Token Abundance Will Bring Abundance to Some, and Abject Poverty to Many Others
I believe the future will deliver staggering AI-driven abundance and mass poverty at the same time, not universal wealth. This is not a prediction I make lightly; it is a conclusion I have reached after tracking AI compute economics, memory supply chains, and the brutal realities of automation. We are not heading toward a Star Trek utopia where everyone shares in the spoils. We are heading toward what I call a “slumdog Star Wars” future: advanced “Godboxes” (a term Zach Vorhies introduced to me during a recent interview) and instant intelligence coexisting with slums, shantytowns and destitution.
The dividing line will not be access to information, because information is becoming free. The dividing line will be ownership of AI compute and tokens. If you own the hardware that generates intelligence, you capture the wealth. If you merely rent access from someone else’s cloud, you remain a subject. I have said repeatedly that personal liberty is good and decentralization is critical, and nothing proves that faster than the coming AI economy. I believe the assumption that AI automatically makes everyone richer is dangerously wrong, and it is the single most costly mistake interested observers can make right now.
Token Abundance Is Coming Faster Than Most People Realize
Token abundance is rapidly arriving because AI architecture is shifting from sequential autoregressive generation to diffusion and parallel chunk generation (this is a very big deal). Older models generated text word-by-word in a linear chain, which is computationally expensive and slow. Diffusion models refine noise into whole blocks of code or content at once, not word-by-word, which radically changes the economics of inference.
TypeSafe AI’s new decision model is reportedly 200 times faster than ChatGPT on certain narrow decision tasks, offering free output tokens, proving that parallel processing can make AI blazing fast and cheap [1]. This is not a minor optimization; it is a fundamental change in how machines think and how tokens are produced.
Inference engines now offload mixture-of-experts models and N-gram lookup tables into system RAM or SSDs, reducing the need for ultra-expensive GPU RAM. This means the bottleneck is shifting away from exotic hardware and toward commodity memory, which is precisely why the GDDR7 shortage I documented is so devastating for consumers [2]. When AI-driven supply chains prioritize data centers over personal computing, the average person gets squeezed out of the hardware market entirely. Zach Voorhees calls the endpoint a “Godbox”: a portable device that knows almost everything and solves problems almost instantly.
That AI-powered future is real, in other words, but it will not be evenly distributed.
This will create massive compute and token abundance, but abundance alone does not equal broad prosperity. As Chris Martenson has written, factions in society already receive entirely different information diets, and AI will amplify that fragmentation rather than heal it [3]. Abundance of tokens in the hands of a few owners means abundance of wealth for those owners. For everyone else, it means they can ask a machine questions for free while their labor becomes increasingly worthless due to automation. Thus, I believe the technology is real; the egalitarian fantasy about it is not.
