Even in a world of radical abundance, scarcity, tradeoffs, and uncertainty persist — and with them, the essential role of prices.

The notion that artificial intelligence at full bloom might eliminate the need for money reflects a deep confusion about what money is and does. Money is not merely a barter-avoiding convenience layered onto an otherwise frictionless world. It is a solution to fundamental problems of exchange, profound difficulties in coordination, and comparison of alternatives under scarcity. Even in a hypothetical future defined by extraordinary productivity gains and broadly collapsing prices, those underlying problems do not disappear. Instead they change form, and for as long as scarcity, tradeoffs, and uncertainty persist in any domain, so too will the need for money.

To begin with the most basic point: scarcity is not abolished by abundance. It is displaced. AI may dramatically reduce the cost of producing many goods and services, particularly those that are digital or easily replicable. But large swaths of economic life remain governed by constraints vastly beyond the power of computation. Land is fixed. Location is inherently scarce. Prime real estate in places like New York City or Tokyo will not become abundant simply because construction costs fall precipitously. The same holds for proximity to infrastructure, culture, or social networks. These are rival, excludable goods, and in such conditions, exchange requires a mechanism for allocating access. Money remains the most efficient one yet developed.

Time is another irreducible constraint. Human attention, especially in its highest-value forms, cannot and will not scale infinitely. The time of a skilled surgeon, an experienced trial lawyer, or a sought-after performer remains finite, tentative, and rivalrous. Even if AI were to augment their capabilities, it does not eliminate the fact that their attention must be allocated among competing uses. The same applies to live experiences: concerts, events, one-on-one advisory relationships, and so on, where presence itself is scarce. In such contexts, prices are not a relic — they are a reflection of incontrovertible limitations.

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