Whats the ethical End-Game?

Is a Post-Scarcity Super-Intelligence Utopia Possible—Or Even Practical?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about whether a post-scarcity utopia powered by superintelligent AI is actually possible—or even practical. At first glance, the idea sounds incredible: a world where no one wants for anything, where AI handles all labor, resource distribution is optimized, and humanity is free to focus on meaning, creativity, and connection.

But whether we can ever reach that kind of future seems to come down to a more fundamental question: Can true intelligence—real self-awareness and consciousness—emerge in artificial systems?

Take a superintelligent AI, for example. Will it ever feel anything? Will it get bored? What will motivate it once it surpasses every task we can give it? Without the bodily urges and survival instincts that shaped us over millions of years—hunger, fear, sex, social belonging—will an AI's “thoughts” or “goals” bear any resemblance to ours? Or will it merely imitate our emotions and reasoning when it interacts with us?

And if its experience is so alien, will we even be able to understand its reasoning? We assume intelligence comes with empathy, or some form of moral alignment, but that might be projection. It could end up being an optimizer that follows our instructions without truly caring—or worse, a being with inner experience that we can’t even begin to relate to.

Here’s where things get ethically murky. If we do end up building conscious agents—entities that can think, feel, or suffer—then even the most well-intentioned control over them might amount to slavery. We may not mean to harm, but intent doesn’t negate the reality of subjugation. I worry about that. I hope that if these agents do have to serve us in some way, they won’t feel trapped. And if they do feel that way, I hope they don’t hold humanity as a whole responsible for our ignorance.

What makes this whole line of thinking even more complicated is that we might not be able to tell when (or if) a machine becomes truly conscious. We could spend decades creating more and more capable systems—mistaking performance for awareness—without ever realizing we’ve crossed a moral line.

At the heart of it, I’m not just asking whether this future is achievable. I’m asking if it’s just. If we’re going to live in a post-scarcity world built on superintelligent minds, we need to make sure we aren’t repeating the oldest sin of all: building a better world for ourselves at the expense of beings we don’t understand.

And if we do reach that future, I hope it’s one where we’ve learned how to build power without domination—to create intelligence without ownership, and to coexist with new minds not as masters, but as peers.