Issue #14 · October 24th 2026
I write about the things that don’t change in a world that won’t stop changing.
I believe adding real value is what gives us purpose, keeps us happy and improves our lives.
The story we keep hearing about superintelligence is a story of abundance, in which intelligence becomes so cheap and so capable that the things it produces, from goods and services to scientific breakthroughs, flow in quantities we have never seen before. It is a beautiful story and it may well turn out to be true, but it leaves a question hanging in the air that very few people seem willing to sit with for long: if everything becomes abundant, who gets the penthouse, who gets the yacht, and who simply gets a share of a bigger cake without ever sitting at the table where the cake is being cut?
I do not know the answer, and the more I read from people who are much closer to this than I am, the more I suspect that they do not know either. That is precisely why I think the question deserves to be asked out loud, while it is still open.
What would actually become abundant
It is worth asking first what abundance would really mean, because the word hides a lot of assumptions. If intelligence gets cheap, then analysis, design, software, translation, diagnosis and a long list of services that used to require expensive experts could become available to almost anyone, and that alone would be a remarkable change in how people live and work. But the things we tend to dream about when we imagine a world of abundance, a home with a view, a place by the sea, a seat at the best table, are not things that intelligence can multiply, because they are limited by land, location, attention and status rather than by thought.
So it is fair to wonder whether abundance of intelligence automatically means abundance of everything, or whether it simply makes some things nearly free while the things that remain scarce become even more valuable and more fiercely contested. If the second is true, then the penthouse is not a metaphor for excess but a signal of where the real competition will move once the easy things have been solved.
“Abundance of intelligence does not automatically make everything else abundant.”
A snapshot or a ladder
Then there is the question that feels closest to home for anyone who works for a living. Will the extra productivity that these tools create show up in our own lives as better pay, more time or more opportunity, or will it be absorbed by the organisations that capture the output while the salary of the person doing the work stays roughly where it is today? One can imagine a world in which the old ladder still works, where learning more and doing more continues to lead to a better position, and one can just as easily imagine a world in which the salary you earn now becomes a kind of snapshot that follows you for decades, because the work that used to differentiate people has become something that anyone with the right tools can do.
I honestly cannot tell which of the two is closer to what will happen, and I suspect it will be different for different people, different industries and different countries. What seems worth noticing is how little of the current conversation is about this question, given how directly it touches the lives of the people who will live through the transition.
I am not the only one asking it. In May 2026, in the opening stretch of his conversation with Joe Rogan, the venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya argued that much of the anger people feel toward AI and toward billionaires is really a symptom of something older, an imbalance between labor and capital in which, over the last forty years, capital has captured most of the upside while the people doing the work have captured less and less. He then raised the question that sits underneath this essay, which is that if abundance really does arrive and people stop working, it is hard to see what it would mean for governments to keep taxing labor, and fair to ask why the companies making trillions should not share more of the winnings. Rogan answered that handing more money to a government with a long record of waste does not obviously fix anything, and I think both reactions deserve to be held at the same time, because each of them describes a real part of the problem.
Who owns the means
Another open question is who ends up owning the things that produce the abundance. The models and the compute that run them are expensive and currently concentrated in a small number of companies, which makes it natural to worry that the gains will concentrate in the same place, and yet the cost of capability keeps falling, open models keep improving and individuals can now build things that used to require entire teams. It is entirely possible that this transition spreads power in some directions while concentrating it in others, and it is not obvious today which force will turn out to be stronger.
If the tools become cheap enough for everyone to use, does ownership of the tools still matter as much, or does the advantage move to whoever owns what the tools cannot produce, such as customers, trust, land, energy or distribution? Those who think they know the answer are probably more confident than the evidence allows.
If money stops mattering
Elon Musk has argued more than once that in a world of abundant AI and robotics, money would eventually stop being relevant, since if machines can produce nearly anything at almost no cost there would be little left for money to buy. It is a striking claim and I am not sure whether it is right, but it opens a question that I find more interesting than the claim itself: if money disappears as the way we keep score, what takes its place?
Money has always been a tool for deciding who gets access to things that are scarce, so the real question is not whether money survives but what remains scarce once the easy things have become cheap. Perhaps it is energy and the compute that depends on it, which already look like the raw material behind everything else. Perhaps it is land and physical space, which no amount of intelligence can manufacture. Perhaps it is something much closer to the body, such as health, longevity and the biological material that makes them possible, in which case the currency of the future might look strange to us today, closer to healthy cells or even blood than to anything we carry in a wallet. And perhaps it is something less tangible, like attention, reputation or the trust of other people, which has always been hard to buy directly.
Later in that same conversation with Rogan, Chamath wondered aloud whether a society that no longer needs money might find ways of rewarding people that are more useful than what he called a “brittle form of exchange”, which is a fascinating thought precisely because nobody yet knows what those ways would look like. I do not think anyone can say with confidence which of these will matter most, but it seems worth noticing that every one of them is something a person either has or does not have, and that the people who hold them early may be the ones who decide how the rest are allocated.
“Money is a way of allocating scarcity, so the real question is what stays scarce.”
What history can and cannot tell us
It is tempting to look at earlier technological revolutions for guidance, and they do offer some perspective, because in many of them the early owners captured a large part of the gains while a long period of adjustment passed before the benefits reached the wider population, often only after social and political pressure forced the issue. But it would be a mistake to treat that pattern as a law, since this technology differs from the earlier ones in the speed at which it moves and in the fact that it touches the very thing, human thinking, that previous technologies left to us.
It may rhyme with the past or it may break from it entirely, and anyone claiming certainty in either direction is offering a story rather than evidence. The honest position, uncomfortable as it is, is that we are making this up as we go along, and that the rules of how the gains get shared are still being written by choices that have not been made yet.
“We are making this up as we go along, and the rules of how the gains get shared have not been written yet.”
The invariant
What does not change from one technological wave to the next is that the question of who gets what is never answered by the technology itself, but by the people, institutions and incentives surrounding it. Superintelligence may deliver abundance, and I hope it does, but how that abundance is shared will be decided by choices made by governments, companies and individuals, some of which are being made right now without much public discussion.
So I would rather finish with questions than conclusions. If abundance does arrive, what do you think should be shared and what should be earned? Who should own the machines that produce it, and what would a fair arrangement look like in practice? If money really does lose its meaning, what would you want to hold on to instead? And if you had to place a bet today on whether your own position gets better, stays the same or slips, what would make you choose one over the others? I would genuinely like to hear how you see it, because I suspect the most useful answers will come from many people thinking about this together rather than from any single prediction.
Fernando Martín is Managing Director of NEXMO Movement Data Hub (UC3M), Venture Builder at Creative Dock, and founder of Eccocar. He writes here about venture building, AI agent operations, and the European technology landscape.
The Invariance — by Fernando Martín In a constantly evolving world, only value is the invariance that holds everything together.