Schlaraffenland (1567), the land of milk and honey
Say we achieve abundance—what becomes of our souls?
Transformative AI may soon lift us from the material constraints that have long shaped civilisation. In this essay, I explore how a species forged in struggle might fare in a world without it.
I. The Utopia That Didn’t Work
‘The excuse of a private school in a democracy is that it shall be a laboratory, a place for the demonstration of old experiments and the trying of new. It is a place of freedom.’ –Lucy Madeira
Every school must be conceived as a kind of utopia: a headteacher’s dream of what the world could be, shrunk down to fit between dormitories and dining halls, and entrusted to pupils who are given the freedom and structure to rehearse a life of joy and meaning, pupils who might one day bring this vision to life beyond the school gates.
Independent schools, especially, are laboratories for utopias—unconstrained by funding, by bureaucracy, by anything but human nature. Wearing rose-tinted glasses, I remember my boarding school, where the grass was always green and the girls always kind.
Our schedule was tailored to the way girls were believed to learn best: two to three classes a day from 8 am to 2 pm, with generous breaks in between to chat under the sun or meet one-on-one with teachers. After school, there was time for music lessons, horseback riding, nature hikes, and team sports. Study hall was a quiet, focused two hours in the evening—no more, no less—so that no one would get too stressed.
If the perfectly engineered system didn’t work for any of us, it bent. There were learning specialists for every subject. Therapists on call. Tutoring, accommodations, and interventions, always available with a reassuring smile.
College counselling began with drawing pictures of our ideal university experience, after which counsellors crafted lists of institutions that would fulfil our every desire. Essays and standardised testing prep were dispensed in precise portions to prevent overwhelm. And if, for all the careful orchestration, a student was left without a place to go, the school would quietly lean on its historical ties, opening doors not to fallbacks, but to colleges that others might have called a triumph.
We had dedicated yoga lofts with views of the river. Personalised pilates programmes. Meditation circles. Emotional support animals.
It was utopia. Or at least, someone’s earnest attempt at creating one.
Our gilded sanctuary contained a hidden curse: a world without friction offers nothing to push against. Nothing to overcome. Nothing to become. Many of us struggled with this paradox, acting out in various ways, but no one self-destructed quite like Aria.
Aria
Aria was the prettiest girl in our class. She loved puppies and Justin Bieber and shopping and fashion. She had the best taste for which top would look best with which jeans, which jewellery would make you feel a certain way, which candy had the optimal fun-to-calories ratio (Jolly Ranchers were genius, candy corn was amateur hour). Before things went downhill, we sang karaoke in the dorms, baked brownies and cinnamon buns, and made friendship bracelets in the never-ending sleepover that was school.
Something in Aria burned hotter than the rest of us. Her father’s family had developed most of a major American city; her mother kept a busy social calendar but flew in every Friday with the drugs Aria requested, only to be punched in the parking lot for not bringing enough. Aria took our typical teenage rebellion a step further: she did cocaine in the bathroom during mixers with neighbouring schools, snuck off campus to drink at college parties, stole ketamine from the barn, and used Adderall to get through the school day (acquired from the dean of students’ son at ten times the market rate, but that’s another story). She constantly screamed at her parents or their assistants over the phone. She never fed her horse. She missed classes for therapy, and therapy for anything that promised even a moment’s escape.
We all helped her hide it. We covered for her during important meetings. We took turns stashing her drugs and alcohol when she was up for room inspection. We looked after her horse. We helped her cram for tests and polish essays minutes before class. That’s how she made it to junior year.
When she was finally expelled, it wasn’t justice—it was logistics. She transferred to a Swiss boarding school with better scenery and better mental health support. In these circles, getting kicked out was a strange badge of honour—an upgrade to somewhere more elite.
What I remember most about Aria isn’t her rebellion, but her sadness.
Aria cried all the time. She cried in class. She cried in the showers. She cried while decorating planners and making gingerbread houses. Aria cried during Thanksgiving dinner.
She was grieving, perhaps, for the weightlessness of her existence. She pushed every boundary not to escape it, but to find out if it would hold. And when it didn’t—when no one resisted her, when everything bent or yielded—she escalated. Perhaps she craved consequences: the gravity of actions that couldn’t be undone and the momentousness of decisions that might just change her carefully curated life. But in a world of endless second chances and soft landings, nothing she did seemed to matter.
Imagine living in a world where you pushed an urn off the mantelpiece, and it didn’t fall and shatter. Imagine pushing and pushing and realising you couldn’t effect any change.
Wouldn’t you go insane too?
II. A World of Arias
‘For [the wealthy] are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there.’ –John Maynard Keynes, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren
To be clear, I am not asking for your sympathy for Aria or for anyone else at boarding school. I am asking for your sympathy for yourself, for your loved ones, and for all of humanity. Because, for the first time, we could all be Aria.
The Possibility of Abundance
Given increasingly capable artificial intelligence (AI) systems, we stand at the threshold of what could be humanity’s first experience of true abundance. As Scott Alexander observes in ‘1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled’, throughout human history, economic growth followed a self-reinforcing cycle: technological advances enabled population growth, which in turn produced more innovators, leading to further technological advances. This virtuous cycle accelerated dramatically with the Industrial Revolution, pushing growth from below 0.1 per cent annually for millennia to unprecedented rates.
This acceleration should have continued toward a singularity, but it did not. Instead, growth peaked around 1960 and then slowed, largely because declining fertility rates interrupted the cycle. Fewer people meant fewer innovators, even as technology continued advancing.
Alexander points out that artificial intelligence offers a way to revive the accelerating growth cycle without relying on population expansion. For the first time, we can convert money directly into inventors and researchers: ‘Money = build more AIs = more research.’
In ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, Dario Amodei envisions a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’, ushering in a new era of progress where cancer and Alzheimer’s become historical curiosities like smallpox, where human lifespans double to 150 years, where global poverty plummets as developing nations achieve growth rates beyond anything we have seen in history.
Imagine a vast intelligence that thinks faster and more profoundly than Nobel laureates across every field, works tirelessly without breaks, and can be replicated millions of times over. Such systems could compress the next century of human progress into just five to ten years. Amodei calls this scenario the ‘compressed 21st century.’
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) refers to systems capable of performing the full range of cognitively demanding tasks at or beyond human level. AGI is the stated goal of every major lab, and those with situational awareness say it will arrive sooner rather than later. Sam Altman of OpenAI holds that AGI could emerge as early as late 2025, Amodei of Anthropic claims 2027, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind thinks that AGI could arrive between 2025 and 2030. Independent platforms like Metaculus, which aggregate the views of hundreds of forecasters and aim to provide a more neutral benchmark, currently suggest a 50% chance of AGI by the mid-2030s.
We are approaching a transformation deep enough to dissolve material scarcity—the core constraint that has shaped civilisation since the beginning. And even if we do not reach AGI, today’s frontier models are already poised to drive sweeping productivity gains.
John Maynard Keynes contemplated this scenario in his 1930 essay ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’. Keynes imagined a future where humanity would be eight times wealthier in a hundred years, thanks to technological advances and the magic of compound interest. But while most people salivate over such prospects, Keynes approached it with significant apprehension: ‘If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived [emphasis mine] of its traditional purpose.’ He wrote: ‘I think with dread [emphasis mine] of the readjustment of the habits and instincts of the ordinary man, bred into him for countless generations, which he may be asked to discard within a few decades.’
A few decades? Try a few years in Amodei’s compressed 21st century. Keynes made his projections without any concept of artificial intelligence; he was simply extrapolating from economic trends he observed in his own time. What Keynes predicted would happen gradually over generations, AGI could deliver in years. Are we ready for the end of scarcity? Can human society, shaped by millennia of want and struggle, navigate a world where these fundamental drivers disappear almost overnight?
The Difficulties in Realising Abundance
You might ask: Why worry about the problems of abundance when we haven’t even achieved it?
This is a fair concern. Realising universal abundance from advanced artificial intelligence is far from inevitable—it demands urgent work, thoughtful benefit-sharing, and a rethinking of the social contract.
Erik Brynjolfsson introduced the concept of the Turing Trap: our fixation on developing AI that replicates human capabilities rather than augmenting them. This creates a dangerous dynamic: as machines become effective substitutes for human labour, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become dependent on those who control the technology. The result is a dramatic increase in inequality.
Noticing that AGI is more like a resource than a tool, ‘more like coal or oil than the plow, steam engine, or computer’, Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine draw a parallel to the resource curse commonly seen in petrostates. They call it the intelligence curse: ‘With AGI, powerful actors will lose their incentive to invest in regular people—just as resource-rich states today neglect their citizens because their wealth comes from natural resources rather than taxing human labour.’
We should absolutely dedicate the vast majority of our resources to preventing such dystopian outcomes. But this essay is about the assumption I see everywhere—that once we solve distribution, we will simply frolic for eternity.
Laine’s essay ‘Capital, AGI, and Human Ambition’ goes beyond the problem of inequality; its main concern is ‘humanity’s collective position, the potential for social change, and human agency.’ To me, the agency and ambition that Laine champions represent moments like seeing a friend building something they believe in, their eyes sparkling with passion. Social dynamism manifests as the joy of always having something new to look forward to in our world. Laine identifies these qualities as worth preserving in our current economy and fears their loss in a poorly managed AGI transition. These are values worth defending, regardless of how our economic system evolves.
If these values are what is truly at stake, we have all the more reason to take abundance seriously. As we work toward a world of plenty, we need to ask whether success might undercut the very qualities we hoped to protect. What if achieving abundance drains away the human drive it was meant to liberate?
Realising Desirable Abundance
Many people envision that, freed from economic necessity, they would finally pursue their highest aspirations, find joy and purpose, and channel their energy toward creative or altruistic endeavours. But abundance can just as easily lead to crisis, rebellion, and detachment.
Keynes wrote: ‘To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! … For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them.’ The problem, of course, is mankind’s permanent challenge—to learn ‘how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.’
Keynes was especially concerned about ‘the wives of the well-to-do classes’, who had been ‘deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations’, and who, in the absence of economic compulsion, could find nothing more fulfilling to do.
The challenges of abundance extend beyond boredom or ennui—regrettable for individuals but perhaps manageable for society. Others, unmoored by a lack of meaning, may turn their desperation toward nihilistic movements, pursue destructive technologies, and develop chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats—now far more accessible through advanced artificial intelligence.
Over a century ago, the psychologist William James experienced a violent revulsion at Chautauqua Lake. In ‘What Makes A Life Significant?’, James describes spending a week in what he called utopia: ‘You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for under the name of civilisation for centuries.’
But James found himself recoiling. Upon leaving this paradise, he confesses to ‘quite unexpectedly and involuntarily’ saying:
‘Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang… this atrocious harmlessness of all things—I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings…’
James’s experience represents one possible response to abundance: a visceral rejection of comfort and safety in favour of challenge and risk. What proportion of humanity might share similar reactions? In a world of billions, even if a small percentage of people respond by manufacturing their own version of ‘Armenian massacres’ not from poverty or religious hatred, but from a desperate search for meaning, we may face a significant threat.
In a world where everyone becomes like Aria, would we know what to do with ourselves?
There are, of course, distinctions between Aria’s situation and humanity’s fate in a future of AGI-driven abundance. Aria’s challenges might simply reflect typical adolescent growing pains—perhaps children test limits because they need structure, while mature adults could flourish in a constraint-free environment (though I have my doubts). Still, it is worth noting that not all humans will enter this age of abundance with the same level of psychological readiness. People at different life stages and with varying emotional resources will react in different ways.
Aria has also experienced privilege her entire life, whereas AGI-driven abundance would constitute a transition for most people. Though in some ways, these situations are more similar than they appear. Both Aria and recipients of AGI wealth will experience a profound sense of security—Aria because wealth has been there her entire life, and future beneficiaries because they trust in the new social contract and seemingly limitless productive capacity of advanced AI systems.
Further, Aria’s access to abundance comes with strings attached—weekly allowances contingent on making the ‘right’ decisions, implicit and explicit expectations about political views, relationships, educational choices, and career paths. True AGI-driven abundance might be more liberating, allowing for genuine autonomy rather than gilded constraint.
Perhaps conditions like those we see in trust funds, encouraging education or meaningful work, should be considered for government-distributed abundance. Although I imagine these paternalistic structures would face fierce resistance, as many would soon view wealth not as a conditional privilege, but as a fundamental entitlement—the birthright of being human in an AI-enriched world.
No current situation perfectly simulates an AGI-wealthy society, but the mosaic of existing abundance pockets offers valuable insights.
III. Investigating Abundance
‘Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.’ –Rainer Maria Rilke, Go to the Limits of Your Longing
I conclude with some proposals for investigating the psychological, economic, and governance challenges that AGI-driven abundance may bring. This agenda proceeds along three paths: analysing existing evidence of abundance-related problems, generating new data through controlled experiments, and developing practical visions and institutions for sustainable post-scarcity societies.
First, we must examine the diseases of affluence—those psychological, social, and existential maladies that emerge when material constraints fall away. We can draw on three case studies: (1) self-made post-economic individuals—such as tech founders or successful crypto investors—who often struggle to find direction once economic survival is no longer a motivator; (2) beneficiaries of generational wealth, including dynastic heirs and elite boarding school students, who frequently rebel against consequence-free privilege; and (3) lottery winners, who receive sudden, unearned wealth and often report isolation or psychological disintegration.
These cases differ in how abundance is acquired—earned vs unearned, sudden vs gradual—and while none perfectly mirrors a post-AGI world, they highlight dynamics likely to recur at scale: the loss of structure, the weakening of ambition, and the erosion of meaning in the absence of consequence. Post-AGI abundance may replicate these effects even more dramatically—sudden, universal, and untethered from merit.
Some of this work has already begun. In recent years, sociologists have turned their attention toward the study of elites. Elite boarding school ethnographer Shamus Khan has argued that ‘poor people are not why there’s inequality; rich people are.’ His work helped shift the sociological gaze upward, toward those who shape institutions and gatekeep opportunity. This was a necessary correction: it is surely unfair—and more than a little uncomfortable—to examine the lives of the poor as if the explanation for their condition lies within them. Yet this newer focus on elites falls short because it treats the privileged instrumentally, never examining their emotional and existential crises as meaningful phenomena in themselves and only scrutinising how they produce and reproduce inequality.
For inequality is a strange problem, and social mobility a strange solution. As Kola Ayonrinde insightfully pointed out in conversation, every time someone rises on the socioeconomic ladder, someone else is pushed down. Ascent is inseparable from descent. There is something unsettling about celebrating success when it depends on someone else’s fall.
Children of privilege face a distinct form of social punishment: the eager anticipation of their failure. So much was given to you, and that’s all you managed? Perhaps this cruelty is not about privilege itself, but about its exclusivity. The real problem is not inequality but insufficiency. The compassionate response is not to invert the ladder, but to eliminate the stakes of the climb—to stop maintaining systems in which winning and losing correlate with real suffering. This would be achievable in a world of abundance.
Second, we should design experimental microcosms—radical universal basic income (UBI) experiments engineered to approximate genuine abundance conditions. Existing pilots are limited: they are temporary, provide modest support, and participants inevitably behave accordingly—saving, striving, and planning for the scarcity they know will return.
What we need is an abundance experiment that is actually abundant: a controlled community where participants receive effectively unlimited resources with no time limits and no work requirements. Such an experiment would allow researchers to observe how people create meaning and purpose when truly freed from economic necessity.
Short of doing a full abundant UBI experiment, we could look at the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. Each adult tribal member receives payments of around $1 million per year from the tribe’s profitable casino operations. On one hand, the community has thrived: they have virtually eliminated poverty, preserved Dakota culture and language, and become one of Minnesota’s largest philanthropists, donating over $400 million to various causes. Many tribal members still choose to work at tribal enterprises despite not needing to financially. Yet familiar abundance challenges have emerged—tribal leaders worry about teaching children self-discipline and the value of money when ‘no one will likely ever need to work.’
While there has been some journalistic and academic attention to these dynamics, no one has done a comprehensive ethnographic study of how this wealth affects daily life, meaning-making, and community cohesion. This seems like an obvious place to start. Understanding how the Shakopee navigate their abundance could provide essential insights as we approach AGI-driven prosperity.
Third, we should explore incentive structures for post-scarcity societies. Drawing on game design, prestige economies, and symbolic systems, we would investigate how voluntary challenges and meaning-making rituals might replace economic striving.
Finally, to explore what lies beyond precedent, we must also turn inward and engage our imaginative faculties: through fiction, worldbuilding, and thought experiments that ask, Who would I become in a world without constraints? Such inquiry may uncover deeper psychological and moral dynamics that empirical studies alone cannot reach.
By weaving together these methods, we can anticipate the complex challenges of true abundance before we are submerged in its reality. This is not abstract theorising. With AGI potentially arriving within years, we have a narrow window to understand how abundance affects human psychology and social structures. The alternative is to repeat Aria’s story on a global scale: a world where people rage against a golden void, where the absence of friction breeds not contentment but despair. If we wait until AGI delivers abundance to study its effects, we will be trying to solve psychological and social crises in real-time, with the meaning of billions of lives at stake.
Only by taking abundance seriously—studying it, experimenting with it, and articulating visions for it—can we ensure that our greatest technological achievement becomes humanity’s liberation rather than its most sophisticated prison.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Kola Ayonrinde for the conversations that inspired this essay. I am grateful to Kola, Rudolf Laine, Carlo Attubato, Aviel Parrack, John Soroushian, Liam Patell, Joanna Wiaterek, Catherine Fist, and Philipp Alexander Kreer for their valuable comments and insights.