AI and Money Can't Coexist: One Creates Abundance. The Other Requires Scarcity.
- S B
- Nov 12
- 4 min read
AI is a technology of abundance. Money is a technology of scarcity. Money was invented to encode scarcity. AI was invented to produce abundance.
The two don't mix.
We're trying to force an abundance technology into an economic system that requires scarcity to function.
Money needs things to be limited to have value. AI makes outputs effectively unlimited at near-zero marginal cost.
Like oil and water, they don't mix.
Money once determined who gets access to time and effort; now AI compresses time and effort for everyone.
In an AI-enabled world, money cannot remain the ruling technology for the distribution of goods and services.
The Core Contradiction: AI and Money
Money is a representation of limited resources. A dollar has value because there aren't infinite dollars. Gold has value because there isn't infinite gold. Both provide access to the output of time and effort: goods and more services.
AI is a representation of unlimited capacity. As long as there are electricity and computational resources, one AI model can perform millions of analyses. Generate thousands of images. Write endless code. Answer infinite questions. Effort collapses. Access to its outputs is readily available to everyone.
This is the collision: Money says "value comes from limitation." AI says "limitation is a bug I'm here to fix."
The result is a society in which those who control AI hold the governing currency: access to AI.
Simultaneously, money loses value indefinitely, perhaps finding refuge only where AI cannot reach. And before we assume hands-on professions are safe, be cautious.
The same was said of auto mechanics. Yet modern cars are more like computers than machinery. When you take your car in for service, it's hooked up to a diagnostic computer. Now, imagine that process amplified by robotic mechanics executing the repairs. This is the pattern: AI will infiltrate every pocket of society, transforming all forms of human labor.
The Labor Market Collision
We readily see the incompatibility between the two technologies in the labor market.
In the creative domains AI generates art, music, advertisements, and even videos in seconds. This was once the expertise of professionals trained for this effort. The scarcity that gave their work economic value (the years of practice, the limited supply of skilled artists) is dissolving.
Similarities are seen in other domains where AI can generate computer code and content. Entire categories of knowledge work that had value because human capacity was limited are threatened. Not because the work isn't valuable, but because AI removes the scarcity that made it economically valuable.
The irony? The work still needs to be done. The value to society hasn't decreased. But the economic value (the price we can charge) is cratering because scarcity is what money measures, and AI eliminates scarcity.
The Rise of Fast Labor
Our economic system has exactly one mechanism for handling abundance: collapse the price until it's nearly free. When something becomes abundant, it becomes cheap.
For decades we've watched as entire industries built on speed-to-market explode, from fast food to fast fashion, from Amazon to DoorDash. Now we're witnessing what happens when technology creates fast labor.
When labor becomes abundant through AI, wages fall. When creative output becomes abundant, commissions disappear. AI is creating abundance in the one thing our economy was built on: thinking itself. The old system, which uses labor scarcity as its primary mechanism for distributing resources (via wages), is failing. It cannot handle cognitive abundance.
Where Will AI Take Us?
In the age of AI, what happens to an economic system built on scarcity?
Do we really want to preserve artificial scarcity just to maintain the current model?
If a single person with AI can do the work of a hundred people, should they capture all the economic value?
Should we prevent the single person from using AI to preserve the hundred jobs?
We've built our economies around money. We've built our professional identities around scarcity. Now skills can be replicated. Analysis can be automated. Creativity can be generated.
As we face economic collapse, where effort is concentrated in AI systems and humans need to redefine how we work, we are caught in a liminal space. The in-between place where the old system is dying but the new one isn't born yet. Where money as a coordination mechanism is breaking down, but we haven't built what comes next.
We can only answer the questions above when we accept that money can no longer make the world go around.
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"AI is the tool, but the vision is human." — Sophia B.
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About the Author
Sophia Banton works at the intersection of AI strategy, communication, and human impact. With a background in bioinformatics, public health, and data science, she brings a grounded, cross-disciplinary perspective to the adoption of emerging technologies.
Beyond technical applications, she explores GenAI’s creative potential through storytelling and short-form video, using experimentation to understand how generative models are reshaping narrative, communication, and visual expression.
