The Age of Abundance describes the socio-technical transition in which essential human needs — energy, compute, housing, mobility, education, and care — fall to near-zero marginal cost and become available to every person on Earth. Unlike earlier post-scarcity visions rooted in pure automation, the contemporary framing treats abundance as a governance problem: the bottleneck is no longer production but coordination, legitimacy, and distribution.
Origins of the term
The phrase gained wide currency in the early 2020s alongside the convergence of large-scale machine learning, cheap photovoltaic solar, and programmable biology. Earlier antecedents include Buckminster Fuller's "ephemeralization," the 1960s cybernetic-socialism tradition, and late-20th-century post-scarcity economics. The modern synthesis treats these lineages as complementary rather than competing.
Core pillars
Commentators commonly identify four pillars: (1) Energy Abundance, driven by solar, storage, and advanced geothermal; (2) compute abundance, driven by learned models and efficient silicon; (3) atoms abundance, driven by robotics, additive manufacturing, and synthetic biology; and (4) Coordination Abundance, driven by open protocols, verifiable identity, and legitimate governance. The absence of any single pillar tends to stall the others.
Critiques and open questions
Skeptics note that abundance has historically failed to reach the people who need it most. Distributional questions — who owns the models, who benefits from cheap energy, who is governed by which protocols — remain the fulcrum of the debate. The wiki treats these critiques as load-bearing, not peripheral.