Imagine waking up tomorrow and finding $10 million in your bank account. You’re rich. So is your neighbor. So is the person who made your coffee yesterday. Everyone, all at once.
Sounds like utopia. It falls apart before lunch.
Because if you had ten million dollars, would you show up for the 6 AM shift to steam milk and wipe down counters? Probably not — and neither would almost anyone else. To ask whether everyone can truly be rich, you have to stop counting the money in the account and start looking at who actually does the work.
The Barista Problem
The unglamorous, essential jobs — sanitation, warehouses, farms, kitchens — are largely staffed by people who need the income to live. Make everyone independently wealthy overnight and most of them walk. A few keep working for love, art, or status, but the baseline jobs that keep the lights on and the shelves stocked get abandoned by morning. The incentive that runs the whole system simply evaporates.
Why the Money Instantly Evaporates
Here’s the part the fantasy skips: money isn’t wealth. It’s a measuring stick. Real wealth is goods and services — food, housing, medicine, and yes, lattes. Hand everyone millions while the labor force walks off, and production stops. Your ten million can’t buy a coffee that no farmer grew, no trucker delivered, and no barista made. It doesn’t exist at any price.
The math of the crash
Enormous demand (everyone has millions) meeting near-zero supply (no one’s working) is the textbook recipe for hyperinflation. Prices rocket up to swallow the new money until your ten million buys a single loaf of bread — and everyone is “poor” again, right up until survival forces people back to work. Printing money never made anyone rich; it just relabels who’s poor.
Enter the Machines: A Post-Scarcity World
This is where the paradigm completely changes. The only way everyone can theoretically be “rich” in an absolute sense is if human labor is decoupled from the production of essential goods and services.
If machines, advanced AI, and robotics advance to the point where they can perform the work no one wants to do, the economic rules change entirely. This theoretical state is known as post-scarcity. In a fully automated post-scarcity economy:
- Supply remains high. Machines don’t demand wages, take vacations, or quit when they win the lottery. They produce abundant goods and services at a near-zero marginal cost.
- Prices plummet. Because the cost of production is so low, the cost of living drops dramatically.
- Wealth is redefined. Being “rich” is no longer about hoarding capital to survive. It becomes about having the free time to pursue whatever you want, supported by a baseline of machine-generated abundance — often proposed to be distributed via a Universal Basic Income.
This isn’t abstract to us. Decoupling human effort from output — letting three people ship what used to take thirty — is the exact thing we build at Rebel Studios, one automation at a time. Which is also why the next part is the one that actually keeps us up at night.
The Catch: Who Owns the Machines?
Post-scarcity is not automatic, and this is the part the utopian version skips. Automation solves the supply side of the barista problem — the machines will happily make the coffee. What it does not solve on its own is distribution.
If the robots that produce everything are owned by a handful of people, automation does not make everyone rich; it makes the owners rich and everyone else unemployed. Abundance flows to whoever holds the machines. The technology that could free everyone can just as easily concentrate wealth further than any economy in history — it depends entirely on who owns the means of production and how the output is shared. That is the same distribution problem we explored in The Automation Trap, seen from the other end.
We’re already watching a small version of this play out. The value AI creates isn’t settling evenly across everyone who uses it — it’s pooling around whoever owns the models, the compute, and the data. Point that dynamic one way and it’s the “widen opportunity” story: a solo founder with the right tools can genuinely outproduce a fifty-person company. Point it the other way and a handful of platforms capture most of the upside while everyone else rents access by the token. Both futures run on the exact same technology. The only variable is who holds the machines — and that is a choice a society makes, not a law of physics it discovers.
The real answer
Can everybody be rich? Not by printing money — that just relabels who’s poor. The only path to genuine universal abundance is automation that drives the cost of essentials toward zero, paired with a deliberate choice about how that abundance is distributed. The machines are the easy part. The choice is the hard part.
We build with AI and automation every day, and this is the tension we sit with: the same tools that let a tiny team ship what once took an army can either widen opportunity or concentrate it. Which one happens isn’t a technical question. It’s a human one — and it’s being decided right now, one deployment at a time.
For us, “thinking about second-order effects” is a habit, not a slogan. When a client asks us to automate something, the first question isn’t “can we?” — it’s “who does this touch, and is there a version that makes those people more valuable instead of redundant?” The automation worth shipping doesn’t delete a role; it deletes the boring 80% of it and hands the person back their time.
Building something in AI or automation and want it done by a team that thinks about the second-order effects? That’s what we do at Rebel Studios.