The Theology of Abundance
Why Automation Moves the Margin but Does Not Abolish Work, Scarcity, Status, or Hierarchy
Keywords: automation, robotics, techno-abundance, post-scarcity communism, labour economics, scarcity migration, Veblen goods, hierarchy, conspicuous consumption, positional goods, coordination, institutional economics, allocation, technological unemployment, political economy
I. The Machine as Political Theology
There is a peculiar superstition in the contemporary cult of techno-abundance: the belief that a machine, once sufficiently polished, sufficiently networked, and sufficiently expensive, ceases to be a tool and becomes a solvent for the human condition. It is not merely claimed that robotics will make certain tasks cheaper, faster, safer, or less tedious. That claim would be ordinary, defensible, and almost too obvious to require stating. The grander claim is that automation will abolish work, dissolve hierarchy, neutralise scarcity, and usher in a condition of effortless common plenty, as though the factory robot were not a machine but an angel with a maintenance contract.
The argument is usually presented with the serene confidence of someone who has mistaken a diagram for a civilisation. Machines will perform labour. Labour will therefore vanish. Since labour vanishes, wages and employment will no longer matter. Since goods will become abundant, property will become obsolete. Since property will become obsolete, hierarchy will wither. Since hierarchy will wither, a technologically mediated communism will arrive without the disagreeable historical inconveniences that accompanied earlier attempts at communism, such as coercion, queues, bureaucracy, terror, and the inevitable emergence of a managerial class whose humility lasts until the first office allocation.
This is not political economy. It is eschatology. It is salvation history with robots.
The central failure lies in a confusion between the automation of tasks and the abolition of work. Autor’s task-based approach to automation makes precisely this distinction: computerisation substitutes for some routine tasks while complementing other forms of human labour, especially those involving problem-solving, adaptability, interpersonal judgement, and non-routine cognition (Autor, 2015; Autor, Levy, & Murnane, 2003). The distinction matters because occupations are not simple bundles of identical mechanical movements. They are structured roles embedded in systems of responsibility, trust, accountability, and coordination. Automating a task does not abolish the institutional, managerial, legal, social, and strategic environment within which that task had meaning.
The techno-abundance communist dislikes this distinction because it makes his prophecy look like a child’s magic trick. He sees a robot cleaning a floor and concludes that cleaning has been abolished. It has not. Cleaning remains. The floor remains. Dust remains. The preference for cleanliness remains. The scheduling of the cleaning remains. The repair of the cleaner remains. The question of ownership, cost, energy, space, replacement, liability, software updates, and service continuity remains. The hand has changed. The structure has not disappeared.
This is the first principle: technology moves the margin. It does not abolish the structure.
II. The Ultra-Rich as the Existing Prototype of “Abundance”
The easiest way to falsify the vulgar theory of post-scarcity automation is to examine those who already live closest to it. The very rich have long inhabited a world in which much ordinary labour is outsourced. They employ cleaners, cooks, gardeners, drivers, assistants, tutors, household managers, accountants, lawyers, security staff, travel organisers, agents, brokers, consultants, and various other human attachments to convenience. They live surrounded by service systems whose purpose is to reduce friction and remove drudgery from their immediate experience.
If outsourcing labour were equivalent to abolishing work, the wealthy would already be post-work beings. They would drift through life in a state of satisfied equilibrium, perhaps pausing occasionally to be photographed beside a charitable foundation. Yet this is not what occurs. The wealthy do not cease to work. They do not cease to decide. They do not cease to compete. They do not cease to manage. Indeed, their lives often become dense with higher-order labour: investment decisions, legal structuring, reputational maintenance, strategic planning, household coordination, institutional access, status competition, and the perpetual problem of protecting wealth from governments, relatives, employees, competitors, and fools.
The household with staff is the miniature civilisation in which the entire abundance fantasy collapses. A maid does not abolish cleaning. A gardener does not abolish maintenance. A driver does not abolish distance. A cook does not abolish appetite, diet, preference, supply, taste, or the need to decide what one wants. Staff remove direct execution; they do not remove decision. They transform labour from physical performance into supervision, selection, correction, payment, trust management, and institutional dependence.
Replace the maid with a robot and the result is not metaphysically different. One has not abolished the household. One has altered its technical substrate. The robot must be acquired, powered, configured, maintained, insured, updated, secured, repaired, replaced, and integrated into domestic routines. It must operate within a physical environment that continues to decay, accumulate dirt, break, leak, rot, oxidise, malfunction, and offend aesthetic preference. Entropy does not resign because a venture-backed company released version 3.2.
The wealthy expatriate in Asia or the Middle East makes the point with particular vulgar clarity. He may have a housekeeper, gardener, driver, cook, nanny, concierge, security guard, and compound maintenance staff. To the abundance enthusiast, this appears almost utopian: most ordinary labour has been displaced from the individual’s hands. But this is not post-scarcity. It is wage arbitrage plus property rights, legal privilege, currency advantage, migration controls, domestic labour markets, institutional stability, and hierarchy wearing linen.
The labour has not disappeared. It has been reassigned. The inconvenience has not vanished. It has been purchased at a discount. The hierarchy has not dissolved. It has become the condition of the arrangement.
Automation generalises this structure. It does not escape it.
III. Work Is Not Motion
The abundance argument fails because it defines work as visible exertion. That definition is crude enough to be politically useful and analytically useless. Work is not merely motion. Work is purposeful activity under constraint. It includes judgement, coordination, responsibility, risk-bearing, monitoring, correction, adaptation, and allocation. A job is not simply a list of physical or cognitive tasks; it is a role inside a system of expectations.
This is why the task-based literature matters. Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) showed that computerisation substitutes most readily for routine tasks that can be expressed through explicit rules, while complementing non-routine problem-solving and complex communication. This does not imply that technology is harmless, nor that workers are magically protected. It means that the effect of automation depends on task content, organisational context, demand elasticity, and institutional adjustment. The robot does not enter the economy as a universal eraser. It enters as capital, as complement, as substitute, as threat, as tool, as dependency, and as a new site of control.
Acemoglu and Restrepo (2020) found that industrial robot exposure in the United States had negative effects on employment and wages in exposed local labour markets. This matters because automation is not fairy dust sprinkled evenly across society. It is a shock transmitted through ownership, bargaining power, industrial composition, geography, and institutions. Some workers lose. Some firms gain. Some sectors reorganise. Some regions decline. Some tasks vanish. Others expand. None of this resembles the childish claim that robots simply end jobs and thereby liberate everyone into egalitarian leisure.
The sophisticated question is not whether machines replace tasks. They do. The question is what new scarcities, complementarities, institutions, dependencies, and hierarchies emerge when they do. Bessen (2019) emphasises that productivity-enhancing technology may increase employment when demand is elastic, but employment can later fall as demand saturates. That is an economic argument. It depends on demand, prices, productivity, and market structure. It is not a bedtime story in which the machine does the work and everyone gets a hammock.
The abundance theorist wants automation to mean finality. In reality, it means recomposition.
IV. Efficiency Produces Escalation, Not Idleness
Every major technological advance has reduced the cost of some activity and thereby expanded the scale, complexity, and ambition of that activity. The plough did not end agriculture. It enlarged it. The factory did not end production. It reorganised it into systems of capital, labour discipline, logistics, management, finance, and global trade. The computer did not end calculation. It made calculation so ubiquitous that whole organisations now drown in metrics while congratulating themselves on insight.
The internet did not end communication. It multiplied communication until silence became a scarce good. Email did not create leisure. It created inboxes. Search engines did not end inquiry. They created a civilisation of people who can retrieve information faster than they can understand it. Artificial intelligence will not end writing, law, medicine, design, administration, education, or research. It will alter their cost structures, compress some routines, expand expectations, and produce new forms of verification, authority, liability, fraud, dependency, and status competition.
Efficiency does not normally produce inactivity. It produces escalation. When something becomes cheaper, people do more of it, demand more variants, expect faster delivery, tolerate less imperfection, and invent more refined standards. Once food is abundant, people do not stop caring about food. They care about cuisine, provenance, organic certification, macro-nutrients, restaurant access, aesthetics, and the social meaning of where and what they eat. Once clothing is abundant, people do not stop caring about clothing. They care about tailoring, rarity, taste, brand, restraint, signalling, and whether the garment communicates wealth without the vulgarity of admitting effort.
This is the problem with the childish version of abundance: it assumes human desire terminates at sufficiency. It does not. Desire expands. Comfort produces refinement. Refinement produces comparison. Comparison produces hierarchy.
The abundance communist imagines that when basic needs are satisfied, social rivalry fades. This is anthropology written by someone who has never attended a faculty meeting, a charity dinner, a school admissions process, or a neighbourhood planning dispute. People compete over money when money is scarce. When money becomes common, they compete over taste. When taste becomes common, they compete over authenticity. When authenticity becomes common, they compete over suffering, virtue, access, or purity. The human animal can manufacture hierarchy out of anything, including humility.
V. Scarcity Does Not Vanish; It Migrates
The doctrine of techno-abundance rests on the assumption that scarcity is mainly a production problem. Increase productive capacity sufficiently and scarcity disappears. This is false. Scarcity is not one thing. It is a shifting set of constraints. Some constraints are material. Others are temporal, spatial, institutional, cognitive, social, legal, energetic, ecological, and positional.
When goods become cheaper, scarcity migrates elsewhere. Time remains finite. Attention remains limited. Competence remains unevenly distributed. Land remains rival. Prime locations remain scarce. Trust remains costly. Institutions remain fragile. Energy systems remain bounded. Social recognition remains comparative. The fact that a factory can produce more objects does not create more Mayfair, more Manhattan, more waterfront, more elite university places, more childhood, more silence, more credibility, more courage, or more good judgement.
Hirsch (1976) understood this in his analysis of positional goods. Some goods are valuable because access to them is limited relative to others. Their value depends on ranking. If everyone has them, they cease to serve the same function. A society can become materially richer while positional competition intensifies. Indeed, prosperity can increase the resources available for competition over non-material or relatively fixed goods.
This is why Veblen remains fatal to abundance communism. In The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen (1899/1994) described conspicuous consumption as social communication. Goods do not merely satisfy needs; they signal rank, exemption, refinement, power, and distance from necessity. The Veblen good is not valuable despite its exclusivity. It is valuable because of it. Universalise it and it ceases to perform the function that made it desirable.
The abundance communist wants “luxury for all.” This is a contradiction dressed as generosity. If luxury becomes universal, it becomes baseline comfort. The status function moves. The hierarchy reforms around something else. Yesterday’s luxury becomes today’s infrastructure, and tomorrow’s elite immediately begin looking bored in a better neighbourhood.
VI. Veblen Goods and the Indestructibility of Status
A Veblen good is not just an expensive object. It is an object whose desirability is entangled with its price, rarity, and signalling capacity. It communicates that the owner possesses resources beyond ordinary necessity. It is consumption with an audience. Sometimes the audience is literal. More often it is internalised: the imagined tribunal of class, taste, envy, resentment, admiration, and quiet humiliation.
Automation can mass-produce objects. It cannot mass-produce distinction. The moment a formerly exclusive good becomes available to everyone, it loses its exclusivity and therefore its positional function. The elite do not then surrender hierarchy. They move on. If everyone can buy the watch, the point becomes the invitation-only edition. If everyone can buy the edition, the point becomes provenance. If provenance becomes easy to fake, the point becomes social recognition by those whose recognition cannot be purchased directly, only approached through the more amusing hypocrisies of culture.
Bourdieu (1984) showed that taste itself functions as social distinction. Class is reproduced not only through income but through cultural capital, embodied habits, aesthetic judgement, education, and the ability to treat necessity as vulgar. This matters because abundance at the level of goods does not equal abundance at the level of distinction. The more goods become available, the more distinction retreats into subtler forms. The game becomes less visible, not less real.
Frank (1985) similarly analysed status as a positional contest. Individuals care not only about absolute consumption but about relative standing. This is why material improvement does not automatically eliminate rivalry. Relative position remains. If everyone rises, the ranking may remain intact. The ladder can be made of nicer wood and still be a ladder.
The techno-abundance communist misses this because he thinks hierarchy is a defect in distribution. It is also an expression of comparison. Remove one basis of comparison and another appears. The future does not become flat because the robots are busy. It becomes more elaborate.
VII. Baumol, Services, and the Persistence of Human Attention
The abundance thesis also fails because not all valuable activity behaves like manufacturing. Baumol and Bowen (1966) analysed the cost disease affecting labour-intensive services where productivity growth is limited relative to progressive sectors. The famous example is live performance: a string quartet does not perform a Beethoven quartet faster because semiconductor manufacturing improved. The time structure of the service is part of the service.
The same logic applies to education, care, medicine, law, elite advice, therapy, management, diplomacy, and many forms of personal service. Some parts can be automated. Some can be supported by tools. But the value often lies in attention, judgement, trust, presence, interpretation, or institutional authority. These are not reducible to object production.
Education is not merely content delivery. If it were, libraries would have abolished ignorance. Education includes discipline, assessment, mentorship, selection, certification, socialisation, and status allocation. Medicine is not merely diagnosis. It includes trust, responsibility, embodied examination, institutional reliability, liability, triage, care, and the management of fear. Law is not merely text generation. It includes procedure, evidence, adversarial judgement, credibility, authority, and enforceability. Governance is not merely information processing. It includes legitimacy, coercion, priority-setting, and conflict resolution.
Automation enters these fields as tool and disruption. It does not dissolve their human and institutional core. A machine may draft a contract, but someone must decide whether the contract serves the client’s interests, whether the risk is acceptable, whether the counterparty can be trusted, whether the jurisdiction is reliable, and whether litigation would be ruinous. The machine can accelerate the production of words. It cannot abolish judgement.
Human attention itself becomes more valuable when ordinary production becomes cheaper. This is why the rich buy access to scarce people, not merely scarce objects: the best doctors, lawyers, tutors, designers, strategists, curators, security advisers, and social networks. The more ordinary goods are automated, the more premium attaches to trusted human discretion.
The robot does not end the servant problem. It elevates it into the expert problem.
VIII. Maintenance, Entropy, and the Back Office of Civilisation
The abundance fantasy also lacks a theory of maintenance. This is not a minor omission. It is fatal. Everything breaks. Machines fail. Systems drift. Components wear. Software ages. Cybersecurity degrades. Standards fragment. Supply chains fracture. Batteries decay. Sensors misread. Actuators jam. Interfaces confuse. Models hallucinate. Networks go down. Regulations change. Parts become unavailable. People misuse tools with the tireless creativity that has always distinguished the species.
A highly automated society is not a society without maintenance. It is a society in which maintenance becomes foundational. The more civilisation depends on automated systems, the more it depends on repair, redundancy, monitoring, auditing, technical standards, security, energy reliability, and institutional competence. The visible worker disappears from the front of the process and reappears behind it as technician, engineer, compliance officer, systems architect, security analyst, logistics manager, regulator, insurer, auditor, and emergency responder.
The fool sees a robot perform a task and declares labour abolished. The serious observer asks who maintains the robot, who writes the software, who supplies the parts, who owns the data, who pays for the energy, who handles the liability, who prevents sabotage, who arbitrates disputes, and who responds when the system fails at scale.
A civilisation of robots is not a civilisation without work. It is a civilisation whose work has moved into the walls.
IX. Institutions Do Not Become Optional
The machine-worshipper often assumes that technical capacity reduces the need for institutional order. The opposite is more plausible. Complex automation requires stronger institutions because more social dependence is placed on invisible systems. Property rights must be secure. Contracts must be enforceable. Technical standards must be stable. Liability rules must be clear. Energy infrastructure must be reliable. Disputes must be resolved. Malicious use must be constrained. Safety failures must be investigated. Access must be governed. Exclusion must be legitimate enough not to produce continuous conflict.
North (1990) defined institutions as the rules of the game in a society. Automation does not remove the game. It increases the value of controlling the rules. A robot economy still requires law, enforcement, standards, ownership, contract, finance, insurance, certification, and governance. The more productive the machines become, the more consequential control over these institutions becomes.
Hayek’s (1945) knowledge problem also remains relevant. Economic coordination depends on dispersed, local, tacit knowledge that cannot be centrally aggregated without loss. Automation may process information faster, but it does not eliminate the problem of ends, preferences, trade-offs, or local context. A system can optimise only against specified objectives. It cannot decide, without human institutional input, which objectives should govern competing claims.
Coase (1937) explained firms as responses to transaction costs. Automation changes transaction costs; it does not abolish them. Some activities may move inside firms. Others may move outside. Platforms may coordinate markets. Hierarchies may deepen where integration becomes valuable. New intermediaries may arise. The structure changes, but coordination remains costly.
This is where the communist fantasy becomes especially naïve. It assumes that abundance makes allocation unproblematic. Yet allocation remains wherever goods are rival, positional, time-sensitive, location-bound, quality-differentiated, institutionally constrained, or socially meaningful. A world with abundant production still requires rules about access, priority, ownership, maintenance, exclusion, and responsibility. Where rules exist, power exists. Where power exists, hierarchy follows.
The machines do not abolish politics. They make politics more technically mediated.
X. Ownership and the Return of Capital
The phrase “fully automated luxury communism” is useful mainly because it exposes its own contradiction. Full automation would make capital more central, not less. If machines perform an increasing share of economically valuable tasks, the ownership and governance of machines become decisive. The old question of who owns the means of production does not vanish because the means of production learned to walk.
Capital ownership becomes more important when capital substitutes for labour. If the returns to automated systems accrue to their owners, automation may increase inequality unless counteracted by institutions, taxation, ownership models, competition policy, or redistribution. This is not a moral slogan. It is arithmetic. When productive assets do more of the work, those who own productive assets occupy a stronger position.
Piketty’s analysis of capital accumulation is not a theory of robotics, but it is relevant to the ownership problem. If returns to capital systematically exceed growth in income, wealth concentration can intensify (Piketty, 2014). Automation does not automatically reverse that process. It may deepen it if productive capital becomes more capable and more concentrated.
This is why the abundance communist’s confidence is so comic. He imagines that automation dissolves capitalism. It may instead produce a colder version of it: fewer workers needed for execution, greater returns to owners of systems, more dependence on intellectual property, platforms, infrastructure, standards, and data, and a broader class of people invited to enjoy cheap goods while having little command over the machinery that structures their lives.
Cheap consumption is not the same as power. A population may be materially entertained and politically dependent. Bread and circuses become less romantic when the circus is algorithmically personalised and the bread arrives by drone.
XI. The False End of Jobs
The claim that jobs will disappear because robots exist is too crude to be useful. Some jobs will disappear. Some jobs will shrink. Some occupations will be restructured. Some workers will be displaced. Some regions will suffer. Some firms will become vastly more productive. Some workers will be complemented by machines and become more valuable. Others will be substituted away. This is not the end of work. It is the reallocation of work through technology, capital, demand, and institutions.
Frey and Osborne (2017) estimated that a substantial share of U.S. employment was susceptible to computerisation, but later task-based analyses, including Arntz, Gregory, and Zierahn (2016), argued that occupation-level estimates overstate automation risk because jobs contain bundles of tasks, many of which are not readily automated. The disagreement is instructive. The question is not whether technology matters. It is whether one understands the unit of analysis. The abundance enthusiast usually does not. He talks about “jobs” as if they were single-task objects waiting to be unplugged.
Real jobs are messy. A nurse does not merely record symptoms. A teacher does not merely transmit information. A lawyer does not merely assemble sentences. A manager does not merely schedule activity. A builder does not merely move materials. Each role contains judgement, exception-handling, tacit knowledge, interpersonal trust, and responsibility. Automation may transform each role. It does not make the organisational need disappear.
Even where employment falls in a sector, the broader economy does not thereby enter post-work bliss. Displaced workers must transition. Skills must be rebuilt. Institutions must adapt. Wages adjust unevenly. Political conflict follows. Regions suffer path dependency. Families absorb shocks. Social status changes. The abundance theorist skips this because his imagined future has no transition costs, no losers, no institutions, no resentment, no geography, and no human beings recognisable outside a diagram.
XII. Communism Without Scarcity Is Still Allocation
The communist element of techno-abundance rests on the claim that material abundance would remove the conflict over distribution. But distribution is not only about quantity. It is also about timing, quality, location, priority, access, exclusion, and control. Even if many goods become cheap, not all goods become non-rival. Not all goods become equally desirable. Not all people want the same things. Not all claims can be satisfied simultaneously.
If robots can build houses, land still matters. If robots can produce food, water and logistics still matter. If robots can provide transport, roads, airspace, ports, permissions, congestion, and jurisdiction still matter. If robots can provide medical assistance, triage, trust, liability, and institutional capacity still matter. If robots can generate entertainment, attention and status still matter.
Allocation remains because conflict remains. Conflict remains because desire remains. Desire remains because man is not a stomach with a subscription plan.
The abundance communist wants to believe that enough production will remove the need for authority. Yet authority is necessary precisely where claims conflict. A world of automated production may reduce certain conflicts while sharpening others. Who receives priority access to scarce locations? Who controls updates to critical systems? Who decides safety standards? Who owns training data? Who receives elite human care when machine care is common? Who is permitted to opt out? Who may command the machines, and on what terms?
These are not technical questions alone. They are political questions. They do not disappear because the machines become impressive.
XIII. Meaning, Agency, and the Horror of Passive Plenty
There is another defect in the abundance fantasy, less economic but no less important. It assumes that the abolition of work would be desirable. This depends on defining work as drudgery. Much work is drudgery, and reducing drudgery is a civilisational achievement. But work is not only drudgery. It is also agency under constraint. It is the transformation of intention into the world. It gives form to time, discipline to desire, and consequence to choice.
A life in which nothing is required is not obviously a life perfected. It may be a life emptied. Purpose does not arise from passive consumption. It arises from projects, responsibility, difficulty, achievement, service, rivalry, creation, and the confrontation with limits. Remove every limit and one does not obtain freedom. One obtains formlessness.
This is why the wealthiest do not retire into pure consumption. They build companies, foundations, collections, networks, political projects, dynastic strategies, aesthetic worlds, reputational monuments, and occasionally lawsuits of such ornamental extravagance that one almost admires the waste. They seek significance because comfort is insufficient. They prove by their conduct what the abundance theorist denies in his doctrine: man does not stop acting when his needs are met.
The machine can reduce toil. It cannot supply purpose. It can execute commands. It cannot decide which commands are worthy. It can optimise within a frame. It cannot create the final frame of value without inheriting it from human institutions, incentives, and conflicts.
A society that imagines machines will spare it from judgement is not preparing for abundance. It is preparing for infantilisation.
XIV. The Needle Moves; the Structure Remains
The strongest version of the automation argument is not absurd. It says that robotics and artificial intelligence will reduce the cost of many tasks, displace some workers, complement others, raise productivity, alter industrial structure, and change the distribution of income and power. That is serious. It deserves analysis. It requires policy, law, investment, education, competition, institutional design, and sober thought.
The weak version, which is the popular version, says that machines will abolish work, scarcity, hierarchy, and politics. That version deserves the back of the hand.
Technology moves the needle. It can move it dramatically. It can make societies richer, healthier, safer, cleaner, faster, and more capable. It can reduce brute necessity. It can remove degrading toil. It can expand human possibility. It can shift labour from muscle to judgement, from repetition to design, from execution to governance.
But it does not abolish scarcity. Scarcity migrates. It does not abolish hierarchy. Hierarchy adapts. It does not abolish Veblen goods. It makes ordinary goods less useful for distinction and thereby pushes status competition into subtler and more exclusive domains. It does not abolish work. It recomposes work around coordination, maintenance, judgement, allocation, and responsibility.
The techno-abundance communist mistakes movement for conclusion. He sees the needle move and announces the death of the clock. The wiser observer hears the mechanism continue.
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