Every civilisation has been built around one unchanging fact: scarcity. There has never been enough food, enough land, enough labour or enough time to satisfy every human want. Economics itself begins with this premise. Money exists because resources are finite and choices have to be made.Now imagine a world where that premise begins to crumble.

Not because governments abolish poverty or redistribute wealth, but because machines become capable of producing more goods and services than humanity could ever consume. It sounds like an idea borrowed from science fiction. Yet it is increasingly being discussed, quite seriously, by the people building the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence systems.

Speaking recently at Tesla’s Gigafactory in Texas, Elon Musk made a prediction that startled even seasoned observers of technology. By 2036, he said, money may no longer matter. His reasoning was disarmingly simple. Nobody desires money for its own sake. What people really want is what money can buy: food, housing, transport, healthcare, education, entertainment and comfort. If robots and artificial intelligence can eventually produce all these things in overwhelming abundance, then money gradually loses the role it has played throughout history.

Almost simultaneously, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman articulated a remarkably similar vision. Humanity, he argued, has quietly entered what futurists once called the “singularity.” Not as a dramatic overnight event, but as a gradual acceleration in which intelligence itself becomes abundant. Combine abundant intelligence with abundant energy, Altman suggests, and humanity begins solving problems that once appeared permanent.Different words. The same destination.Silicon Valley increasingly believes we are moving from an economy organised around scarcity to one organised around abundance.The idea itself, however, is far older than artificial intelligence.

Karl Marx imagined that technological progress could eventually liberate human beings from lives dominated by necessity. In his vision of a communist society, productivity would become so great that people would no longer define themselves merely by their occupations. One could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner, “without ever becoming hunter, fisherman or critic.” Behind the politics that continue to divide........

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