UFFF, al final me compré uno de los libros de Ezra que llevaba tiempo buscando. Está traducido al castellano y Antonio Machado en Madrid lo tenía en su sección de ensayos. Leo la intro y es que ESTÁ claro de qué van estas guerras. De impedir la Abundancia.
Beyond Scarcity
YOU OPEN YOUR EYES AT dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets. A few feet above your head, affixed to the top of the roof, a layer of solar panels blinks in the morning sun. Their power mixes with electricity pulled from several clean energy sources—towering wind turbines to the east, small nuclear power plants to the north, deep geothermal wells to the south. Forty years ago, your parents cooled their bedrooms with joules dredged out of coal mines and oil pits. They mined rocks and burned them, coating their lungs in the byproducts. They encased their world—your world—in a chemical heat trap. Today, that seems barbaric. You live in a cocoon of energy so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill.
The year is 2050.
You walk to the kitchen to turn on the sink. Water from the ocean pours out of the faucet. It’s fresh and clear, piped from a desalination plant. These facilities use microbial membranes to squeeze out the ocean salt. Today, they provide more than half of the country’s fresh used water. Previously overtaxed rivers, such as the Colorado, have surged back now that we don’t rely on them to irrigate our farms and fill our coffee mugs. In Phoenix and Las Vegas, previously parched cities are erupting in green foliage.
You open the refrigerator. In the fruit and vegetable drawer are apples, tomatoes, and an eggplant, shipped from the nearest farm, mere miles away. These crops don’t grow horizontally, across fields. They grow vertically on tiered shelves inside a tall greenhouse. Banks of LED lights deliver the photons the plants need in precisely timed increments. These skyscraper farms spare countless acres for forests and parks. As for the chicken and beef, much of it comes from cellular meat facilities, which grow animal cells to make chicken breasts and rib eye steaks—no live animals needed, which means no confinement and slaughter. Once prohibitively expensive, cultivated meat scaled with the help of plentiful electricity. When your parents were young, nearly 25 percent of all global land was used to raise livestock for human consumption. That is unimaginable now. Much of that land has rewilded.
Out the window and across the street, an autonomous drone is dropping off the latest shipment of star pills. Several years ago, daily medications that reduced overeating, cured addiction, and slowed cellular aging were considered miracle drugs for the rich, especially when we discovered that key molecules were best synthesized in the zero-gravity conditions of space. But these days, automated factories thrum in low orbit. Cheap rocketry conveys the medicine down to earth, where it’s saved millions of lives and billions of healthy years.
Outside, the air is clean and humming with the purr of electric machines all around you. Electric cars and trucks glide down the road, quiet as a light breeze and mostly self-driving. Children and adult commuters follow on electric bikes and scooters, some personally owned and some belonging to subscription networks run by the city. Another last-mile delivery drone descends from canopy level, pauses over a neighbor’s yard like a hummingbird, and drops off a package. These e-bots now deliver a sizable chunk of online orders, reducing the drudgery of much human delivery work.
Your micro-earpiece pings: a voice text from a friend and his family, on their way to the airport for another weekend vacation. Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days, which has expanded the number of holidays, long weekends, and vacations. Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared. Your friends are flying from New York to London. The trip will take them just over two hours. Modern jetliners now routinely reach Mach 2—twice the speed of sound—using a mix of traditional and green synthetic fuels that release far less carbon into the air.
The world has changed. Not just the virtual world, that dance of pixels on our screens. The physical world, too: its houses, its energy, its infrastructure, its medicines, its hard tech. How different this era is from the opening decades of the twenty-first century, which unspooled a string of braided crises. A housing crisis. A financial crisis. A pandemic. A climate crisis. Political crises. For years, we accepted homelessness and poverty and untreated disease and declining life expectancy. For years, we knew what we needed to build to alleviate the scarcities so many faced and create the opportunities so many wanted, and we simply didn’t build it. For years, we failed to invent and implement technology that would make the world cleaner, healthier, and richer. For years, we constrained our ability to solve the most important problems.
Scarcity Is a Choice
This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.
