The Case For Abundance

Why I'm betting on depth over distraction

This is Part 2. If you haven’t read The Case Against Doomerism, start there.

METR published their evaluation of Claude Opus 4.5 a few weeks ago. The model completed tasks autonomously that take skilled humans nearly five hours. Their confidence interval stretches to 20 hours. METR admitted their task suite doesn’t have enough hard problems to measure where the ceiling actually is.

We have officially run out of tests.

The time horizon for autonomous task completion has doubled every seven months since 2019. Claude 3.7 Sonnet hit one hour in February. Opus 4.5 hit five hours in November. Day-long tasks by mid-2026 looks conservative. Week-long tasks by 2027 looks possible.

Tab, tab, tab. Watch someone use Cursor and you see the future. The gap between intention and execution has collapsed. What looks like autocomplete today is the elimination of work itself.

This is where we get pessimistic. We’ll get lazy. We’ll get bored. The wealth gap will explode.

I don’t buy it.

Cheap dopamine has diminishing returns. The people who’ve been plugged in longest are the first to unplug. Rich people don’t sit on beaches forever. Humans need meaning, not just stimulation. And the best builders are already using AI to think harder, not escape.

TV was supposed to destroy civilization. Radio before that. We adapted. We always do. People’s happiest moments aren’t scrolling. They’re making something, connecting with someone, losing themselves in work that matters. We’re headed into a golden age of creativity where only your thoughts and ideas matter.

But most people don’t get to do that work. Not yet. They’re buried in the 70% of the job that’s retrieval, updating, communicating, aligning. The job becomes the job about the job. Ship the first idea that gets a little validation.

All of that is about to disappear.

Hours will open up. The bottleneck shifts from “can we build this?” to “should we build this?” That question nobody had time to ask becomes the only question left.

This will be a rude shock. Large companies have coddled workers into shallow output for decades. Meetings about meetings. Status updates that update nothing. Productivity theater. AI ends the theater. Thinking is what’s left. Most people haven’t exercised that muscle in years.

I’m betting they’ll adapt. Boredom is powerful. Desire is powerful. I’ve watched founders discover their best ideas came after they stopped managing calendars. The constraint was always time.

The constraint is lifting. This is what abundance looks like.

Yes, the infrastructure for escapism exists. Screen time keeps climbing. Gambling apps are everywhere. AI makes content infinitely personalized, infinitely engaging, infinitely available. The distraction infrastructure will probably generate better returns.

I’m investing in depth anyway. Here’s where I’m putting money in 2026:

Synthetic humans. This year, generated video stopped looking fake. You can watch artificial people speak and feel like you’re talking to someone real. Their eyes show actual emotion. Now add personalization. A tutor who knows exactly where you’re stuck. A therapist available at 3am. Synthetic populations that detect the next outbreak. The same technology that enables escape will enable growth.

World models. Take a flat image and turn it into a place you can walk through. Games that build themselves based on what you want to do, not what designers decided years ago. But this isn’t just entertainment. Architects will design in generated worlds. Engineers will simulate in them. We’re moving from content you watch to places you work.

Infra for long-horizon agents. METR showed what’s possible in a single session. We are headed toward agents that run for days. Hand off a project Monday morning, check in Friday afternoon. Agents that talk to other agents, break down problems, ask for help when stuck, deliver work you can trust. The models will keep getting better. The infrastructure around them is where the gap will show.

Vertical robotics. Everyone covers the humanoid robot demos. But the machines built for one job are still underrated. A robot that loads trucks. A robot that inspects welds. A robot that picks strawberries. Labor is short. Wages are rising. Vision models finally work well enough to navigate messy real spaces. The boring applications will matter most.

Creation tools. When everyone can consume infinite content, the edge is making things. Tools that let more people build, not just scroll. Execution is getting cheaper every day. The bottleneck is imagination. I want to back the tools that expand what people can make.

This is infrastructure for the golden age.

The abundance everyone worries about is also permission to be present with people who matter. Time was always the excuse. The excuse is disappearing.

Start thinking about what you’ll do with the time. Not because the future is coming. Because for some of us, it’s already here.

If you’re building for the abundance era, I want to hear from you 👋