Four Reasons I Care About Abundance as an AI and Global Risks Researcher

Abundance matters because civilizations need state capacity to handle existential risks—and bureaucratic complexity is slowly destroying our ability to coordinate basic functions.

Photo by AXP Photography on Unsplash

1. Civilizational Collapse Is a Recurring Pattern

History is littered with societies that simply stopped working: the Western Zhou empire, the Harappan civilization, medieval Mesopotamia under the Abbasids, the Egyptian Old Kingdom, the Hittites, the Minoans, the Western Roman Empire, the Classic Maya, Teotihuacan, etc.

As Eli Dourado points out, collapse has "happened often enough that it is not likely to be a series of flukes, but a general feature of human social organization."

The mechanism is straightforward: societies add layers of complexity to solve problems. An oil shock leads to the Department of Energy. Environmental damage spawns the National Environmental Policy Act. Each solution creates new procedures, new bureaucracies, new costs. Over time, the cumulative burden becomes so heavy that the society struggles to perform basic functions.

We're watching this happen in real time. When New York City can't fix an ice rink for six years, it's a signal that our institutions are losing the capacity to function. I think this is why abundance struck a chord in America. Abundance is a cry against stifling complexity.

2. Complexity Diffuses Leadership and Responsibility for Urgent Problems

A tuberculosis vaccine that passed safety and early efficacy trials still isn't on the market seven years later. 1.25 million people die from TB each year.

The RTS,S malaria vaccine spent 23 years in trials, including a nine-year delay after European approval, before finally entering African vaccination programs in 2024. The New York Times estimated that 143,000 children would have lived if the vaccine had arrived just nine years sooner.

Institutional systems are so complex that nobody is actually responsible for the people dying right now. The WHO wants to protect public trust. European regulators want absolute certainty. The diffusion of responsibility is so complete that 1000 preventable child deaths each day became nobody's fault nor area of responsibility.

When institutions can't coordinate on life-saving interventions, I question their capacity to handle other complex challenges—like emerging technologies.

3. Slow Energy Innovation Probably Made the World More Dangerous

Environmental regulations serve important purposes, but their complexity has costs we rarely calculate. The National Environmental Policy Act was well-intentioned, but it metastasized into a system where anyone can sue to stop any project that might hypothetically impact the environment. One of NEPA's early supporters later found that the very law he helped create prevented his own organization from building a clean energy paper mill.

I suspect that if we hadn't made it so difficult to build and experiment in the physical world, solar power prices would have dropped much faster. The delay didn't just cost us cheaper energy, it could have reshaped global politics.

• Energy scarcity drives international conflict. Abundant, cheap energy reduces great power competition and the incentives for weapons of mass destruction.

• Water crises are in the top five of the World Economic Forum's Global Risks by Impact list nearly every year since 2012. Earlier solar deployment would have enabled large-scale desalination, addressing water scarcity that drives humanitarian crises and mass migration. In 2017, severe droughts displaced 20 million people across Africa and the Middle East.

• Faster energy innovation would have helped developing countries leapfrog ahead economically, following the path of the Asian Tigers (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea) who got rich in 40 years by rapidly adopting emerging technologies. Instead, regulatory bottlenecks in the world's leading economy slowed global progress.

4. How AI Might Amplify Our Institutional Blind Spots

The vaccine delays aren't about speed; they're about accountability. Nobody's job is actually "make sure this life-saving medicine reaches people quickly." The WHO worries about public trust, European regulators want certainty, and African health systems face their own constraints.

AI can process paperwork like 23,000-page environmental reviews faster, but it won't solve the core problem: nobody is actually in charge of making sure our institutions deliver cheap energy, housing, or medicine.

The deeper issue is about democratic oversight. Right now, those massive NEPA reviews are so long that most members of Congress have never read one. But at least a determined journalist could analyze them and point out problems.

AI-generated reviews might be technically superior—more thorough, fewer errors, faster production. But they could become so long and dense that only other AI systems can meaningfully evaluate them. When your solar project gets rejected, even the regulators won't know why.

We might trade democratic oversight for technocratic efficiency—and get neither.

The Stakes Are Higher Than We Think

Other developed countries seem to manage complexity better. Norway and Sweden can still build and maintain infrastructure effectively. Understanding why some societies maintain state capacity while others lose it should be a research priority for anyone concerned about humanity's long-term trajectory.

The global risks community spends significant time thinking about AI alignment, biosecurity, and nuclear war. These are crucial concerns. But we should also be worried about the slow movement toward complexity that makes society unable to handle challenges effectively, especially the ones that lead to collapse: elite mismanagement, insufficient response to circumstances, and depletion of vital resources.

This is how civilizations end—not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic whimper.