Everyone a Billionaire, Nobody a Parking Space
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 4 November 2026
There is something instructive about a machine which can provide a man with a magnificent house, an expensive motor car and glamorous company within a minute, provided that he agrees to remain inside a picture. This represents a considerable advance in the democratisation of looking wealthy. Whether it represents an equivalent advance in being wealthy is a question best explored by attempting to drive the car.
This distinction bears upon one of Elon Musk’s more ambitious predictions: that artificial intelligence and robotics will eventually produce such abundance that work becomes optional and money loses its relevance. In this future the machines will make what we want, leaving humanity to enjoy the results without the tiresome preliminary exercise of earning a living. The proposition deserves serious examination, partly because some version of it could be true and partly because its more extravagant interpretation becomes increasingly entertaining the longer one considers it.
Fairness requires that we establish what is being examined. Musk has acknowledged that constraints upon electricity and physical resources would remain even in a future where currency became irrelevant. In remarks reproduced in a Tesla securities filing, he also described an ambition of “Sustainable Abundance”, explicitly encompassing the preservation of forests and other natural environments. It would therefore be misleading to attribute to him a carefully elaborated doctrine that matter is infinite or that nature should be comprehensively concreted over. His stated vision is more attractive: widespread prosperity alongside an intact natural world.
Nevertheless the distance between making ordinary necessities plentiful and making money irrelevant is substantial. Between these propositions stand geography, ecology, ownership, human preference and the awkward fact that several people may want the same thing.
Consider the strongest plausible version first. Machines become extraordinarily capable. They grow food, construct buildings, diagnose many illnesses, manufacture clothing and organise transport. Energy becomes much cheaper. Material recovery improves. A comfortable existence requires a smaller share of society’s available resources than it does today.
Such a development would be an extraordinary achievement. If people could obtain decent housing, nutritious food, education and medical care without spending most of their lives worrying about payment, the improvement in human freedom would be profound. None of this requires limitless production. Human needs, understood as the conditions for a secure and dignified life, can be met at finite levels of resource use. The problem begins when a reasonable promise of sufficiency acquires the considerably more ambitious wording of anything anyone wants.
The accompanying car provides a useful starting point. Imagine that automated factories can supply a supercar to every adult who requests one. This would solve the problem of manufacturing supercars. It would leave unresolved the problem of where to put them.
A car requires road space when moving and somewhere to stand when it is not. Its driver may wish to visit precisely the same attractive destination as several million other drivers. Producing the vehicles more cheaply does not produce additional space in a medieval city centre. It may merely deliver congestion with unprecedented efficiency. In this future everybody could own a car capable of travelling at two hundred miles an hour, and everybody could sit in it travelling at four.
Perhaps artificial intelligence could coordinate traffic. Certainly it could help. Perhaps people could share vehicles or use excellent public transport. Certainly they could. But these solutions involve organising and modifying consumption to accommodate constraints. They do not demonstrate that constraints have vanished.
The next improvement would be private roads. Each owner would request a personal route to the coast, sufficiently empty to make the supercar worthwhile. These roads would intersect with other personal roads, requiring bridges, tunnels and rules of priority. Eventually an appreciable portion of the landscape would consist of infrastructure enabling people to escape the infrastructure occupied by everybody else. Someone would then request a house in an unspoilt valley.
The house presents a deeper difficulty. Construction can become cheaper without desirable locations becoming unlimited. A robot may build a handsome villa, but it cannot place every villa upon the same promontory overlooking the same bay. Nor can it give every resident uninterrupted views if the solution to insufficient coastal accommodation is to construct another row of houses in front.
Artificial islands would add land. They would also alter the coastline, occupy marine space and generate further questions about access and environmental effects. Tall buildings would create more accommodation whilst changing the experience which made the location attractive. These may be sensible compromises. Their necessity is precisely the point: one may manufacture houses, but one cannot manufacture an unlimited number of claims to the best position.
This is why an economy of very cheap manufactured goods could still contain extremely expensive land. As reproducible products became easier to obtain, competition might concentrate upon the things which remained difficult to reproduce. The mansion’s automated kitchen could cost almost nothing whilst the right to stand in that particular kitchen became more valuable than ever. Abundance in one part of the economy can intensify scarcity elsewhere.
The ecological problem is broader. Production occupies space, moves materials and uses energy. Its consequences depend upon the methods employed, the quantities involved and the places in which it occurs. Cleaner technology can greatly reduce environmental damage per unit of output. Whether total damage falls also depends upon how many units are produced.
A machine which makes a product using half the material is a useful invention. If cheaper production encourages people to acquire four times as many of the products, the material saving per item does not become a saving overall. This is a possibility rather than an invariable law: consumption does not always expand enough to cancel improvements in efficiency. But a promise of limitless consumption cannot quietly depend upon consumers exercising restraint whenever the arithmetic becomes inconvenient.
The United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Resources Outlook 2024 reports that global resource extraction tripled over the preceding five decades and warns that, without concerted changes, extraction could rise by a further 60 per cent between 2020 and 2060. These are projections within particular conditions, not proof that prosperity must end. They do, however, establish the scale of the material problem which an account of universal abundance must address.
Recycling would help. So would repair, better design, cleaner energy and more durable products. Yet a circular economy must still collect, sort, transport and reprocess materials. Materials incorporated into a bridge cannot simultaneously be incorporated into another bridge. Even highly efficient recovery does not make the same stock available for unlimited concurrent uses.
Nor does inexpensive electricity abolish every environmental cost. It may make desalination easier without deciding where to place the facilities or how to manage their discharges. It may power automated mining without resolving what should happen to the landscape above the deposit.
A forest presents a particularly revealing case. Its value may lie in being left alone. If one person wants the timber and another wants the habitat preserved, greater manufacturing capacity does not reconcile their wishes. The conflict concerns alternative uses of the same place.
The rainforest in Musk’s vision would therefore need protection through some arrangement capable of refusing certain demands. This might be law, public ownership, conservation agreements or limits upon extraction. Whatever the mechanism, sustainable abundance would involve boundaries. The first essential employee of the limitless economy might turn out to be someone authorised to say no.
At this point money returns to the discussion. Money helps people compare competing uses of resources, exchange claims upon them and defer consumption. Its usefulness does not arise solely from the inconvenience of paying human workers. An automated factory can eliminate much labour whilst continuing to compete with other factories for land, materials, power and delivery capacity. If several people want the same scarce asset, a price offers one way of deciding who obtains it.
It is not the only way. Scarcity does not logically prove that every good requires a market, or that a society without conventional money is impossible. Public services, households and other institutions already allocate many things through need, entitlement, deliberation or agreed rules. A future society could expand such arrangements considerably.
But abolishing money would leave the allocation problem intact. The available alternatives include queues, lotteries, quotas, administrative decisions and personal influence. Each distributes access according to something. None enables everyone to exercise incompatible claims simultaneously.
Consider a desirable waterfront house made available without payment. A million people apply. The authorities might hold a lottery, establish a waiting list or assess applicants against a set of criteria. Such arrangements could be defensible. They would nonetheless mean that almost every applicant did not receive the house.
If the successful applicant could sell the entitlement, a market might emerge. If entitlements became widely transferable and exchangeable against other goods, they could acquire some of the functions of money. If transfer were prohibited, officials would have to enforce that prohibition and investigate indirect exchanges. The Ministry of Abundance would require a department for preventing people from trading the things of which there was not enough.
Artificial intelligence could administer this system with formidable competence. It might process applications swiftly, detect inconsistencies and calculate the consequences of different allocation rules. Yet the rules would still embody choices. Should a coastal property go to someone born nearby, someone with a disability, someone who has never seen the sea or someone willing to relinquish several other entitlements? No amount of computing power converts these competing principles into a single morally compulsory answer. The machine might make the decision, but people would still disagree with it.
There is a further distinction between making a resource cheap to produce and making it freely available. The machines will have owners, unless society deliberately establishes another arrangement. So will the land, the power infrastructure and the systems through which goods are distributed. An enterprise capable of manufacturing something for very little need not supply it for very little if it controls access and faces inadequate competition. Technical abundance can coexist with restricted availability.
Consequently a credible account of universal prosperity must explain the distribution of claims upon production. Perhaps citizens would own shares in automated enterprises. Perhaps taxation would fund services and transfers. Perhaps some infrastructure would be collectively owned. Perhaps vigorous competition would push many prices towards negligible levels. These are institutional possibilities, each requiring examination. A robot’s ability to assemble a refrigerator does not select amongst them.
Nor would giving everyone a very large income resolve every scarcity. If the supply of desirable locations remained limited, increased purchasing power could be absorbed partly into higher bids for those locations. The question would remain who could obtain them relative to everyone else. Universal billionaire status would be easy to arrange by changing the denomination of the currency. Universal access to what billionaires currently enjoy is a much more demanding proposition.
Some of those enjoyments are explicitly dependent upon exclusion. A private beach is private because access is restricted. A secluded retreat is secluded because other people are absent. A prestigious invitation derives some of its appeal from not having been issued to everybody. These goods cannot be universalised in their existing form. A club admitting everyone may be a splendid institution, but exclusivity will no longer be amongst its attractions.
Imagine, then, that everybody is issued with a private island. Set aside the geographical and ecological difficulties for a moment. The owners would soon discover differences amongst their islands. Some would be warmer, some closer to desirable cities, some more beautiful, some less troubled by mosquitoes. A market in superior islands would be an unsurprising response.
Suppose the machines instead supplied islands so carefully standardised that no material distinction remained. People might begin to prize the original islands, or islands associated with particular historical events, or simply islands whose possession had become fashionable. The technology would have solved production. Society would have invented another distinction.
Not all desire is competitive, of course. Most people derive substantial satisfaction from activities which need not deprive anyone else: friendship, reading, gardening, walking, creating things. A prosperous society could encourage these pleasures and reduce the pressures which make conspicuous consumption attractive. That would be a valuable cultural achievement. It would also mean that the success of abundance depended partly upon what people learned to want. The unrestricted fulfilment of every preference would have become the cultivation of preferences compatible with widespread fulfilment.
The human company in the accompanying image exposes another limit. A picture can place a likeness beside its subject without the depicted meeting ever having occurred. Actual companionship depends upon another person’s wishes. It cannot be manufactured as an entitlement flowing from technological progress.
No amount of productive capacity gives anyone a claim upon a particular person’s affection, friendship or evening. Other people have their own purposes. Their capacity to decline is part of their freedom. An artificial companion might satisfy some desires for conversation or reassurance, but it would not establish that the original person had chosen to be present. Where that choice matters, the substitute does not supply the same thing.
Human attention is finite even when freely given. A celebrated musician cannot personally know every admirer. A gifted teacher cannot form an equally close relationship with millions of students. An individual has only so many evenings to spend with friends. Technology can widen access to performances, lessons and communication. It cannot turn a relationship with one particular person into an infinitely reproducible commodity whilst preserving everything that makes the relationship particular. The future may therefore contain more entertainment than anyone could consume and a continuing shortage of invitations to dinner.
Time generates its own difficulties. A person with unlimited access to books, games and travel still has to choose between them. Every hour spent enjoying one experience excludes other experiences during that hour. This does not establish that money must govern leisure. It establishes that abundance does not abolish opportunity cost. Even when no payment is required, choosing one possibility may mean surrendering another.
Imagine a world in which every concert is free. The most desirable seats at the most desirable performance on a particular evening remain limited. A recording can be copied. Being present at the original occasion cannot be distributed without limit.
Imagine everyone has access to a yacht. Quiet anchorages remain congestible. Imagine everyone can commission a palace. Privacy becomes more difficult to obtain. Imagine everyone can fly wherever they wish. People beneath the flight paths may wish that they would not. A world in which every desire is fulfilled immediately would require a further miracle: nobody could want anything which interfered with what anybody else wanted.
Space offers a familiar escape route. Perhaps humanity will exploit resources beyond Earth, construct vast habitats and spread across the Solar System. Such developments might expand available resources enormously. They would not make every resource accessible everywhere at every moment.
A house on another planet would not satisfy someone whose preference was to live near her family in Lviv. A large supply of extraterrestrial material would not create another original Rynok Square. Distance, delivery and location would continue to matter. One could, of course, construct a replica, but its adequacy would depend upon what people wanted from the original.
If everyone preferred the replica, the problem might be solved for that particular demand. If some people continued to prefer the original, access to the original would remain scarce. The distinction would survive however irritating engineers found it.
Virtual reality offers a more economical solution. Each person could inhabit a convincing simulation of a private island, an empty motorway or an evening in distinguished company. Conflicting preferences could be separated into different experiences. This might become a significant source of pleasure. It might also bring us back to the accompanying picture, expanded until one could walk around inside it.
The practical question would be whether people regarded simulated possession as an adequate substitute for the things they wanted. Some might. Others might place a premium upon experiences known to be shared, physical and independent of the software generating them. Beneath the simulations would remain equipment, energy, maintenance and decisions about access. The material economy would continue to support the experience of having escaped it.
The promise could become stranger still. Perhaps advanced systems would discover how to change people’s preferences until everyone felt satisfied with whatever was available. Scarcity would then be resolved by ensuring that nobody wanted what they could not have.
There are benign versions of learning contentment. There are also deeply troubling versions of having contentment administered. A society would need to distinguish between people freely revising their ambitions and institutions adjusting their desires for administrative convenience. The final triumph of unlimited consumption might otherwise consist of a machine explaining that one no longer wished to consume anything unavailable.
For readers in Ukraine, the discussion has a further practical dimension. A productive asset must be accessible, maintained and protected. Technical capacity somewhere in the world does not guarantee electricity in a particular home, a usable road to a particular town or a secure dwelling for a particular family. Abundance is experienced locally. So is deprivation.
A future in which machines produce far more than today could still contain interrupted supplies, contested territories, damaged infrastructure and governments restricting access. An account of prosperity which omits security and political power has omitted part of the delivery system. The ability to produce something and the ability to ensure that a particular person receives it remain different achievements.
There is nevertheless a worthwhile ambition beneath the extravagance. Reducing the share of life spent in involuntary drudgery would be a major gain. Making necessities reliably available would be another. Technology could help societies achieve both.
Money might consequently become much less important to everyday survival. People might obtain a generous range of services without payment at the point of use, whilst continuing to exchange money for scarce locations, discretionary purchases and other limited opportunities. Markets could operate alongside public provision, environmental protections and rights which were deliberately kept outside commerce. That future would require practical work upon ownership, distribution and institutions. Its attraction would lie in the lives people could lead.
The more spectacular promise, however, invites a remarkably simple test. Ask two people to select the same unique thing and explain what happens next. If one pays more, money remains useful. If they take turns, time is rationed. If a lottery decides, luck allocates access. If an official decides, authority does. If the machine tells one applicant to want something else, preference has been managed. If both receive a digital copy, the original request has been altered. Each answer may have its place. None means that the problem disappeared.
The car consumes no fuel, the house occupies no additional land and the apparent social occasion requires no coordination of diaries. It can be enjoyed by everyone without depriving anyone else of a copy. The difficulty begins when we ask for the keys.
