Thoughts Out Loud: Technology, Group Egoism, and How Humanity Is Organized

>by Roman Tsyupryk

>August 16, 2026

This text is just my thoughts out loud. I'm only a human being trying to analyze current information and imagine what might happen in the future. My thoughts could be completely wrong or might be just "noise" or they could be food for brainstorming about "what if..." scenarios.

What technology can make unlimited, what it can never touch, and why the difference decides everything.

The short version

If you're short on time, here is the whole argument in plain language.

Five technologies could remove material scarcity: artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, nuclear fusion, and unlimited raw materials. Four are visible on the horizon. All five are engineering problems, and nothing in physics forbids solving them.

But a second category of scarcity does not yield to engineering at all. Rank, attention, and unique things are scarce by definition, because their value comes from your position relative to other people. If everyone gets more, nobody has more. So the honest claim is not "everything becomes unlimited." It is that everything material becomes unlimited while everything positional stays exactly as scarce as it is today.

That matters because of how humanity is organized. We run on group egoism: we split into groups, and each optimizes for itself rather than for the whole. We inherited this from animals and it kept our ancestors alive, but it now produces most of our large-scale disasters. Abundance will not fix it, because group egoism works perfectly well on prestige and does not need scarce copper. What abundance does is declaw the competition, since losing a status contest while fed and healthy is a completely different event from losing one while your children go hungry.

The part nobody imagines clearly is the transition. Not the utopia, not the dystopia, but the twenty or forty years after labour is automated and before abundance arrives. That gap breaks the wage system before a replacement exists, it lets whoever owns the automation at the start still own it at the end, and it will not close everywhere at once. Technology does not choose between the good ending and the bad one. The loyalty structure does.

The reason for optimism is that separate entities merging into a cooperating whole has happened repeatedly in nature, and that everything we would have to redesign (states, economies, religions) was invented by us in the first place.

The rest is the long version. Every section opens with its own In short box, so you can read just those boxes for the whole argument in about two minutes, and drop into the full text only where you want the detail.

Definitions

In short: Two terms carry most of the weight in this essay, so they are worth pinning down before the argument starts. Group egoism does not mean individual selfishness. It means humanity is divided into groups, and each group optimizes for itself rather than for the whole. And "we" here always means humanity as a whole, not any one nation or bloc.

When I say group egoism, I do not mean individual selfishness. I mean that humanity is divided into groups (states, economies, religions, interest blocs), and each of them optimizes for itself rather than for the whole.

When I say we, I mean humanity as a whole.

Part 1: What the new technologies make possible, and what they cannot touch

In short: Five capabilities could remove material scarcity, and four of them are already on the horizon. They are engineering problems, so nothing in physics forbids them. But a second kind of scarcity is immune to engineering: positional goods like rank, attention and unique places, whose value depends entirely on your position relative to other people. Once you separate the two, the interesting question stops being "do we still need money" and becomes which of our institutions were only ever tools for managing scarcity.

The things that can become unlimited

In short: Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and nuclear fusion point at unlimited thinking, computation, labour and energy. The fifth, unlimited raw materials, is the one we do not have, and probably cannot get while confined to one planet. What unites all five is that they are engineering problems rather than physical impossibilities. There is not enough copper because we have not yet mined, recycled or synthesized enough of it.

Five capabilities. Four of them are already visible on the horizon:

Artificial intelligence: call it, in quotation marks, unlimited thinking.
Quantum computing: unlimited computation.
Robotics: unlimited physical labour.
Nuclear fusion: unlimited energy.
Unlimited raw materials: iron, copper, and everything else. This is the one we do not have, and the one we probably cannot get on a single planet. It requires becoming a multi-planetary species, and eventually a multi-stellar one.

What these five have in common is that they are all engineering problems. There is not enough copper because we have not yet mined, recycled, or synthesized enough of it. Point unlimited energy and unlimited labour at that problem and the constraint genuinely dissolves. Nothing in physics forbids it.

The things that cannot

In short: Some things are scarce by definition rather than by supply, because their value comes from your position relative to other people. Rank, attention, and unique or locational things are the clearest cases: the top one per cent is capped at one per cent by arithmetic, every person has only sixteen waking hours, and a robot can build a thousand identical apartments but not a thousand of that one view. Most arguments about a post-scarcity world quietly ignore this category. The honest claim is that everything material becomes unlimited while everything positional stays exactly as scarce as it is now.

But there is a second category, and I want to name it early, because most of the arguments about a post-scarcity world quietly ignore it.

Some things are scarce not because supply is limited, but by definition. Their value comes from your position relative to other people, not from the thing itself. If everyone gets more of it, nobody has more of it. Economists call these positional goods, and no amount of energy produces them:

Rank and status. Being the best at something, being admired, being trusted more than others. The top one per cent is capped at one per cent by arithmetic.
Attention. Every human has about sixteen waking hours. If you want an hour of one specific person's time, no factory produces a second copy of that person. The same is true of audiences: total available attention is fixed at population times hours.
Unique and locational things. The apartment with the view over the park. The original object rather than a perfect copy of it. The beach that stops being worth visiting the moment everybody goes there. A robot can build a thousand identical apartments, but not a thousand of that view.

So the honest version of the claim is not "everything becomes unlimited." It is: everything material becomes unlimited, and everything positional stays exactly as scarce as it is today. I will come back to this, because I think it is the hinge between this part and the next one.

So what is the economy still for?

In short: If nothing material is scarce, exchange has nothing material left to allocate. The strongest objection is that prices do something besides allocating: they aggregate what billions of people actually want, and no central planner can reconstruct that signal. But that objection is an argument about computational limits, and this essay has already assumed unlimited thinking and computation as premises. I am not certain the objection dissolves, because knowing what people want is not purely a computing problem, but the same question can be pointed at states and religions too.

Take the first four capabilities as given. Intellectual labour is automated, physical labour is automated, energy stops being a constraint. Then ask the obvious question.

As far as I understand it, the economy exists so that people can exchange things that are scarce. If nothing material is scarce, then exchange has nothing material left to allocate.

There is a serious objection here, and I want to meet it rather than walk past it. The economy does something besides allocating: prices are the only mechanism we have ever built that aggregates what billions of people actually want. Nobody decides how much bread Madrid needs; the price finds out. Remove payment and you have removed the signal, and no central planner can reconstruct it. This is the classic argument, and every attempt to plan an economy from the centre has confirmed it.

But notice what I have already assumed in this essay. The argument that planning cannot work is an argument about computational limits: that no authority can gather and process enough information fast enough. That was obviously true when it was formulated. It is not obviously true in a world where I have just posited unlimited thinking and unlimited computation as premises. If those premises hold, I am committed to the claim that the calculation problem is solvable, and I would rather state that openly than pretend the objection does not exist.

I am not certain it is right. Aggregating preferences is not only a matter of computing power. People do not always know what they want until a price makes them choose, and a system that predicts your preferences is not the same thing as a system that lets you express them. But that is the real question, and it is a much more interesting one than "do we still need money."

And the same question can be pointed at everything else we take for granted. The state, religion, the borders between them: which of these are permanent features of human life, and which are tools for managing scarcity and conflict, tools that lose their purpose when scarcity changes shape?

My suspicion is that we will have to rethink how humanity is organized from the ground up. Not for ideological reasons, but for efficiency, and to avoid an enormous number of conflicts that no longer have any material cause.

Part 2: Why we are the way we are

In short: Group egoism is inherited, not invented: in-group loyalty and out-group indifference are everywhere in the animal world, and they kept our ancestors alive. The question is whether they still pay, and I think they now cost far more than they give, because most large-scale disasters are several groups each acting rationally and jointly producing a bad result. Inverting our pyramid of loyalties so that humanity outranks family does not work, since every attempt has needed force to hold it in place. Widening each level looks more promising, and abundance helps, not by ending competition but by declawing it.

Group egoism is not a human invention. Watch any animal: in-group loyalty and out-group indifference are everywhere. We inherited it, and it worked. It is the reason our ancestors survived at all.

The question is whether it still pays. My view is that it now costs us far more than it gives us. Almost every large-scale disaster we produce (war, arms races, climate inaction, blocked transfer of technology) is a case of several groups each acting rationally in their own interest and jointly producing a result that is bad for all of them.

So: what would make humanity act as one whole? And I would put it more sharply. If we do not manage it, I think the probability that we destroy ourselves is high.

I am not naive about the alternative. Unification would bring large benefits and it would also bring costs, because no solution has only benefits. Every solution has both, and the work is to analyse honestly and choose the one that serves humanity best at that moment, and then to keep re-checking, because the best answer changes.

So the real question is mechanical, not moral: what mechanisms would we have to build?

Here is one way to look at it. Humanity currently runs on roughly this pyramid of loyalties, strongest first:

Family
Your circle: the people who share your interests
Religion
The state
Goals for humanity as a whole

The list is incomplete; many more abstractions could be added. These are only the obvious ones.

Now turn it upside down:

Goals for humanity as a whole
The state
Religion
Your circle
Family

What would we gain, and what would we lose? We would gain coordination on every problem that is global by nature. We would lose the thing that makes people willing to sacrifice anything at all, because loyalty to an abstraction has never moved anyone the way loyalty to their own children does. Every attempt to place an abstract collective above family ties has had to use force to hold the ordering in place, and that is a fact about human beings, not a failure of implementation.

Which suggests the answer is not to invert the pyramid but to widen each level. To make loyalty to humanity feel like an extension of loyalty to your family rather than a competitor to it. The moral circle has widened several times already (from the clan to the tribe, from the tribe to the nation), and each of those widenings looked impossible before it happened.

And now the hinge with Part 1. Material abundance removes the material causes of group conflict, but it does not remove the positional ones. Rank, attention, and unique things stay scarce forever. Group egoism does not require scarce copper to operate; it works perfectly well on prestige. Anyone who thinks technology alone will make us cooperate is assuming that the only thing we ever fought over was stuff.

But there is something important in the difference. Losing a status competition while fed, housed, and healthy is a completely different event from losing one while your children go hungry. Almost all the violence in human history came from the second kind of loss, not the first. So abundance does not end competition. It declaws it. That is a smaller claim than "conflict ends," and I think it is defensible.

Part 3: The gap

In short: Both end states are easy to picture, but the decisive period is the twenty or forty years in between, after labour is automated and before abundance arrives. Three things make that gap dangerous: it severs the wage link that distributes almost everyone's share before any replacement exists, it lets whoever owns the automation at the start still own it at the end because labour was everyone else's leverage, and it will not close everywhere at once. Industrialization already ran that experiment, and the countries that arrived first have held the advantage for two centuries. The technology does not choose between the utopia and the dystopia; the loyalty structure does.

Part 1 and Part 2 are not two topics. They are one topic seen from two sides, and the place where they meet is not the destination. It is the transition.

Both end states are easy enough to imagine. The utopia: everything material is free, work is voluntary, and humanity competes over things that do not kill anyone. The dystopia: the same technology, owned by a few, and everyone else outside the gate. What is much harder to imagine, and far more important, is the twenty or forty years in between: after labour is automated, before abundance arrives. That gap is where all the decisions actually get made, and it is where the dystopia lives.

Three things about it seem important to me.

First: the gap breaks the distribution mechanism before it builds a new one. Almost everyone alive claims their share of what society produces through wages: you contribute labour, you receive a claim on goods. Automation cuts that link. Not gradually and not evenly: it cuts it for some categories of work years before others, and it cuts it long before goods are actually free. For that whole period there is production without a way to distribute it, and no replacement mechanism exists yet.

Second: ownership at the start of the gap probably decides ownership at the end of it. Abundance does not distribute itself. Whoever owns the automation when the transition begins is in a strong position to still own it when the transition finishes, because during the gap they no longer need anyone else's labour, and labour was the leverage everybody else had. Whatever inequality exists when the gap opens is likely to be frozen into whatever comes out the other side.

Third, and this is the point where Part 2 deforms Part 1: the gap will not close everywhere at once. It could close for one country, or one bloc, or one company, decades before it closes for everyone else. This is not a hypothesis. It is exactly what industrialization did: the countries that got there first spent the following two centuries in a position the others have still not caught up with. Now imagine that same asymmetry, but the head start is unlimited energy and unlimited labour, and the group that has it no longer needs anything from anybody.

That is group egoism operating on post-scarcity technology, and it is what I mean when I say the concepts in Part 2 will shape what Part 1 turns into. The technology does not choose between the utopia and the dystopia. The loyalty structure does. A world that has widened its moral circle before the gap opens gets abundance for everyone; a world that has not gets abundance for whoever arrived first.

It is a genuinely interesting moment to be alive for. My one regret is that a human life is ninety or a hundred years, which is far too short to see which road humanity actually takes. But it should be long enough to see the signs of which way we are turning, and I think the signs will show up in the gap, not after it.

One last thought

In short: I used to think nothing in nature showed separate entities merging into a whole that acts for the common good, and I now think the opposite, which is the strongest reason for optimism I have found. Free-living cells became multicellular organisms, solitary insects became colonies, separate species locked into permanent symbiosis, and the pattern is always that defection is made costly and cooperation profitable. The second point is that states, economies and religions exist nowhere in the universe except in us, so we are not stuck with them. The quantity of status is fixed, but what a society grants status for is a design decision, and possibly the most consequential one we will ever make.

I used to think there was no example anywhere in nature of separate entities merging into a single whole that acts for the common good. I now think the opposite is true, and it is the strongest reason for optimism I have found.

It has happened repeatedly. Free-living cells merged into multicellular organisms. Solitary insects became colonies that behave like one animal. Separate species locked themselves into permanent symbiosis. Biologists call these the major evolutionary transitions, and the pattern is always the same: entities that used to compete find a way to make defection costly and cooperation profitable, and afterwards the new whole can do things none of the parts could do alone.

And there is a second point. Statehood, the economy, religion: none of these exist anywhere in the universe outside of us. We invented them. Which means we are not stuck with them.

That matters most for the one thing technology can never make abundant. The quantity of status is fixed, but its content is chosen. What a society grants status for (consumption, conquest, craft, contribution, care) is an abstraction like any other, and abstractions can be redesigned. If we are going to spend the post-scarcity centuries competing over rank regardless, then the question of what we award rank for may turn out to be the most consequential design decision humanity ever makes.

If humanity has invented abstractions before, humanity can invent the next one. And it is entirely possible that at some point in the future we will function as one whole.