Greetings from Cyberdelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I'm your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

And today I'm posting another audiobook edition of a novella I just wrote. It's a follow-on to my

previous book featuring Diane DePrema, and it continues in the San Francisco 1960s vibe.

Now, I can hear some of you groaning because, well, it's another one of my long podcasts.

But you should think of it as just another audiobook.

So take a few days to listen to it, just like you would if you were going to read it.

In any event, here is why I think that the essence of this

story is, well, it's important yet today. In 2024, leading voices in the field of artificial

intelligence began making a startling prediction. Within 20 years, we might live in a world

where most goods and services cost essentially nothing to produce energy could become virtually free through advanced fusion and solar technology

manufacturing could be automated to the point where the marginal cost of creating almost anything approaches zero. Food could be grown in vertical farms

tended entirely by robots. Even complex services might be provided by AI systems that never

sleep, never demand wages, and never go on strike. If these predictions prove accurate, we're heading

towards something economists call a post-scarcity society.

A world where abundance, rather than scarcity, becomes the fundamental economic reality,

where the question isn't how do we divide our limited resources, but rather how do we organize a society where nearly everything is freely available?

It's a fascinating prospect, and it's also a terrifying one, because abundance doesn't automatically

solve the deeper questions of human organization. Who decides what gets made? Who controls the

systems of distribution?

How do people find meaning and purpose in a world where traditional work becomes obsolete?

And perhaps most importantly, how do we prevent the owners of the AI and automation from simply becoming a new class of feudal lords, controlling abundance for their own benefit,

while the rest of us become permanently dependent.

...