Hello, Futurists! Welcome to the Monday newsletter, where we explore AI topics that often nobody else wants to discuss.
I also want to thank you for all the emails you've been sending. I personally reply to them one by one, so please bear with me.
With that said, let's get into today's topic.
A few days ago, I saw several posts by Elon Musk proposing an idea that got me thinking.
According to him, if AI and robotics advance far enough, we could eventually eliminate much of scarcity and reach a point where money loses its importance.
In December 2025, he summed it up this way:
“Civilization will disappear, or AI and robotics will eliminate scarcity. Either way, money will stop mattering.”
Elon Musk
A few months later, he went further:
“Long before that, conventional money will cease to be relevant. Mass and energy will take the place of dollars.”
Elon Musk, June 2026
The logic behind his argument makes sense.
Much of any product's cost comes from a combination of energy, labor, materials, transportation, and infrastructure.
Now imagine a future with much cheaper energy and autonomous robots working practically all day.
Robots building. Transporting. Growing food. Manufacturing products. Performing a huge range of services.
If AI also coordinates these systems much more efficiently, the cost of producing many things could fall enormously.
Not necessarily to zero. But enough to change our relationship with the economy.
Musk thinks we could even reach a point where work is optional.
“AI and robots will be able to do everything, resulting in universal high income. Working will be optional.”
Elon Musk, July 2026
For most people, that would be extraordinary. Much of the money we currently need is simply for survival.
Housing. Food. Transportation. Energy. Healthcare. Services.
If producing many of those things becomes extremely cheap, a person would need much less money to maintain a good quality of life.
I think that part of Musk's vision makes a lot of sense.
But scarcity never disappears completely
I don't think abundance necessarily means money disappears. Not everything can become abundant.
Imagine building a house someday costs almost nothing because robots do nearly all the work. That could make good housing much more accessible.
But there's a problem. You can't create infinite beachfront properties in the same location. You can't produce millions of homes right next to Central Park.
Construction can be cheap. Location remains scarce.
That difference matters. The same is true of many other things.
We can make travel much cheaper, but we can't put everyone in the same first-class seat.
We can produce practically infinite entertainment, but we still have only 24 hours a day.
We can create millions of AI agents, but a person can maintain only a limited number of deep relationships.
We can copy information infinitely, but we can't copy twenty years of trust between two people.
We can't produce more of another person's time. Unlimited attention. Unlimited access. Infinite unique experiences.
Interestingly, Musk himself acknowledges that even in his most extreme vision, physical resources would remain limited.
In February 2026, he wrote:
“Once the loop closes between solar energy generation, robot manufacturing, chip production, and AI, conventional currency will just get in the way. Watts and tons will matter, not dollars.”
Elon Musk
I find this particularly interesting. Even in the future Musk describes, two things still need managing: energy and matter.
Energy might be incredibly abundant, but there is still a finite amount of land, minerals, atoms, space, and physical resources.
In other words: AI can eliminate a lot of scarcity, but it's unlikely to eliminate all scarcity.
Value simply moves
When something stops being scarce, it usually becomes less valuable.
Hundreds of years ago, accessing information was difficult. Today, practically all human knowledge is available on a phone.
Information became abundant. But that didn't eliminate value. Value simply moved elsewhere.
Knowing which information matters. Having judgment. Having attention. Having distribution.
I think something similar will happen with AI.
If producing things becomes so cheap, things will lose relative value.
If creating content becomes practically free, human attention becomes more valuable.
If anyone can create software with AI, having users and distribution becomes more important.
If anyone can generate a perfect song, perhaps hearing your favorite artist in person becomes even more special.
If we can produce millions of homes, the best locations may become even more valuable.
Abundance doesn't necessarily eliminate value. It shifts it toward what remains difficult to obtain.
What will remain scarce?
Probably many things.
Land in prime locations. Time. Attention. Reputation. Trust. Human relationships. Unique experiences. Access to certain people. Privacy. Limited natural resources. Social status.
Even things as simple as silence, nature, or space.
As long as two people want something and there isn't enough for both, we have a problem to solve:
Who gets it? Who decides? In exchange for what?
That's where we again need some mechanism for exchanging and allocating value.
Money won't disappear. It will evolve
This is where I find tokenization especially interesting.
When we talk about tokenization, we aren't necessarily talking about Bitcoin or speculative coins. The idea is much broader.
Tokenizing means turning ownership of, or rights to, something into a digital representation that can be stored, divided, and transferred.
A property can be tokenized. A stock. A bond. A resource. Even rights to certain future income.
Instead of buying an entire building, for example, thousands of tokens could represent small fractions of its ownership.
This is no longer just a crypto-world idea. International financial institutions are exploring how bank deposits, bonds, and other assets could exist in tokenized, programmable systems.
The reason is simple. Tokenization can enable faster exchanges, divide assets into much smaller pieces, and automate certain transactions.
But what interests me most is what it represents conceptually.
Maybe the future won't have less exchange of value. Maybe it will have much more.
The units might just change. Today, we exchange dollars for property. Tomorrow, we might exchange tokens representing energy, a stake in a company, a fraction of real estate, rights to an asset, or things we haven't invented yet.
Even Musk's vision of an economy measured in mass and energy points in that direction.
Maybe he's right that the dollar as we know it will become less important. But that's different from saying we won't need to keep track of who owns what.
As long as scarce resources exist, we need a way to represent ownership and rights over them.
At its core, that's one of the most important functions money has served for centuries.
Money has always been a technology
Sometimes we think of money as just banknotes. But money has always evolved.
We've used cattle. Metals. Coins. Gold. Banknotes. Bank accounts. Cards. Digital databases. Cryptocurrencies.
Now we're starting to experiment with tokenized assets.
That's why I'm not certain we'll use dollars exactly as we do today in a hundred years. We probably won't.
It could be digital money. Some kind of token. A combination of assets. A completely new system we haven't invented yet.
But I struggle to imagine an advanced society where scarcity exists without some tool for exchanging value.
That's essentially what money does. Money isn't the paper.
Money is a technology for keeping track of value.
You dedicate time, knowledge, or resources to producing something. You receive a representation of that value. Then you can exchange it for something someone else produced.
Seen this way, I've always liked thinking of money as almost a form of economic energy.
It lets value flow. It turns one person's work into another person's product. It enables exchange. It allows millions of people who will never meet to collaborate indirectly.
That's why I think the interesting question isn't:
Will money disappear?
Maybe it's:
What will we need money for?
Today, we need money for many basic needs. Perhaps in the future, those needs will be so cheap that we practically stop worrying about them.
That alone would be an enormous revolution.
Someone could have food, energy, transportation, education, and access to advanced services without working forty hours a week just to survive.
Money could still exist, but play a different role.
Instead of using it mainly to buy survival, we could increasingly use it to access what remains scarce.
A better location. A unique experience. More privacy. Access. Time. Attention. Something original.
Perhaps that's one of the most interesting paradoxes of an abundant future:
The more things we can produce almost without limits, the more valuable the things we can never produce without limits may become.
That's why I don't entirely agree that AI and robotics will make money disappear.
I think they could do something even more interesting. They could completely transform what we consider valuable and the technology we use to represent that value.
The dollar can change. Cryptocurrencies can evolve. Tokenization can create new forms of ownership and exchange. Systems we can't yet imagine might emerge.
But as long as time, land, attention, and matter are limited—and some experiences can't be replicated—scarcity will remain.
As long as scarcity remains, we'll probably need some way to decide how to allocate it.
Maybe money won't disappear. Maybe it will simply evolve with us.
This piece took me almost three hours to write, though it will probably take you less than ten minutes to read.
That's exactly why I want to know what you think.
Do you think money will really disappear, or simply evolve with us?
Send me an email and tell me what you think. I'm reading!