For most of modern history, money has been the quiet operating system of adult life. It decides where you live, how you spend your hours, what you eat, and which risks you are allowed to take. We treat that as natural. It is not. Money is a coordination tool for scarcity: an elegant one, refined over centuries, but still a tool. Tools become obsolete when the problem they solve stops being the main problem. By 2036, for a growing share of human activity, that problem may no longer be “how do we ration limited goods?” It may be “how do we organise a world in which machines can produce almost everything we need?”
That is the abundance thesis. It sounds utopian until you notice how quickly the ingredients are assembling.
What Abundance Actually Means
Abundance does not mean infinite yachts for everyone, or that desire itself evaporates. It means that the marginal cost of many essentials (intelligence, design, logistics, basic manufacturing, energy optimisation, education, and a large slice of healthcare guidance) falls toward zero. When software can plan, robots can build, and models can optimise the whole stack, the old bottleneck of human labour weakens. Food, clothing, housing components, media, software, and personalised services become dramatically cheaper to produce at scale.
We have seen previews of this already. Digital goods copy for free. Navigation, search, translation, and entertainment are effectively unlimited for anyone with a connection. Generative AI is now doing to cognitive work what the industrial revolution did to physical work: multiplying output while reducing the human hours required per unit. The difference is speed. Previous revolutions took generations. This one is compressing into a decade.
AI as an Abundance Engine
Artificial intelligence is not only a chatbot. It is a general-purpose lever on productivity. It designs better factories, schedules better supply chains, discovers materials, writes code, tutors children, drafts contracts, and soon, increasingly, operates machines that never sleep. Once the design of a product is free and the manufacturing is automated, the remaining costs are energy, raw materials, and political permission. Even those can be optimised. Better batteries, smarter grids, and automated mining or recycling change the resource equation over time.
In that world, the economic story of the twentieth century, with wages as the main claim on life’s necessities, starts to crack. If human labour is no longer required at the centre of production, wages cannot remain the only ticket to survival. Something has to replace the wage as the default distribution mechanism. That is where universal basic income enters, not as a soft-hearted luxury, but as infrastructure.
UBI as the New Plumbing
Universal basic income is usually sold as a safety net. Under abundance, it becomes something closer to a citizenship dividend: a regular claim on the surplus created by automated systems. The logic is straightforward. If AI and robotics generate enormous wealth while employing fewer people, the gains concentrate unless policy spreads them. UBI is one of the cleaner ways to do that: cash, unconditional, and universal enough to avoid humiliating means tests and bureaucratic traps.
By 2036, the argument will not primarily be moral. It will be practical. Societies that refuse to decouple survival from employment will face mass underemployment, political rage, and collapsing demand. Machines can produce; people still need purchasing power, at least during the transition. UBI provides that bridge. Over time, as more goods become nearly free or publicly provisioned, the cash itself may matter less than the floor of security it creates.
When Money Stops Being the Point
“Money won’t matter” does not mean money disappears overnight. Currencies, markets, and prices will still exist for scarce luxuries, land in desirable places, unique experiences, status goods, and anything limited by physics or fashion. What changes is the role of money in ordinary life. When housing basics, food, transport, education, and healthcare are either extremely cheap or covered by a social floor, money stops being the daily terror it is for most people today.
Think of it as a phase change. Today, money is oxygen. In an abundance-plus-UBI world, money becomes optional fuel for ambition, taste, and play. You still use it for the special, the scarce, and the speculative. You no longer need it to justify your right to exist. That shift is civilisational. It rewrites identity, politics, and culture. Work becomes contribution, craft, or status rather than ransom paid to landlords and grocery aisles.
The Road to 2036
A decade is short, but not impossibly short if you measure progress by capability curves rather than by institutions. AI systems already outperform average humans on a widening set of cognitive tasks. Robotics is catching up more slowly, but investment is pouring into warehouses, factories, and eventually homes and streets. Policy lags technology; it always has. Yet once automation is visible enough that middle-class careers hollow out in waves, UBI moves from fringe pamphlet to mainstream necessity.
Expect a messy path. Early UBI experiments will be partial, temporary, or means-tested under another name. Political fights will be brutal. Some countries will move first and attract talent; others will dig into austerity mythology until crisis forces a change. Abundance itself will be uneven: software and media first, then services, then physical goods. But by 2036, the direction of travel will be hard to deny: production rising, labour’s share falling, and a public dividend looking less radical than the alternative.
What Could Go Wrong
This future is not automatic. Abundance can be hoarded. AI can be owned by a few firms that extract rents instead of sharing surplus. UBI can be set too low, or used as a political weapon, or paired with surveillance and control. Energy and climate constraints can bite. Wars can shatter supply chains. Status competition can invent new scarcities faster than technology dissolves old ones. And humans may cling to work-as-identity even when work-as-necessity fades, creating cultural confusion rather than liberation.
There is also a quieter risk: that “money won’t matter” becomes a slogan for the comfortable while the vulnerable still feel every price rise. A real post-scarcity ethic requires more than clever models. It requires institutions that treat shared prosperity as a design goal, not a side effect.
Life After the Ledger
If the bet pays off, 2036 will not look like a science-fiction paradise so much as a rebalanced ordinary. People will still argue, create, love, waste time, and chase prestige. But the background hum of financial anxiety may recede. Children may grow up assuming that intelligence is cheap, that tools are abundant, and that adulthood is not a lifelong audition for rent. Money will still circulate. It just won’t sit in the middle of every human story as the main character.
That is the claim, stated plainly: AI will drive production toward abundance; UBI will distribute a claim on that abundance; and money, freed from the job of rationing survival, will matter less in the places it has mattered most. Whether we arrive there with grace or with chaos is still open. The technology is accelerating either way. The only real question is whether our politics can learn to share what the machines make possible.