Summary: Post scarcity or post-scarcity describes a hypothetical form of economy or society, often explored in science fiction, in which things such as goods, services and information are free, or practically free. This would be due to an abundance of fundamental resources (matter, energy and intelligence), in conjunction with sophisticated automated systems capable of converting raw materials into finished goods, allowing manufacturing to be as easy as duplicating software.

Even without postulating new technologies, it is conceivable that already there exists enough energy, raw materials and biological resources to provide a comfortable lifestyle for every person on Earth. However even a hypothetical political or economic system able to achieve this lifestyle for everyone would generally not be termed a “post-scarcity society” unless the production of goods was sufficiently automated that virtually no labor was required by anyone. (It is usually assumed there would still be plenty of voluntary creative labor, such as a writer creating a novel or a software engineer working on free software.)

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Post-Scarcity Princeton

Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a “post-scarcity” iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?

These four projects all represent post-scarcity trends relating to a small local investment yielding huge results globally. A few million US dollars on Wikipedia turned into millions of person-hours of global labor (taken mostly from TV viewing) to yield a global multi-lingual resource that is changing the face of education worldwide. A college student (and grandson of a poet) named Linus Torvalds developed Linux in Finland, and, along with others’ contributions (both volunteer and done while on payrolls), that free software now makes possible huge server farms and huge supercomputers (which previously were slowed by the inability to customize proprietary software, as well as essentially a tax per CPU); those supercomputers are promising all sorts of wonders including new medicines.

A few million dollars spent developing WordNet at Princeton has led to a “cognitive revolution” in software that can process text. GNU/Linux and WordNet together made possible Google as it is now. While Google may have annual operating costs in the billions of dollars, it is saving trillions of dollars worth of time spent researching, and it is also improving the quality and timeliness of information used to make important decisions globally. In each case, a relatively small initial investment has produced enormous global benefits. Encyclopedic knowledge is no longer scarce. End-user modifiable software is no longer scarce. The ability to intelligently process text is no longer scarce. Timely answers to certain questions are no longer scarce.

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The Economics of Abundance

The Internet is changing the entertainment business from one that is driven by hits to one that will make most of its money from misses. This is good news for consumers because it means more choice, and we all like things that will never make the bestseller lists for CDs, books or movies. And although it might sound strange, this “new economics of abundance” is already the basis of the Net’s most successful companies, such as Amazon, eBay and Google. Internet start-ups are now asking one another: “Are you long tail?”

The phrase was popularized by Wired magazine editor in chief Chris Anderson, who started the ball rolling last year with a series of talks and a long article called “The Long Tail.” That caught the imagination of bloggers, who circulated and applied the meme. “The day I knew I was on to something was when people saw the applicability in places I hadn’t anticipated,” says Anderson. “It’s become, in some sense, an open-source meme. They’re doing a lot of research and feeding it back to me. That’s why I started the Long Tail blog and, unbelievably, it works.”

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