Futuristic Musings · by James Brown
Abundance is a choice we keep forgetting to make
By James Brown · Published · Updated
The 1960s imagined flying cars. We got pocket supercomputers. The next leap depends on whether we want it.
The retro-futurists weren't wrong about the future. They were wrong about which parts would arrive first. They drew jetpacks and got something stranger: a device in every pocket that can translate, tutor, navigate and, now, reason out loud.
Here's my provocation: scarcity is increasingly a policy and engineering choice, not a law of nature. Intelligence is getting cheaper every year. Solar and batteries got cheaper for years too. When the two key inputs of modern life, thinking and energy, both trend toward cheap, what's left scarce is our willingness to build.
Build the reactors. Build the transmission lines. Build the housing near the jobs. Build the weird startup. Every generation gets one shot at its own version of the moonshot, and ours is sitting there with an API key.
The pessimist sounds smart. The optimist builds the future the pessimist ends up living in.
This essay is opinion and speculation, not factual reporting or financial advice.