In the mid-19th century, aluminum was a luxury metal. Its production required a chemical process so complex and expensive that, for a time, the material was worth more than gold itself. It only took the emergence of new industrial techniques for its large-scale manufacturing to become viable. The rare material transformed into a cheap commodity, finding its way into windows, kitchen utensils, automobiles, and beverage cans. Aluminum did not lose its utility; it merely lost its scarcity. This phenomenon captures the essence of commoditization: the economic process through which a rare, expensive, or complex good turns into a standardized, accessible, and extremely low-cost product.
The history of technology is rich with examples of this transformation. Photographers of the past century relied on buying film rolls, developing them in laboratories, and printing them on paper, which made every photograph a valuable object, measured down to the smallest detail. Today, any phone allows anyone to capture and share thousands of images without significant additional costs. The advantage grounded in scarcity dissolved in favor of mass accessibility. The question remains: what will happen when the resource about to be commoditized is human cognitive capacity itself?
Before reaching the level of superintelligence, technology will likely pass through Artificial General Intelligence, often abbreviated as AGI. This is the inflection point where AI ceases to be merely a specialized tool—like current models that write text or generate images—to match the cognitive capacity of an adult human across the full spectrum of intellectual tasks. AGI represents the transition from software that executes commands to a system capable of reasoning, learning autonomously, and solving novel problems with the flexibility of the human brain.
When AGI crosses that threshold and begins improving itself at exponential rates, society will enter the realm of Artificial Superintelligence, or ASI. In this scenario, AI does not just match human intellect; it vastly surpasses it in all areas of knowledge, from scientific research to financial strategy. If a company today needs one hundred engineers working for six months to solve a complex problem, an ASI could deploy the equivalent of ten thousand instances of its capacity running in parallel to deliver the solution in a matter of hours.
For this superintelligence to act on the real world in a transformative way, it needs to build a "world model." In practical terms, this means developing a deep internal representation of the laws of physics, cause and effect, and object dynamics in space. An ASI equipped with such a world model understands gravity, material strength, and environmental behavior with mathematical precision. When this advanced cognitive ability is combined with robotics—that is, with mechanical bodies capable of moving and manipulating objects in the physical world—AI leaves server rooms to intervene in construction sites, agricultural hubs, and transportation networks. Far beyond simply operating machines, an ASI with autonomous agency would assume the complete orchestration of physical reality: it would identify needs, draft end-to-end strategic and logistical planning, and coordinate fleets of robots to execute complex projects, closing the entire loop of perception, decision, and action without any need for human supervision.
The convergence of advanced robotics and an ASI capable of understanding the physical environment radically alters the production of material goods. Autonomously managed farms can analyze soil composition, plant, identify pests, and harvest without manual intervention, while logistics fleets manage food distribution continuously. In theoretical terms, if intelligence and physical labor are performed by reproducible machines, the production costs of essential goods tend toward zero.
This perspective reopens a historical debate regarding the end of labor as an absolute economic necessity. Should wealth creation no longer depend on human labor, professional activity loses its status as an indispensable requirement for daily survival. However, this projection of total abundance—where even the role of money and traditional markets could evaporate in the face of practically free goods—meets strong caveats. Economic analysts and scientists warn that such a scenario takes on utopian overtones. Technological abundance does not, on its own, guarantee equitable distribution, since physical production will always remain subject to real material limits, such as the availability of energy, arable land, raw materials, and strategic infrastructure.
As intelligence and physical labor convert into abundant, commoditized resources, society's value structure tends to shift. In a world where machines can design, optimize, and build with matchless efficiency, economic and social focus returns to the elements that can never be manufactured on an assembly line. Time spent together, interpersonal connections, empathy, and the deep search for meaning become the only remaining rare resources—and, consequently, the most valued.