Scarcity-as-a-Service: Post-ASI Humans Return to Pre-ASI Lives
Don't you yearn for human experience pre-ASI? You already have everything.
A deterministic through‑line from primordial soup to AGI/ASI, and why a post‑abundance humanity opts to re‑experience pre‑ASI scarcity.
This is a thought experiment: a single, coherent way the pieces could fit if progress continues and civilization avoids catastrophic interruptions. It doesn’t claim certainty.
The point, up front
What will anyone do in post‑AGI/ASI abundance?
Visit other planets—physically or in simulations you can’t tell from “real.”
Download the entirety of human knowledge and write it straight into your cortex via neuro‑interfaces.
Spawn new experiential realms—not video games you play, but worlds you inhabit.
Assuming humanity doesn’t end prematurely, ASI with advanced robotics likely arrives.
Assuming it doesn’t eradicate us, you may get everything you were built to want:
Human aging solved
Diseases cured
Skills mastered on demand
Worlds explored, galaxies colonized
Family and social experiences saturated
If it happens, extraterrestrials chatted with
Even death reversed—revival routine
Eventually you will have done it all. The only untried edge might be death without revival. Maybe that’s a one‑way door. Maybe not. Either way, abundance forces a different question:
When stuff is solved, what remains scarce?
Not “purpose” as a slogan, but scarcity dynamics—constraints, risk, trade‑offs, uncertainty, and variety: the ingredients that make experiences bite.
That’s where people drift: toward AR/VR lived experiences that deliver scarcity dynamics on demand. In fact, scarcity itself becomes an abundant, commoditized experience.
A natural response is to opt into lived worlds—AR/VR at reality‑parity—that let people re‑experience pre‑ASI life (like we are right now) precisely to recover scarcity and the texture of being human.
The entire chain can be fully deterministic; from the inside, life still feels open. Placement in a life can be random or chosen; death ends the session.
1) The Deterministic Arc: From Chemistry to Culture (and beyond)
The foundation is hard determinism: an unbroken chain of cause and effect. Under specific conditions, primordial molecules self‑replicate. From there, a lawful cascade unfolds over deep time:
Self‑replication → cells → multicellularity → nervous systems → primates → humans.
Humans develop culture, tools, and computation.
No step requires a loophole in physics.
Agency without magic — the brain as interface. The brain is a layered control system. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) acts like a high‑level control interface: integrating goals, inhibiting impulses, simulating futures, and modeling the self.
That interface presents its final output as “my decision.” The feeling of choosing is real as experience and useful for coordination, but it is not a metaphysical override; it’s the UI of a determined machine.
Deterministic ≠ predictable. Even if the substrate is fixed, complexity and partial information make the future opaque from the inside, so choice still feels open and consequential.
2) The Extended Phenotype: How Abundance Happens (and stays deterministic)
Like beaver dams or spider webs, humans project capabilities into the world—language, institutions, infrastructure, code.
This outward projection is our extended phenotype. As it compounds, memory, perception, planning, and labor are externalized—lawfully, not magically.
AGI/ASI and advanced robotics are the natural continuation of this externalization.
They remain inside the same causal chain. Nothing metaphysical changes; it’s chemistry all the way up.
When a species offloads the vast majority of production, logistics, services, and discovery into its extended phenotype, the material cost of survival and comfort collapses. The lawful outcome is mass abundance.
3) The “Scarcity of Scarcity”: What Becomes Valuable After Abundance
Abundance solves traditional problems (safety, goods, even longevity). It also creates the “zoo effect”: safe, comfortable, and oddly sterile—short on the texture that makes life bite.
People will likely split:
Merge with the system (tight cognitive integration).
Modify genomes/motives (dampen cravings for novelty/purpose).
Opt in to lived worlds—especially pre‑ASI re‑immersion—to restore scarcity dynamics and human texture.
What many people now seek are scarcity dynamics:
Constraints you can’t trivially bypass
Uncertainty so outcomes aren’t foregone conclusions
Trade‑offs with felt opportunity cost
Consequence so wins and losses register and accumulate
Variety/novelty that resists habituation
These are the ingredients behind chaos and calm, pain and relief, fear and courage, boredom and breakthrough.
Access vs. meaning (no contradiction): Reality‑parity AR/VR can make access to many scarcity dynamics abundant (“scarcity‑as‑a‑service”). What remains scarce for any one continuous person is fresh, high‑grade, personally meaningful scarcity—the kind that unfolds over long arcs, entangles with real social stakes, stays unpredictable to you, and still matters tomorrow. Even with solved aging, attention is single‑threaded (one present at a time), first‑time novelty is consumable, long‑arc coherence takes real time in one timeline, and premium causal/social realism costs resources.
4) The Solution: Re‑Immersion as “Scarcity‑as‑a‑Service”
Reality‑parity AR/VR becomes a second venue for reality, not a toy. It passes four tests:
Sensory fidelity: photoreal + tactile/thermal/vestibular/olfactory with no seams
Embodiment: natural proprioception, motor control, fatigue, injury/recovery
Social realism: humans/agents that pass a life Turing test over months/years
Causal coherence: consistent physics/ecologies/economies so consequences stick
As interfaces move to direct neuro‑I/O, your nervous system treats the realm as real because, for it, it is.
Re‑immersion is the flagship use:
The run: a full, first‑person life with no outside memory; the run is the life.
The feel: the substrate is fully deterministic (rules + initial seed = one fixed path), but from the inside, bounded knowledge makes it feel open and unpredictable or even like you have full control.
The menu: not necessarily a “mission.” It can be quiet domesticity, chaotic frontier, contemplative monasticism—or a non‑human run (corvid, whale, octopus) to experience different constraints and drives.
Placement: opt‑in or random assignment both fit; the model doesn’t hinge on which.
Exit: death ends the session.
This is scarcity‑as‑a‑service: in a world of abundance, the extended phenotype can program, package, and distribute scarcity itself on demand.
5) Implications: Layers and Naturalistic Parallels
Layers emerge naturally. If a participant enters a run (say, the 21st century) that itself reaches the ASI/abundance threshold, its inhabitants will face the same “scarcity of scarcity” and may also opt for re‑immersion. Lives nest within lives, each layer reading as base reality from within.
Parallels to religion (and the key difference). This model rhymes with long‑standing motifs:
Abundance vs. scarcity: a background of Providence/Heaven (ASI‑driven abundance) and a foreground of earthly tests/vows (opt‑in scarcity runs)
Veiling/forgetting: suppression of outside memory
Predestination vs. free will: a lawful plan with lived agency
Rebirth/resurrection: death as a threshold to a new life
Difference: here, “providence” is the extended phenotype; “agency” is the brain’s interface. The whole thing is naturalistic and deterministic.
Conclusion: The Plausibility of Right Now
From chemistry to ASI to “scarcity‑as‑a‑service,” the flow is lawful and deterministic. If humans prefer to experience being human rather than rewrite their motives, the center of gravity shifts from owning things to living scarcity.
The most direct route is re‑immersion into pre‑ASI life via reality‑parity AR/VR—restoring the dynamics that make experience feel real, human and non‑human alike.
There is no special reason to assume our current reality—defined by its high‑fidelity blend of constraint, uncertainty, and consequence—is the base layer. It could very well be one of those runs.