The world’s most industrially productive society is South Korea. With 50 million people packed into a territory the size of tiny Iceland, South Korea is, of course, outproduced on an absolute scale by many far more populous countries like the United States or China. But, per person, no country produces as many automobiles, ships, and tons of steel as South Korea does. Per worker, it has more industrial robots installed in its factories than any other country, more than twice as many as second-ranked Germany and five times as many as the U.S. The only major countries that use more energy or electricity per capita than South Korea are the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. If Taiwan didn’t exist, South Korea would also be the world’s foremost per capita manufacturer of both advanced and everyday semiconductors, at least ten times more productive than the U.S. or Japan, who currently occupy distant third places. South Korea also exports electronics, medicines, tanks, aircraft parts, and nuclear reactors.

No matter the scale or complexity, it seems like there is nothing South Koreans cannot figure out how to produce at a rate that puts the rest of the world to shame—with the notable exception of human beings, of which South Korea currently manages to produce only about 0.75 per woman, one of the lowest, least productive rates in the world. At this rate, in three generations, the newest generation of South Koreans would be 96% smaller than the current one. A future South Korea of 5 million rather than 50 million people is highly unlikely to be as exceptionally industrially productive as it is today.

The systems of both material and social technology we rely on to deliver our modern standards of living explicitly and implicitly assume large and growing populations, including to make many crucial economies of scale viable. They were neither designed nor intended to function with rapidly aging and declining populations. South Korea isn’t as great an outlier as it might seem. The U.S. generation of three generations from now would be 47% smaller than the current one at current fertility rates, and China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union are all worse off than that.

Why global fertility rates have widely, structurally declined to below replacement since the 19th century is a question that, still, nobody has a decisively persuasive answer to. But it is difficult not to tie the trend, somehow, to the inner workings or consequences of the unprecedented industrial societies we have built in roughly the same period. A rising supply of energetic human labor, not just physical but also mental, clerical, and intellectual, has always been a key prerequisite to and driver of industrial and technological progress. Without industrial production, there is no technological capability to speak of, no abundance of wealth, and no mass prosperity.

Slipping Down Into a Dark Age

Even if birth rates in industrialized countries magically recovered overnight, a great degree of aging and population shrinkage is already baked in. Even if this baked-in amount proves not to be outright ruinous, even if some industrial societies manage to muddle along with roughly equivalent populations and standards of living, this outcome would negate the legitimizing narrative of continuous progress and probably foreclose on achieving ambitious dreams like colonizing the Solar System or achieving untold material abundance for the whole world this century. By default, it looks like industrial civilization is abolishing itself.

A common rebuttal is that advances in automation and artificial intelligence have made human labor obsolete, so there is no need to worry about a graying and shrinking humanity, since robots will inevitably take over where humans cannot and, even, do a better job. There are two problems with this argument. First, while automation is a replacement for human labor at the level of a single factory, at the level of a civilization it is not a replacement for human labor, but a force multiplier. A society with a billion workers and a high degree of automation is extremely likely to be far wealthier and more technologically capable than not just a society with a billion workers and a low degree of automation, but also a society of one hundred million and an equal degree of automation. If we conceive of artificial intelligence as a form of automation for mental, clerical, or intellectual labor, the exact same logic applies. The purpose of automation is not inherently to mitigate the negative effects of demographic decline; defining it that way is a cope. The greatest period of automation in history, the Industrial Revolution, also saw unprecedented demographic growth.

Second, insofar as artificial intelligence is not just another form of automation but the introduction of autonomous, generally-intelligent minds capable of matching or even outdoing human genius, agency, and ingenuity, the problem is not even that this remains totally speculative from a technological standpoint, but that, philosophically, it amounts to saying that it is so difficult to get human beings to reproduce under modern techno-industrial conditions that it would be easier to just get rid of them entirely and replace them with artificial human beings. If you care about humanity, then this is not a persuasive argument.

The social niche this argument occupies is not that of a self-confident vision justified earnestly on its clear and universally-recognized merits, but that of a furtive excuse and accounting trick whose assumptions and implications would be widely rejected if they were thoroughly appreciated. “Degrowth” environmentalism effectively proposes that the solution to industrial civilization’s problems is to simply abolish industry while keeping humanity; this is increasingly and accurately recognized as the actual proposition behind the school of thought, and rightly rejected due to the inevitable, self-imposed impoverishment that would follow. Along the same lines, some of the most committed believers in the potential of artificial intelligence are effectively proposing to solve industrial civilization by abolishing humanity while keeping industry.

Neither of these visions actually solve for the desirable outcome of not just maintaining but growing both humanity and industry. One must always ask what undesirable outcome a cope serves to obscure. If we imagine our industrial societies continue on their default trajectories for ten years, then fifty years, then one hundred years, then two hundred years—without inserting speculative total paradigm shifts from environmental collapse, artificial intelligence, or something else—we can imagine societies that, bit by bit, get older, smaller, poorer, more sclerotic, more ineffective, and more riven by more petty political conflict. These societies would slowly lose capabilities they previously had and, if not for the fact they now constitute all of the relevant societies on the planet, we might even say they would become more irrelevant over time.

A prolonged dark age is not an existential risk to humanity. Such dark ages have occurred many times in known history. But it is an existential risk to both current and future scientific, technological, and industrial progress, not to mention all of the dreams and ambitions that would be achievable only by vigorously wielding them. It is therefore a pressing societal imperative to develop a model of industrial society that preserves both humanity and industry.

One Hundred Years of Post-Scarcity

We have lived in a post-scarcity society since the late 19th century. The term “post-scarcity” is most often used nowadays to mean a world where any conceivable material want, by any person, can be met without political difficulty and at trivial cost. It brings to mind images of Star Trek-style “replicators,” fictional machines that can instantaneously generate any desired object on demand. Usually, it is assumed that hypothesized future progress in artificial intelligence will lead us to this world of unimaginable plenty, which, it is also usually assumed, will usher in an unprecedented age of peace and harmony as conflicts over wealth and resources become pointless. This vision rests, however, on a bad definition of post-scarcity. True philosophically rigorous post-scarcity is impossible, both because there is no reason to think human desire or imagination will ever reach any kind of objective, hard limit and because, in the end, the matter, energy, and access to other valued people we will ever have are necessarily finite. It is not possible for everyone, at the same time, to get the maximal extent of what they can imagine and desire.

The definition of what constitutes post-scarcity is therefore necessarily arbitrary, tied to some normative standard of affluence. Insofar as we are arbitrarily proposing that there are standards of affluence to which all of humanity should aspire at once—why not choose the transition from subsistence agriculture to industrial consumerism? After all, a human being’s needs to survive can be far more objectively quantified and enumerated than a human being’s wants.

For thousands of years prior to the Industrial Revolution, subsistence was the default state of humanity. People would work from dawn to dusk, sweating and toiling in the fields, to feed themselves and their families. One nasty war, drought, plague, or famine could spell the end of an entire community or even nation. The needs of human beings were being met—but barely. Then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, everything changed. An incredible spate of technological innovation and industrial expansion saw living standards in the most advanced countries rise and rise and rise until, in the present day, a poor person in an undeveloped and unindustrialized country will eat surplus food shipped from the developed world’s mechanized farms, clothe himself in cheap apparel imported from a factory in Asia, and use electricity generated by infrastructure built with the rich world’s generously donated pocket change. Over 90% of the jobs available in America in 1800 have been fully automated, mostly because well over half were just in agriculture. Today, just 1% of U.S. jobs require presence on a farm.

In the same way we can speculate that a “post-scarcity” version of modern society would be one where people spend all their newly-afforded time on art, hiking, and poetry, rather than war and work, we can ask what the transformative, “post-scarcity” material surplus afforded by the Industrial Revolution was sunk into. The correctly-formed version of this question should yield the same answer as asking what the typical person in a wealthy society today does with most of their time, in the same way we would answer that a “post-scarcity” society would afford a lot of time for art, hiking, and poetry. Overall, it looks like we sunk our industrial surplus into fake jobs.

Whereas 80% of workers in America circa 1800 were farmers, 80% of workers in America circa 2025 work in “services,” as opposed to industry or agriculture. These modern-day workers are still expected to devote about half their waking hours to employment, for nearly the entirety of every year, for nearly the entirety of their lives. Nearly 40% of U.S. GDP is spent by the government. Another partially overlapping 10% is spent by nonprofits. Some untold number of non-government jobs only exist due to the inscrutable influence and regulation of the government, whether in law, healthcare, insurance, or other fields. That far too much time is wasted on the appearance of productivity, or far too much effort on securing intangible goods that once came at no cost, is a universal complaint. A similar picture preponderates in the rest of the developed world.

This situation does not appear to be the result of intentional planning or design. Rather, it seems to be a stable equilibrium we stumbled into, unintentionally, by attempting to settle a series of political conflicts over how to use the surplus afforded by industry. If a hypothetical artificial intelligence revolution could singularly lead to a new world of abundance that would merit its own rules, values, and norms, we could apply the same logic retroactively. Both the real Industrial Revolution and the hypothetical artificial intelligence revolution, seen this way, are tantamount to an alien mothership of inconceivable technology and resources—factories are just replicators with more steps—crashing on Earth and disrupting the logic of all existing social technologies, as the capabilities of the material technology underneath them suddenly transform.

The superintelligent AI would not be the first “alien” to live among mere humans. The scientists and industrialists who created modern technology were also, for all intents and purposes, aliens. “The Martians” was the nickname given to the famous Hungarian Jewish physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Surely, they were but one species of alien. Do we have more or less Nikola Teslas and Thomas Edisons today, or John von Neumanns and Albert Einsteins? Technological progress reached peak acceleration in the lifetimes of these men and others, and has greatly slowed down since the 1960s or so.

The fundamental paradigm shift wrought by these aliens, the ability of humanity to produce orders of magnitude more wealth per person than ever imagined before, could be seen as creating the real question over which the most intense political and intellectual conflicts have been fought ever since: what should we do with all this surplus? The enduring simplicity of one answer, to give it away and let people indulge, is perhaps the driving appeal behind what we call communism and socialism. The fear of revolution eventually led all industrial states, including the U.S., to adopt a softer version of economic redistribution and guaranteed economic privileges to the poor, the old, the sick, the needy, and—the forgotten revolutionary class—the intellectuals.

As a result, “capitalism” has not meaningfully existed in the developed world since the heyday of the Industrial Revolution in the late nineteenth century. The arguments that to this day are regularly trotted out to justify “free market” or libertarian policies have a beauty and consistency of their own, but bear little to no resemblance to the societies they are intended to describe or reform. Load-bearing features of theories that describe how free markets will lead to wealth and progress, such as unfettered market competition, have been suspended by governments for a century through mass wealth redistribution, bureaucratic regulation, debasement of currency, favoritism of certain companies over others, the co-option of corporations as enforcers of ideological programs, and many other means.

Given this history, there is good reason to be skeptical that Darwinian free market capitalism even works as a political formula, and therefore as a durable basis for a society. Its necessary building block, the rational, profit-seeking Homo economicus, perhaps just does not exist in sufficient quantities and densities to scale and drive progress on his own. Perhaps the Homo sapiens we are stuck with is content with a life of unearned frivolity after his bare subsistence needs are met—which they have been.

But meeting him halfway with the compromise of a “mixed-economy social democracy,” the unquestioned societal and economic model of the whole developed world today, irrevocably corrupts the pure and beautiful logic of free markets. What if a communist country compromised on its persistent poverty and backwardness by allowing half the economy to run on free markets, in order to subsidize the other half? How different would that look from the system we have today? Would we celebrate it? Is this just kind of what China did?

The modern “capitalism” we are stuck with today, then, is not the vigorous and glorious tournament of production described in economics textbooks, but a restrained and neutered system whose only purpose is to economically support the very fakeness it claims to oppose. Creating economic growth and technological progress without concomitant political, intellectual, and institutional reform, therefore, amounts to nothing more than subsidizing a broken and even hostile system, augmenting its capabilities and prolonging its lifespan, in an unreciprocated and ultimately futile way. No wonder so many jobs seem fake.

Even if a revisionist market liberalism that would seek to undo the last century and a half of redistribution and restraint could be mustered as a political force, could it even do so legitimately? The scientists whose intellectual work laid the foundations for modern technology and industry did not pursue such work out of a desire to capture maximum profit, but to enlighten and uplift humanity. Even many of the industrialists who applied that vaunted science to the gritty world of smelters and assembly lines, of stock markets and bottom lines, later donated much of their fortunes to universities, libraries, and foundations. How could one claw back what was freely given in the first place? There would be no liberal grounds to do so, at least.

Long-term, the surplus of the Industrial Revolution was sunk partially into indulgence and partially into fake work. It was not invested into further, real work, as it should have been, like any good investment. Humanity had its post-scarcity moment already, and it was squandered. Our material technology jumped ahead into the 22nd century, while our politics and culture remained stuck in the 18th and the 19th centuries. Continued attempts to drive forward industrial and technological progress are, for their own sake, a good thing. But they are not the best thing, and will not solve the broken political economy of our civilization, nor can they substitute—like technological “accelerationists” hope—for a real, humane answer to the fundamental question of how to deploy material surplus at a civilizational scale, and why.

Commandeering the Alien Mothership

A rising American thinker recently interviewed by The New York Times has offered a concise formulation for rethinking the basis of our relationship to work, society, and the economy: the purpose of a society should be to maximize the value of its people and, since a person becomes more valuable through fully expressing their talents through challenging work, the purpose of a society should be to maximally challenge all of its people with maximally challenging work appropriately calibrated to their talents. In contrast, our societies today instead try to maximize consumption, which devalues our people as they get softer, flabbier and, even, fail to reproduce. He proposes the solution of introducing “artificial difficulty” into the economy by “restrict[ing] the technology of production.” He imagines former office workers taking up new careers as stonemasons and craftsmen. Going further, a hypothetical disinterested global military hegemon could even restrict the use of technology in warfare to incentivize a return to sword-and-sandal warfare, bringing back good-paying, skilled jobs in swordsmanship and horseback archery.

There is no need for artificial economic difficulty, however, and there never has been, because there is a source of inexhaustible natural economic difficulty already available to us: space.

The fundamental problem with our version of industrial society appears to be that we are powering it with the appetites of our people; this is “maximizing consumption” or “consumerism.” The problem is that the more people consume, at a certain point, the less they are capable of working. Excess consumption causes human capital depreciation. This does not mean consumption as measured by economists, in dollars, although there is substantial overlap. It means consumption in the sense of satisfaction of individual human appetites, eventually to the detriment of the whole human being and his or her society. To tightly define and quantify these appetites would be a long and thorny endeavor. But their existence, at least, seems clear enough. Excess consumption must be at least part of the problem for the obese and for addicts, two of the most glaring victims of industrial consumption; it is also a way of describing excessive competition for positional goods, the activity which perhaps most singularly defines the lives of the most materially affluent people alive today.

In the words of Foxconn founder Terry Gou, “outside the laboratory, there is no high technology, only the implementation of discipline.” Consumption exhausts the human being’s capacity for discipline, which results in industrial decline. Human appetites are self-limiting. But industry is unlimited. Whereas the limits of consumption are near and fleshy, the limits of production conceivably lie at the point where the expansion of space surpasses the speed of light. That developing and largely unindustrialized countries like India or Colombia are seeing rapidly falling birth rates is evidence that it is not industrial production which causes fertility collapse, but industrial consumption. They are getting the overflow of the industrialized world, which can produce more smartphones and televisions, more sweets and candies, more appealing online videos, more appliances and apparel, more power plants and electrical poles, than it knows what to do with, just like it produces so much grain that ancient breadbaskets like Egypt today import food from the developed world rather than bother feeding themselves.

The way consumerism powers industry is that it is socially, intellectually, and legally encouraged and rewarded to exhaust appetites in ever more incredible ways, using a price system within a mostly free market to measure effectiveness. This works pretty well since people will pay to reliably satisfy appetites, and companies can pay marketers to reliably generate appetites through advertising and media campaigns. The “difficulty” in such an economic system lies in identifying and arousing new appetites among the masses.

But consumerism and maximized consumption are not intrinsic extensions of free markets or capitalism. A free society of Nikola Teslas and John von Neumanns would not have invented corn syrup or internet slop videos. There would be no profit in providing such consumption in such a society, because there would be no demand for it. In our world, we cannot, of course, assume we are working with a society of Teslas and von Neumanns. But to assume we are working with undifferentiated, rational economic actors with infinite appetites of no negative externality is equally mistaken. Consumerism is one of many possible applications of social engineering, and arguably a misapplication.

We could instead imagine a system where “difficulty” comes from overcoming challenges handed down or agreed upon by fiat. To avoid waste and tyranny, such challenges would need to be limited somehow to obvious, public, and natural ones. The classical parallel would be a war economy—where war is the most obvious and public challenge imaginable—reaching its ideal in the industrialized WWII-era economies that saw both production and technological progress reach never-before-seen heights, producing everything from space rockets to nuclear power to computers in the span of less than a decade. Besides the killing and destruction, the problem with war is that you cannot wage it without a credible enemy, and credible enemies for our globe-spanning techno-industrial civilization are in short supply.

This could be thought of as the “public works” or “megaproject”-driven economy. Rather than maximizing consumption, we will aim to maximize production according to the obvious, public, and natural challenges available to us. Such challenges will have to be rated based on how much exertion of human capital they require; the more, the better. On this metric, the most challenging challenges will all inevitably end up in the category of space exploration and settlement. The most unimaginably challenging megaprojects are not even interplanetary, but interstellar. A civilization genuinely committed to undertaking such projects would finally generate the political capital necessary to streamline the economy, eliminate rent-seeking, and solve a million other minor and major problems, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It would also finally generate demand for human beings and therefore offer the possibility of solving the fertility crisis.

If we are just picking an arbitrary megaproject, then why not something other than space? The answer is that, first, we should pursue arbitrary megaprojects on Earth in addition to in space. But the difference is that any arbitrary megaproject besides space is an arbitrary megaproject that will eventually be completed, whereas space is the arbitrary megaproject that effectively never, ever ends. Space expansion is not incompatible with a list of subsidiary goals like satisfying appetites, achieving runaway taste through technological restrictions, building colonies underwater or on Antarctica, or whatever else. But every other goal will be more finite and limited in its intangible value and positive externalities compared to space. You will always eventually have to return to the question of space. So you might as well base your industrial civilization around that to begin with, and this will help correctly maximize production, talent, dynamism, and efficiency for an expanding and humane civilization.

We could also choose arbitrary microprojects—why don’t we humans arbitrarily choose to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe? The short answer is that that is stupid and nobody will ever believe it. The long answer is that the positive externalities of infinitely cheaper paperclips are clearly of less intangible value to humanity than, say, expanding throughout the universe. The whole question revolves around what intangible goal of intangible value we wish to direct the machine of industry towards. If a literal alien mothership crashed on planet Earth, our fate and responsibility would be obvious: commandeer it, reverse-engineer it, and take the fight to the cosmos. We have had the exact same responsibility since our metaphorical alien mothership crashed over a hundred years ago. We have only lacked the eyes to see it. Better late than never.