An example is slavery and the cotton gin.
If you look at how much more effective the cotton gin made cotton production, you would think the logical outcome would be: “If you’re increasing efficiency by that much, surely you don’t need as many slaves.” The machine is doing work that people were doing. So the suffering should decrease.
But that’s not what happened.
People went out and bought more land, built more plantations, and owned more slaves, because the bottleneck wasn’t processing the cotton anymore. The bottleneck moved. Now it was picking the cotton. So you needed more slaves, which meant more suffering. Something that looked like it should reduce suffering actually increased it, because the system didn’t remove suffering from the equation, it just shifted where it was.
That’s the point. A big leap in efficiency doesn’t automatically reduce human suffering. It can just relocate it, or even increase it, if the incentive is “maximize output and profit” instead of “minimize suffering.”
That’s exactly what AI and robotics are about to test.
AI and robotics have the potential to create universal abundance. We can become massively more productive without needing the same amount of human suffering to be productive. But during the transition, the key question is simple: what do the people in charge of these systems do?
Do they look at the equation as “how much human suffering can I minimize while we move toward the goal”?
Or do they look at it as “how much money and power can I extract with the least expense”?
Because if it’s the second one, we’re going to repeat the cotton gin pattern. We’re going to shift the bottleneck, and the suffering will show up somewhere else. Different form, same logic.
So if we could go back in history and redo what we did when the cotton gin showed up, would we change it? What would we put in place so that the productivity jump reduced suffering instead of scaling exploitation?
That’s what’s in front of us now. Another dramatic leap in technology, and the same moral problem: how do we balance productivity against the amount of human suffering required to get there?
And the part people don’t want to say out loud is that speed matters.
If we wanted to reach universal abundance in 10 years while keeping society stable, that’s one path. If the people in charge disregard human suffering, maybe they try to force it in 2 years. Or maybe it’s 5. But the faster you try to push it without guardrails, the more you increase the probability that the system tears itself apart.
That’s the real risk.
If we let this transition run on pure incentive, with no agreement on what we’re optimizing for, it can destabilize society internally. And in the worst case, internal instability escalates into bigger conflict, including self-annihilation.
So we need to come together and agree on the balance: this is how quickly we can accomplish the goal while minimizing the probability of implosion. This is how we move toward universal abundance in the most efficient way without tearing the world apart on the way there.
Because the rest of time after that is what matters.
Once we actually reach the goal, we have an enormous amount of time to expand. But this transition determines whether we get to expand… or whether we implode.