A surplus of productivity should not be a problem. It’s only troublesome in an economy in which markets are driven by scarcity alone and value is understood as something to be extracted from people rather than created for them. That’s the zero-sum economic approach that sees something like, say, renewable energy as such a problem: how do we compensate for the loss of profit to be derived from digging oil out of the ground? When an economy has been based in exploiting real and artificial scarcity, the notion of a surplus of almost anything is a mortal threat. As individuals living in an economic landscape constructed over centuries to remove humans altogether, we fear being sacked the moment we are no longer necessary to our employers. As business owners, we fear technologies that render our claim to scarce resources or other competitive advantages obsolete.

We’ve gotten too competent to maintain this position. Rather, we must take a step outside the economic model in which we are living and accept the potentially scary truth that we have finally succeeded. In spite of our dehumanized approach (or maybe because of it), we have managed to produce enough stuff to give out a livable share to everyone as a matter of course, and for free. A whole lot of what used to be scarce is now plentiful, and between 3-D printing and other forms of distributed production, the rest of everything could turn out to be plentiful as well. We may be approaching what economic futurist Jeremy Rifkin calls “the zero marginal cost society,” in which new technologies reduce the cost of everything to nearly nothing at all.