Main Page/Post-scarcity

The post-scarcity age is an anticipated era where advanced automated technology combined with efficient use of natural resources and effective co-operation could create a great abundance of the material items, goods and services required by a global population. As these highly automated processes continue to evolve, the results are likely to be achieved with ever diminishing harm to the environment.

Mankind's ever-increasing technical sophistication, will mean that people should not have to die or suffer unnecessarily due to a lack of basic necessities like food, clean water and medicine which is still the case in many parts of the world; and additionally humanity can undertake projects that were previously impossible or economically unfeasible.

Additionally due to this physical abundance society may lose some of its obsessive preoccupation with material possessions, meaning it could become a post-materialistic era also. This is hard to see while sitting in the middle of the current consumer culture and is a debatable point, but even if people's taste for goods does not subside, old goods will be easily recycled into new.

It has been promised for decades but the technology and culture to enable a true era of abundance could finally free people from working in jobs they have no particular interest to them except for the wage that it gives. People would be free to pursue their interests, learn and have far more time to be with the people who are important to them. Among other things like personal happiness, this is vital in restoring genuine communities and all the richness and support that gives to those living within it.

The bigger picture being painted here may sound rather idealistic, but the enormously powerful enabling technologies and co-operative frameworks that make it possible need to be properly understood in order for this to make any sense...