The Eternal Pageantry of the Post-Scarcity Mind

Post-scarcity science fiction tends to be low interpersonal conflict. In the Walle-E dystopia, everyone is fat and lazy, nobody is fighting or striving. In Star Trek and the Culture series, the conflict is mostly pushed to the frontier, where unassimilated civilizations still lurk — the assimilated tend to be so Enlightened and Reasonable that intense interpersonal conflict is unimaginable. When you can get anything you want from a replicator, when the Minds have already foreseen and fulfilled every material need, and can effortless out-perform humans at any job, what is there that’s left to fight over?

Probably a lot, counter to most science fiction. The problem is that a lot of goods are positional. No matter how rich a society becomes, no matter how technologically advanced it is, only 1% of the population can have the top 1% of anything. There’s only one Olympic gold for the marathon. This would remain true even if we invented a super-drug that let the average couch potato run a 3:00 marathon with zero training. Similarly, there are only 2,000 freshman seats at Harvard; there is only one Captain of the USS Enterprise; etc.

TNG presents a low-competition utopia. People are generally competent, and try at jazzercise-level exertion to be good at their jobs. There’s minimal political maneuvering. You have time to learn the trombone.

But is this realistic? Humans care a lot about positional goods, arguably even more than they care about “absolute” goods such as food, shelter, clothing, etc. In a post-scarcity world where all material needs are met, and where humans have no economic advantage over robots/AI/whatever, it seems likely that ≈100% of human effort would go into acquiring positional goods.

This leads to a different vision of a post-scarcity future: one of never-ending, zero-sum social competition. The final frontier is not space — it’s status. This is probably most productive when channeled into sport-like competition (everyone striving to be the fastest runner, the best chess player, etc.). It feels less productive when channeled into popularity contests, celebrity status, etc. And, unfortunately, the sport-like compeition only works because of the ambient respect/popularity of the sport; being good at something isn’t enough, people have to care about what you’re good at. Even today, being the world’s best chess player is a lot cooler than being the world’s best Jenga player.

Thinking this through, you realize that most Americans actually have direct experience with a post-scarcity, high-competition environment: high school. High-schoolers don’t have replicators, but they do have mom and dad, which is enough to meet the material needs of most. (As a secondary point, wealth benefits are artifically constrained in high school relative to the adult world — your #2 pencil can only be so good.) High-schoolers aren’t economically dominated by AI (yet), but they are economically dominated by adults. Most high-schoolers have little earning potential in a labor market of adults, and the things they do/make might be “good for their age”, but they’re not good.* You don’t listen to the high-school band unless your kid is in it.

This gives us a convenient shorthand for imagining a post-scarcity, high-competition dystopia. It’s high-school, forever.

(* Obviously some high-schoolers are amazing, and have far greater earning potential than the average adult. The exceptional should send it.)