand' locale. However, hypothetical machines such as a nanofactory are envisioned as being able to produce any real-world artifact, and some fictions even envision the physical creation of new living space (orbitals or ringworldRingworld
Ringworld is a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, set in his Known Space universe and considered a classic of science fiction literature. It is followed by three sequels, and preceded by four prequels, and ties into numerous other books set in Known Space...
s) to reduce this scarcity. This would likely further reduce (though not fully abolish) the value of an 'original' item or a specific locale to live in. Engineers have suggested megascale structures such as an Alderson disk
Alderson disk
An Alderson disk is an artificial astronomical megastructure, like Niven's Ringworld, or a Dyson sphere. The disk is a giant platter with a thickness of several thousand miles. The sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer radius of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent...
or Dyson sphere
Dyson sphere
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure originally described by Freeman Dyson. Such a "sphere" would be a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to completely encompass a star and capture most or all of its energy output...
to provide abundant living space and energy.
Population growth, if it continues long enough, may also lead to unavoidable scarcity. As pointed out by Thomas Robert Malthus, Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich was a German scientist in the fields of hematology, immunology, and chemotherapy, and Nobel laureate. He is noted for curing syphilis and for his research in autoimmunity, calling it "horror autotoxicus"...
, Albert Bartlett
Albert Bartlett
Albert Allen Bartlett is an emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA. Professor Bartlett has lectured over 1,600 times since September, 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy...
, and others, exponential growth
Exponential growth
Exponential growth occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value...
in human population
World population
The world population is the total number of living humans on the planet Earth. As of today, it is estimated to be billion by the United States Census Bureau...
has the capacity to overwhelm any finite supply of resources, even the entire known universe, in a remarkably short time. For example, if the human population could continue to grow indefinitely at its 1994 rate, in 1,900 years the mass of the human population would equal the mass of Earth, and in 6000 years the mass of the human population would equal the estimated mass of the observable universe Although this would imply the invention of faster than light travel
Faster-than-light
Faster-than-light communications and travel refer to the propagation of information or matter faster than the speed of light....
, necessary for humanity to spread throughout the universe as fast as population growth, even at lower growth rates these levels would still be reached in readily imaginable times. It is therefore difficult to conceive of a credible post scarcity scenario which does not also imply zero population growth
Zero population growth
Zero population growth, sometimes abbreviated ZPG , is a condition of demographic balance where the number of people in a specified population neither grows nor declines, considered as a social aim....
or relatively low population growth, even though possible future technologies such as self-replicating spacecraft could theoretically maintain exponential growth far beyond earth's carrying capacity.
At present, the total fertility rate
Total Fertility Rate
The total fertility rate of a population is the average number of children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if she were to experience the exact current age-specific fertility rates through her lifetime, and she...
is high in poor countries with poor health infrastructure, but it tends to drop to replacement levels or lower once a nation reaches a per capita income of roughly $10,000. In fact, virtually every wealthy OECD nation currently has a total fertility rate that is below replacement levels, implying a coming population decline for the west. Due to the decline in fertility that tends to accompany wealth (of the 233 countries listed by the CIA for fertility, 100 have fertility rates below replacement rates), human population is expected to stabilize at near 9 billion by 2050.
Utopias
Fictional post-scarcity societies include varied settings, such as The Queendom of SolThe Queendom of Sol
The Queendom of Sol is a science fiction book series by Wil McCarthy. It includes:* The Collapsium * The Wellstone * Lost in Transmission * To Crush the Moon...
in the series of the same name by Wil McCarthy
Wil McCarthy
Wil McCarthy is a science fiction novelist, Chief Technology Officer for Galileo Shipyards , and the science columnist for Syfy...
, "the Festival" and agalmic economics from Singularity Sky
Singularity Sky
- External links :* at * * at Worlds Without End...
and Accelerando
Accelerando (novel)
Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories by British author Charles Stross. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free e-book under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivatives license...
by Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. He was born in Leeds.Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera...
, and the United Federation of Planets
United Federation of Planets
The United Federation of Planets, also known as "The Federation" is a fictional interplanetary federal republic depicted in the Star Trek television series and motion pictures...
from the Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...
series.
One of the earliest treatments of a transition to a post-scarcity society occurs in Pandora's Millions by George O. Smith
George O. Smith
George Oliver Smith was an American science fiction author. He is not to be confused with George H. Smith, another American science fiction author.-Biography:...
, in which the development of a "matter duplicator" that can replicate almost any scannable object causes an economic collapse, and a return to a barter economy for the only remaining scarce resource: Skilled human labor. Chaos ensues until the inventors of the matter duplicator discover a substance that explodes when scanned by the duplicator beam. This new substance, "Identium," serves as a new medium of exchange
Medium of exchange
A medium of exchange is an intermediary used in trade to avoid the inconveniences of a pure barter system.By contrast, as William Stanley Jevons argued, in a barter system there must be a coincidence of wants before two people can trade – one must want exactly what the other has to offer, when and...
for skilled labor, in a post-scarcity society otherwise primarily devoted to the pursuit of leisure, science, art, the occasional lawsuit, and the sale and exchange of "Certified Uniques" — objects whose chain of provenance
Provenance
Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...
can legally establish that they have never been scanned by a duplicator beam.
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer known for his award-winning Mars trilogy. His work delves into ecological and sociological themes regularly, and many of his novels appear to be the direct result of his own scientific fascinations, such as the fifteen years of research...
's Mars trilogy
Mars trilogy
The Mars trilogy is a series of award-winning science fiction novels by Kim Stanley Robinson that chronicles the settlement and terraforming of the planet Mars through the intensely personal and detailed viewpoints of a wide variety of characters spanning almost two centuries...
describes the beginning development of a highly automated society whose economy was to be based on caloric input/output and had only a few materials valued based on their scarcity. However, the inherent problems of such a system (such as its remaining capitalist elements or the difficulty in fixing the worth of academic work) are not resolved within the timeframe depicted in the trilogy.
An intermediate step to a post-scarcity society is shown in Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.Difficult to categorize, his novels have been variously referred to as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk...
's The Diamond Age
The Diamond Age
The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is a postcyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It is to some extent a science fiction bildungsroman, focused on a young girl named Nell, and set in a future world in which nanotechnology affects all aspects of life. The novel deals with themes of...
, where fabricator technology allows the growth of any item that one has design plans for - however, the poor receive a lesser amount of energy and resources per day to use, and thus have to wait longer for their items to be fabricated. Also, their items tend to be smaller, as they have no access to large-scale fabricators. This system, fueled by a centrally-distributed matter 'feed' is eventually replaced by the protean 'seed', which is able to take in raw materials from its environment to develop into whatever its program dictates. No longer bound to the aristocratically-controlled feeds, the society moves to a post-scarcity economy.
James P. Hogan
James P. Hogan (writer)
James Patrick Hogan was a British science fiction author.-Biography:Hogan was born in London, England. He was raised in the Portobello Road area on the west side of London...
has written several works where post-scarcity plays a major role. Voyage from Yesteryear
Voyage from Yesteryear
Voyage from Yesteryear is a 1982 science fiction novel by the author James P. Hogan. It explores themes of anarchism and the appropriateness of certain social values in the context of high-technology....
details the society of the "Chiron
Chiron
In Greek mythology, Chiron was held to be the superlative centaur among his brethren.-History:Like the satyrs, centaurs were notorious for being wild and lusty, overly indulgent drinkers and carousers, given to violence when intoxicated, and generally uncultured delinquents...
ians", embryo colonists
Embryo space colonization
Embryo space colonization is a theoretical interstellar space colonization concept that involves sending a robotic mission to a habitable terrestrial planet transporting frozen early-stage human embryos or the technological or biological means to create human embryos. The proposal circumvents the...
of Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri
Alpha Centauri is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Centaurus...
who have adopted such a lifestyle. Cradle of Saturn and its sequel The Anguished Dawn is mostly told from the perspective of the "Kronians
Kronos
Kronos can refer to:*Cronus, a Titan, the father of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, and Chiron.In business*Kronos Foods, the world's largest manufacturer of gyrosIn computing...
", a pseudo-religion who colonize Saturn
Saturn
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter. Saturn is named after the Roman god Saturn, equated to the Greek Cronus , the Babylonian Ninurta and the Hindu Shani. Saturn's astronomical symbol represents the Roman god's sickle.Saturn,...
's largest satellite in the process of developing such a society. Both stories are driven by the difficulties of changing an existing economic paradigm, and postulate that a fresh start may be necessary to overcome old thinking about money and possessions.
Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...
also dealt with this jarring transition in Realware in which humans receive an alien device that can instantiate any consumer product they have seen. This leads to a breakdown of the market, with stores blacking out their windows in a vain attempt to prevent people from 'copying' their products. Still, people who do buy the products find them instantly copied once out on the streets.
Iain M. Banks
Iain Banks
Iain Banks is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...
' The Culture
The Culture
The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks which features in a number of science fiction novels and works of short fiction by him, collectively called the Culture series....
stories center around an advanced spacefaring civilization that has used artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
s to provide extremely abundant (and in daily practice unlimited) amounts of goods and services using advanced technology, describing a fully post scarcity society, which also attempts to influence other galactic societies towards the advanced cultural stage that freedom from greed and material need has allowed it. As Banks puts it in a 1994 article, "nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."
John C. Wright's novel The Golden Age
The Golden Age (John C. Wright novel)
The Golden Age is a science fiction trilogy by the American writer John C. Wright. It consists of three books, The Golden Age, The Phoenix Exultant and The Golden Transcendence.-Plot introduction:...
deals with a future voluntary libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
society spanning the solar system called the Golden Oecumene. Due to technology, nearly everyone is immortal and tremendously wealthy except those living outside society due to exile or by choice. The Sophotechs, a superior line of computer intelligences, do most of the work, research, and simulations required by the society. Throughout the book the main character, Phaethon, has to face off against a technologically superior and unknown enemy while also dealing with a post-scarcity society which is afraid of death and instability more than anything else and does not believe his plight.
In the short novel Manna, Marshall Brain
Marshall Brain
Marshall David Brain is an American author, public speaker, and entrepreneur. A former college instructor and computer programmer, Brain is the founder of HowStuffWorks.-Background:Marshall Brain was born in Santa Monica, California...
writes of a dystopian society ruined by advanced robotics as well as a utopian society enabled by it. The protagonist escapes life in a government run dormitory because his father bought shares in the fictional "Australia Project".
Dystopias
There have also been fully dystopian science fiction societies where all people's physical needs are provided for by machines, but this causes humans to become overly docile, uncreative and incurious. Examples include E. M. ForsterE. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society...
's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops
The Machine Stops
"The Machine Stops" is a science fiction short story by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review , the story was republished in Forster's The Eternal Moment and Other Stories in 1928...
", Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a 20th century American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle , Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humor and science fiction. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.-Early...
's Player Piano
Player Piano
Player Piano, author Kurt Vonnegut's first novel, was published in 1952. It is a dystopia of automation and capitalism, describing the dereliction they cause in the quality of life. The...
, Frank Herbert
Frank Herbert
Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr. was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful American science fiction author. Although a short story author, he is best known for his novels, most notably Dune and its five sequels...
's Dune
Dune (novel)
Dune is a science fiction novel written by Frank Herbert, published in 1965. It won the Hugo Award in 1966, and the inaugural Nebula Award for Best Novel...
, and Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey, and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein,...
's 1956 novel The City and the Stars
The City and the Stars
The City and the Stars is a science fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke. It is a complete rewrite of his earlier novella, Against the Fall of Night.-Overview:...
. "Riders of the Purple Wage
Riders of the Purple Wage
Riders of the Purple Wage is a science fiction novella by Philip José Farmer. It appeared in Dangerous Visions, the famous New Wave science fiction anthology compiled by Harlan Ellison, in 1967, and won the Hugo Award for best novella in 1968, jointly with Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey.-Title:The...
", Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer
Philip José Farmer was an American author, principally known for his award-winning science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories....
's dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n 1967 science fiction novella also explores some ramifications of a future wherein technology allows everyone's desires to be met. David Weber
David Weber
David Mark Weber is an American science fiction and fantasy author. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio. Weber and his wife Sharon live in Greenville, South Carolina with their three children and "a passel of dogs"....
's Honor Harrington
Honor Harrington
Honor Stephanie Alexander-Harrington is a fictional character, the heroine of a series of military science fiction books set in the "Honorverse", written by David Weber and published by Baen Books....
saga has the example of the People's Republic of Haven
People's Republic of Haven
The Republic of Haven is a fictional star-nation in the Honorverse, the background setting for a series of novels and short stories in the military science fiction genre, written by David Weber and others and published by Baen Books....
, in which each citizen is due a Basic Living Stipend. With most of their population "on the dole", productivity and their economy collapse. In Frederik Pohl's "The Midas Plague," resources and luxuries are so common, that the poor must bear the burden of consuming and disposing of the bounty, as well as working at meaningless jobs to produce more meaningless plenty; the rich, conversely, are allowed to live simple but comfortable lifestyles. In Stanislaw Lem
Stanislaw Lem
Stanisław Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. He was named a Knight of the Order of the White Eagle. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has...
's Cyberiad, a central motif
Motif (narrative)
In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
is unbounded progress of technology. In The Highest Possible Level of Development civilization, the inhabitants have become passive, and the visitors have to shoo away machines trying to comfort them. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine
The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 for the first time and later adapted into at least two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It indirectly inspired many more works of fiction...
, the Time Traveller speculates, based on the Eloi
Eloi
The Eloi are one of the two post-human races in H. G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine.-In The Time Machine:By the year 802,701 AD, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks...
, that mankind had been "armed with a perfected science" which reduced all dangers in nature, epitomized by the quote: "Strength is the outcome of need". The 2008 Pixar
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios, pronounced , is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Its films have made over $6.3 billion worldwide...
film WALL-E
WALL-E
WALL-E, promoted with an interpunct as WALL•E, is a 2008 American computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. The story follows a robot named WALL-E, who is designed to clean up a waste-covered Earth far in the future...
also depicts what appears to be a post-scarcity dystopia, albeit humorously imagined.
See also
- Capacity developmentCapacity DevelopmentThe commitment, sealed in the in September 2000 in New York, of 190 countries to achieving the by 2015, and the urgent need for countries, particularly developing countries, to effectively and speedily respond to the current global economic recession, climate change and other crises that are...
- Gift economyGift economyIn the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards . Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community...
- James S. AlbusJames S. AlbusJames Sacra Albus was an American engineer, Senior NIST Fellow and founder and former chief of the Intelligent Systems Division of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology .- Biography :Born in Louisville Ky., Albus received the B.S...
(section Peoples' Capitalism) - Julian Lincoln SimonJulian Lincoln SimonJulian Lincoln Simon was a professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Simon wrote many books and...
- Post-capitalismPost-capitalismPost-capitalism refers to any hypothetical future economic system that is to supersede capitalism as the dominant form of economic organization.-Post-capitalist systems:There have been a number of proposals for a new economic system to replace capitalism...
- Post-Scarcity AnarchismPost-Scarcity AnarchismPost-Scarcity Anarchism is a collection of essays written by Murray Bookchin and first published in 1971 by Ramparts Press. It outlines the possible form anarchism might take under conditions of post-scarcity...
- Pure communism
- Strong AIStrong AIStrong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence — the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can. It is a primary goal of artificial intelligence research and an important topic for science fiction writers and...
- Socialist economicsSocialist economicsSocialist economics are the economic theories and practices of hypothetical and existing socialist economic systems.A socialist economy is based on public ownership or independent cooperative ownership of the means of production, wherein production is carried out to directly produce use-value,...
- Techno-progressivismTechno-progressivismTechno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change...
- Techno-utopia
- Technocracy movementTechnocracy movementThe technocracy movement is a social movement which arose in the early 20th century. It put forth a plan for operating the North American continent as a non-monetary society. Technocracy was highly popular in the USA for a brief period in the early 1930s, when it overshadowed many other proposals...
- Technological singularityTechnological singularityTechnological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as...
- The Ultimate ResourceThe Ultimate ResourceThe Ultimate Resource is a 1981 book written by Julian Lincoln Simon challenging the notion that humanity was running out of natural resources...
- The Venus ProjectThe Venus ProjectThe Venus Project is an organization that advocates the futurist visions of the American Jacque Fresco, with the aim of improving society with a global sustainable social design that it calls a "resource-based economy"...
- Wealth, Virtual Wealth and DebtWealth, Virtual Wealth and DebtWealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt is a 1926 book by the Nobel prize-winning chemist Frederick Soddy on monetary policy and society and the role of energy in economic systems....
External links
- The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance
- The Economics of Abundance
- The Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance
- The Energy Certificate A Technocracy Technate suggestion for a post scarcity economy
- A Place To Live In. Wilton Ivie Technocracy Digest Nov.1955.
- The Economics of Science Fiction
- The Post-Scarcity / Culture of Abundance Reading List v2.2
- The Gift Economy. Writings and videos of Genevieve Vaughan and associated scholars.
- Infinity Is Your Friend in Economics - contains links to a series of Techdirt articles on economics when scarcity is removed
- Nanofactory Regulation - ideas on managing post-scarcity through extensive DRMDigital rights managementDigital rights management is a class of access control technologies that are used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to limit the use of digital content and devices after sale. DRM is any technology that inhibits uses of digital content that...
-like legal restrictions on nanofactories - Imagining Futures, Dramatizing Fears - classic science fiction stories about highly automated societies, most of them pessimistic
- Automating Feminism - Paragraphs 20-28 (and footnotes 12-20) discuss interest in post-scarcity amongst the New LeftNew LeftThe New Left was a term used mainly in the United Kingdom and United States in reference to activists, educators, agitators and others in the 1960s and 1970s who sought to implement a broad range of reforms, in contrast to earlier leftist or Marxist movements that had taken a more vanguardist...
in the 1960s/1970s - Post-Scarcity Princeton - Post Scarcity perambulations by Paul Fernhout
- AdCiv.org - Post Scarcity through Open Design and Advanced Automation
- Sharewiki collects theoretical and practical information on how to bring about post scarcity and live in abundance through (universal) sharing
- Unofficial International Post-Scarcity Symbols
- THE ZEITGEIST MOVEMENT