第4章
Exponential Growth: The Engine of Transformation
While 12,000 years separated the First and Second Disruptions, the Third follows much more quickly because historical change is accelerating. This acceleration is driven by exponential trends in digital information costs-collection, processing, storage and distribution.
To understand digitization's future impact, consider photography's evolution from film to digital. Kodak's 1991 DCS 100 camera cost $13,000 but marked a decisive shift to photography as an information good, following Moore's Law with pixels per dollar doubling yearly. This exponential growth pattern is best illustrated by the "wheat and chessboard problem"-where doubling grains on each square creates an unimaginably vast quantity by the final square.
Such exponential growth has driven transistor development from cotton fiber-sized components costing $8 each to billions fitting on a fingernail for fractions of cents. The 1996 ASCI Red supercomputer that cost $55 million was matched by a $600 PlayStation 3 just a decade later, demonstrating the transformative power of exponential rather than linear technological advancement.
Beyond exponential growth, the Henderson Curve (or Experience Curve) shows how manufactured goods decline in cost by roughly 20% each time production capacity doubles. This principle is perfectly demonstrated in photovoltaic solar cells, which have followed this 20% cost reduction pattern for sixty years-from expensive NASA satellite panels in 1958 to just fifty cents per watt by 2016.
Five looming crises-climate change, resource scarcity, surplus populations, aging demographics, and technological unemployment-threaten capitalism's foundational assumptions of constant expansion, infinite resources, profit-driven production, and labor markets. As futurist Stewart Brand noted in 1984, "Information wants to be free" despite its value, because distribution costs continuously fall. The Third Disruption is creating extreme supply not just in information but potentially in labor, energy and resources too-pointing toward a world beyond jobs, profit, and scarcity itself.
第5章
What Is Fully Automated Luxury Communism?
While many view communism as a failed 20th century experiment, "fully automated luxury communism" precisely describes a society where work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance, and labor and leisure blend together. Given the Third Disruption's creation of extreme supply in information, labor, energy and resources, FALC represents not an underlying ideology but the logical conclusion of these technological trends-if we choose to embrace it.
Marx recognized capitalism's tendency to replace human labor with machines-a contradiction that could lead to liberation. In the 'Fragment on Machines' from his unpublished Grundrisse, Marx observed how capital "reduces human labour to a minimum" which would "redound to the benefit of emancipated labour." While generating suffering under capitalism, this automation represented a momentous opportunity under another system.
For Marx, communism meant the end of any distinction between labor and leisure, signaling humanity's exit from the "realm of necessity" into the "realm of freedom." While socialism still contained features like work and scarcity (albeit more democratically controlled), communism represented abundance beyond imagination-not a legendary past but a political project for the present. Communism would emerge when labor becomes self-development rather than survival, when mental and physical labor distinctions vanish, and when society could provide "from each according to ability, to each according to needs." Under conditions of permanent abundance, communism becomes luxurious by dissolving boundaries between utility and beauty.
Despite criticizing Marx, John Maynard Keynes envisioned a remarkably similar post-scarcity society in his 1930 "Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren." Keynes predicted that by 2030, the "economic problem" would be solved, leaving humanity free to determine "how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares." The key difference was that Keynes saw this transition as inevitable under capitalism, with productivity gains naturally benefiting workers through higher wages and shorter hours. The golden age of capitalism initially seemed to confirm Keynes' view, but since the 1970s, wages decoupled from productivity gains, with real household wages in Britain falling 10.4% between 2007-2015-an unprecedented decline that Keynes never predicted.
Management theorist Peter Drucker identified information as the primary factor of production, surpassing labor, land and capital. Writing in 1993 as HTML was being released, he declared "knowledge has become THE resource rather than A resource," creating new social, economic and political dynamics. For Drucker, knowledge fundamentally changed with the Industrial Revolution, transitioning from private to public good applied to doing rather than being.
第6章
Full Automation: Post-Scarcity in Labor
The Economist posed a profound question in 2011: "What happens when machines are smart enough to become workers?" This possibility challenges Adam Smith's fundamental premise that labor would always remain distinct from capital. If tools can perform any human task, workers' market value collapses. This creates an underconsumption problem exemplified by Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther's exchange about factory robots: while Ford wanted to eliminate workers, Reuther asked how robots would buy Ford's cars.
The 1894 "Horse Manure Crisis" exemplified the challenges of rapid urbanization during the Second Disruption. London, with its quadrupled population, had become the world's largest city with unprecedented complexity. Despite technological advances, the city still relied on horses-around 50,000 transported people daily, with thousands more delivering goods, producing 1.5 million pounds of manure every day. The Times predicted London's streets would be buried under nine feet of manure within fifty years. Yet this seemingly insurmountable problem vanished as internal combustion engines and electricity enabled cars, buses and electric trams to replace horse-drawn transportation-revealing how what appeared to be a permanent crisis was merely the friction between one technological paradigm giving way to another.
While the Second Disruption began in the late eighteenth century, it took decades for its innovations to permeate society. The United States didn't reach "peak horse" until 1915 with 26 million working horses, which then disappeared within decades, replaced by more reliable, productive machines. Nobel economist Wassily Leontief predicted in 1983 that human labor would face a similar fate in the twenty-first century, with computers and robots replacing mental functions just as mechanical power replaced physical tasks.
In 1997, IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, but IBM's Watson later defeating Jeopardy! champions was more significant as the game requires pattern recognition and creative thinking-hallmarks of human intelligence. Ken Jennings presciently noted that "quiz show contestant" would be the first knowledge-industry job made redundant by thinking machines, but certainly not the last.
The progression from Boston Dynamics' awkward PETMAN prototype in 2009 to Atlas-a robot capable of box jumps and backflips by 2017-demonstrates how Moravec's paradox (the observation that high-level reasoning requires less computational power than low-level sensorimotor skills) is being overcome. Atlas can now jog outdoors and perform parkour, suggesting machines may soon match human dexterity and spatial awareness.
Multiple authoritative sources predict massive job displacement from automation. The Bank of England forecasts 15 million UK jobs (40% of the labor market) will disappear in coming decades. Oxford academics Frey and Osborne estimate 47% of US jobs face high automation risk. Even the conservative Millennium Project expects global unemployment to reach 24% by mid-century-comparable to crisis-stricken Greece, but without hope of recovery.
第7章
Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy
Energy fundamentally shaped our past disruptions and now stands at the heart of our greatest challenge: climate change. While we currently consume around 18 terawatts hourly, population growth and rising living standards will nearly double global energy demand by 2040. The scientific consensus shows Earth has already warmed 0.8C since the 1880s, with further warming inevitable.
When Earth was last three degrees warmer, 10 million years ago, sea levels stood 25 meters higher and continental glaciers were absent from the Northern Hemisphere. At such temperatures, the Amazon would become desert, Himalayan glaciers would vanish, and much of the southern US, Mediterranean, Middle East, Australia and Africa would become uninhabitable. We can still avoid this catastrophe by reducing CO2 emissions 85% by 2050, but despite knowing this for 25 years, emissions have only increased.
The sun bombards Earth with 174 petawatts of energy, with approximately half reaching the surface-thousands of times more than humanity's current consumption of under 20 terawatts. In just 90 minutes, Earth receives enough solar energy to power humanity for an entire year. This represents virtually free, limitless energy from nature's nuclear reactor at the center of our solar system.
Solar energy has evolved dramatically since powering NASA's Vanguard 1 satellite in 1958 at thousands of dollars per watt. By the mid-1970s, costs fell to $100 per watt, and today, sunny regions can generate solar power for just fifty cents per watt. Global capacity doubles every two years, increasing 100-fold between 2004-2015, with installations growing 40% annually. By 2016, solar became the fastest-growing energy source worldwide.
The British government's 2040 ban on petrol and diesel vehicles will be irrelevant-by then, none will remain to purchase. Energy storage technologies, particularly lithium-ion batteries, are falling in price even faster than solar cells. Since 2009, battery costs have plummeted from $650 per kilowatt hour to projected costs of just $100 by the early 2020s. In fifteen years, energy capacity has tripled while cost per unit has fallen tenfold.
Renewable energy will prove most transformational in the Global South, potentially ending historic imbalances between wealthy and poor nations. In Nigeria, where half of 180 million citizens lack electricity and population may reach 400 million by 2050, solar offers the only viable path to universal electrification. Just as Nigeria leapfrogged landlines to adopt 150 million mobile phone subscriptions, developing nations can bypass traditional grid infrastructure for distributed solar.
Climate change presents an unprecedented crisis, yet we stand at the brink of an energy revolution that could take us beyond the fossil fuels warming our planet. The opportunity extends beyond avoiding catastrophe-extreme energy supply could sever the chains of underdevelopment holding back the Global South. Technologies like solar cells, batteries, wind turbines and LEDs following the experience curve will deliver permanently cheaper energy, potentially taking us beyond scarcity altogether.
第8章
Mining the Sky: Post-Scarcity in Resources
Resource scarcity presents a fundamental challenge alongside climate change. Despite renewable energy's advantages, minerals like lithium and cobalt needed for energy storage remain limited. The Club of Rome warns we're approaching peak production for many minerals, with coal peaking by 2050 and copper a decade earlier. Even lithium would become strained in a complete transition from fossil fuels, requiring extensive recycling.
In 2017, Elon Musk unveiled SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), shifting focus from commercial satellites to manned planetary missions. The system includes the BFR ("big fucking rocket"), which will finally surpass NASA's Saturn V-still the most powerful vehicle ever built despite being designed over fifty years ago by Wernher von Braun. Since its founding at the millennium, SpaceX has achieved numerous firsts, including launching the first privately funded liquid-propellant rocket into orbit in 2008 and landing a reusable first-stage booster in 2015-breakthroughs that were science fiction just years earlier.
Space exploration costs have plummeted since the Apollo era, when Saturn V launches cost $3.5 billion each in today's money. Today, SpaceX's Falcon 9 costs around $61 million to launch, while smaller companies like Rocket Lab aim for weekly launches at just $4.9 million each. Rocket Lab achieves this efficiency through their Rutherford engine, which uses electric propulsion and 3D-printed components, reducing both costs and build time from months to days.
Asteroids represent an almost incomprehensible wealth of resources. We've identified over 16,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), with estimates suggesting there are around 1,000 NEAs larger than a kilometer in diameter and approximately 8,000 wider than 140 meters. A single platinum-rich asteroid measuring 500 meters wide could contain nearly 175 times the annual global output of platinum and 1.5 times known world reserves. Even a football field-sized asteroid might hold $50 billion worth of platinum.
However, the industry faces a fundamental economic paradox: there is so much mineral wealth beyond Earth that successful mining would collapse commodity prices. The asteroid 16 Psyche alone contains an estimated $10,000 quadrillion in iron and other metals. The fundamental problem with asteroid mining is that capitalism cannot function properly under conditions of extreme abundance. Just as with information, renewable energy and automated labor, production for profit malfunctions when faced with limitless supply.
第9章
Editing Destiny: Post-Scarcity in Health
By 2020, for the first time in history, people over sixty-five will outnumber those under five, representing humanity's crowning achievement. This demographic shift creates unprecedented challenges, particularly for social insurance systems designed for populations with more workers than dependents.
Human life expectancy has dramatically increased-from around thirty years in the 17th century to a global average of seventy-one by 2015. This population explosion saw humanity grow from 1 billion in 1800 to 6 billion by 2000, with projections reaching 9.6 billion by mid-century. However, as countries develop, fertility rates decline, suggesting population growth will eventually plateau.
This demographic transition creates serious economic challenges. A 2013 Standard & Poor's simulation predicted 60% of analyzed countries would see their credit status reduced to junk within a generation due to aging populations. The crisis spans different economic models and cultural values, affecting countries from Ukraine to Brazil to China.
By 2016, Alzheimer's and dementia had surpassed heart disease as the leading cause of death in England and Wales. With dementia rates projected to triple globally by 2050 and already costing $818 billion annually in 2015, the economic burden is staggering. The challenge is exponential-the risk of Alzheimer's doubles between ages seventy and seventy-five, then doubles again between seventy-five and eighty.
The convergence of DNA research and computing has revolutionized genomics. After Watson and Crick identified DNA's structure in 1953, progress culminated in the Human Genome Project's completion in 2003, mapping all 3.2 billion base pairs. While initially taking 13 years and $3 billion, sequencing costs have fallen exponentially-more dramatically than Moore's Law-from $1 million in 2007 to under $1000 by 2015, with Illumina projecting sub-$100 sequencing shortly thereafter.
The revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 technique has democratized gene editing, reducing costs by 99% and cutting experiment times from months to weeks. Unlike the space race, gene editing's rapidly falling costs mean this technology will soon be accessible to many-for better or worse.
Gene therapies could eliminate conditions affecting millions and help address aging population challenges. Socialized healthcare systems, being more efficient and equitable, are best positioned to integrate these technologies. The alternative is biological inequality mapping onto economic inequality, undermining the foundation of human rights.
第10章
Food Without Animals: Post-Scarcity in Sustenance
The First Disruption was primarily a food revolution. Before agriculture, human population was minimal-just 5 million people worldwide, equivalent to modern Ireland's population. The cultivation of crops and breeding of livestock enabled larger, more complex societies by creating surpluses and reducing vulnerability to predators, famine, and natural disasters. Many foods we consider natural today, like carrots and bananas, were actually developed through early genetic modification by our ancestors following the last Ice Age.
Humanity's agricultural success has reached Earth's natural limits. We're witnessing a sixth mass extinction event, with 25% of mammals facing extinction and 90% of large ocean fish already gone. Glaciers providing drinking water for billions are disappearing, and industrial farming is degrading agricultural soils.
Despite dire Malthusian predictions about population growth outpacing food production, agriculture has proven remarkably adaptable. While land devoted to farming has remained constant at about 37.5% of Earth's surface since the 1970s, we now support an additional 3 billion people with higher average calorie consumption and less hunger. In just two decades, global hunger has halved to about 10% of the population-all while employing fewer agricultural workers.
Norman Borlaug, perhaps the twentieth century's most consequential yet unheralded figure, pioneered this transformation. Beginning in Mexico in 1943, he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat varieties that directed energy toward edible kernels rather than inedible stems. By 1956, Mexico achieved wheat self-sufficiency, and by 1964 exported half a million tons.
The Green Revolution transformed agriculture by spreading industrial techniques-modern irrigation, chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilizers-alongside genetically modified crop varieties. This tripled wheat yields in developing countries since the 1970s, potentially saving a billion lives. But it came with severe costs: accelerated climate change, habitat destruction, water pollution, soil degradation, and immense animal suffering.
In 2013, Dutch professor Mark Post unveiled the world's first lab-grown burger in London-a $325,000 meal secretly funded by Google's Sergey Brin. The process is conceptually simple: remove muscle samples from an animal, isolate stem cells, and grow them in a bioreactor with oxygen, sugar and minerals. After 9-21 days, the cells develop into skeletal muscle ready for harvest. Progress in cost reduction has been remarkable. Post's 2013 burger cost $325,000, but by 2016, Memphis Meats produced a cultured meatball for just $1,000.
While cellular agriculture focuses on growing real animal proteins without animals, Impossible Foods takes a different approach by creating plant-based products indistinguishable from meat. Their breakthrough ingredient is heme-the molecule that gives blood its color and meat its rich, iron-like taste. Though heme exists in plants (particularly legumes), harvesting it directly would require enormous farmland. Impossible's solution was inserting genes that code for heme protein into yeast, which then produces heme when fed sugars and minerals-essentially brewing food ingredients like beer.
Cellular agriculture extends far beyond meat to revolutionize other animal products. Milk appears particularly promising, with Perfect Day Foods creating "real" milk proteins without cows. Their biomedical engineers inserted cow DNA sequences into yeast, which when fermented with sugar produces identical milk proteins-both casein and whey. Combined with plant-based fats and nutrients, this creates lactose-free milk that's molecularly identical to dairy but requires dramatically less land, water, and emissions.
第11章
Luxury Populism: A Politics for the Future
The technologies of the Third Disruption are already creating new dispositions toward the world, transforming every aspect of social life from ownership to work and scarcity itself. This raises critical questions about converting these dispositions into political power, bridging the gap between our promised future and disappointing present, and translating individual problems into a collective "we."
The fundamental challenge is that while the tendency toward extreme supply will make everything permanently cheaper through information-driven production, without proper politics this will only lead to novel forms of profiteering. Marx captured this paradox perfectly: "The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools."
Luxury populism must be both red and green. Red because it places the Third Disruption's energies at humanity's service, enhancing personal freedom. Green because it recognizes climate change's inevitability and the urgency of moving beyond fossil fuels. Rather than reducing quality of life, the transition to renewable energy offers a bridge to energy abundance, permitting more prosperous societies than possible under fossil fuels.
FALC is not the communism of the early twentieth century and won't arrive through storming the Winter Palace. Until the Third Disruption began, communism was impossible-just as surplus was impossible before the First Disruption or electricity before the Second. Instead, socialism, still defined by scarcity and jobs, became the global aspiration.
FALC differs fundamentally by recognizing human rights and personal happiness as central. It builds a society where everyone can access resources needed for self-determination. As Roosevelt noted, "necessitous people are not free people." Liberal ends require communist means-most people cannot find happiness while necessities remain commodities subject to profit rather than need.
Breaking with neoliberalism is the essential first step toward FALC. While the ultimate horizon is a world beyond work and scarcity, the immediate task is dismantling an orthodoxy built on weak unions, precarious labor, falling wages and privatization.
Universal Basic Services would transform public transportation, healthcare, housing, education, and information into free services accessible to all. As autonomous vehicles and renewable energy drive down transport costs, these benefits should flow to citizens, not profiteers. Similarly, breakthroughs in gene sequencing, therapies and editing will make healthcare cheaper while potentially eliminating inherited conditions like Parkinson's and Huntington's-but only if we reject the profit motive in favor of socialized benefits.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism isn't a utopian endpoint but a beginning. It doesn't promise a perfect society without sadness, pain, or conflict-human flaws and political disagreements will persist. Rather, FALC offers a new possibility for a rapidly changing world where old utopias no longer make sense.
This book isn't about some distant future but about a present we fail to acknowledge. A better world-more equal, prosperous, and creative-is already visible if we dare to look. But seeing isn't enough; we must have the courage to argue, persuade, and build. There is a world to win.
