The Abundance Trap: Why We Are Renting the Future

I am a daily practitioner of AI. I build with it, I rely on it, and I am optimistic about its potential to remove drudgery from our work. But while I am an enthusiast for the technology, I am deeply skeptical of the narrative. We are told that AI abolishes scarcity. Big Tech sells a vision where intelligence becomes "too cheap to meter", lifting humanity into a post-scarcity utopia. But if you audit the actual architecture of this economy, you realize that AI does not abolish scarcity. It reorganizes it. The Anaesthesia of Cheap Content We are currently witnessing a massive divergence. • The Output is Free: The marginal cost of generating text, images, and code has collapsed. The world is flooded with synthetic media that looks like "value." • The Input is Priceless: The infrastructure required to create that value, advanced fabrication, high-bandwidth memory, energy contracts, and specialized talent, is becoming aggressively scarce. This is the Abundance Trap. The flood of cheap conte