Beyond Work and Scarcity: Designing an AI-Automated Civilization for Shared Ownership and the Governance of Meaning

Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and energy systems raise the possibility, though not yet the certainty, that a significant share of the labor currently required to produce food, housing, energy, mobility, and basic services could eventually be automated. This paper treats that possibility as a design problem rather than a prediction. Material abundance, even if it arrives, does not automatically generate justice, freedom, dignity, or meaning; it can just as easily become the substrate for a new architecture of domination, organized around the ownership of compute, energy, data, and automated infrastructure rather than the ownership of land or capital in their historical forms. The paper develops a conceptual governance framework, an Abundance Constitution, intended to be articulated before, not after, any such technological condition arrives, so that the terms of shared ownership, anti-capture governance, transparent allocation, and human agency are set while they can still be contested rather than imposed after the fact. The framework rests on eight interlocking commitments: energy abundance, shared productive ownership, anti-capture governance, transparent AI allocation, human agency, ecological constraint, pluralistic social life, and the governance of meaning after compulsory labor. It identifies ten recurring failure modes, from post-labor oligarchy to meaning collapse, that a post-scarcity civilization could fall into even with abundant technology, and proposes a seven-stage transition pathway from the present labor-organized economy toward a more mature and pluralistic arrangement. The paper does not claim that AI-automated abundance is inevitable, imminent, or resolved by any single existing ideology. It is offered as anticipatory civilizational design: a set of institutional questions that are better asked now, while their answers remain open, than deferred until scarcity has already been replaced by a new form of dependency.