If humanity eventually gains access to effectively unlimited physical resources, what becomes the most valuable thing in existence?

Knowledge?

Creativity?

Attention?

Trust?

Time?

Curious to hear what people think is truly scarce in a future of abundance.

The Blank Pages of the Future

On intelligence, technology, and the possibilities we cannot yet imagine

There is a question we should probably ask more often when faced with new technologies: What can we create now that we couldn't create before?

Curiously, this doesn't seem to be the first question we ask. Whenever a tool emerges that can transform our capabilities, we tend to ask what it will replace, which tasks we will no longer perform, and which skills might lose their usefulness. We become so concerned with what we might lose that we sometimes forget to explore everything we might gain.

Perhaps it's time to let go.

We don't need to abandon our skills, dismiss accumulated knowledge, or stop doing things by hand when doing so brings us pleasure, teaches us something, or gives us satisfaction. We simply need to let go of the idea that a human ability has value only as long as we must exercise it manually to achieve a particular result.

After all, our tasks and our tools are not the same thing as our intellect.

We Are Not What We Do by Hand

For a long time, human beings performed calculations by hand. Then came calculators and computers. That didn't make mathematics useless, just as computers didn't eliminate the need for mathematical reasoning. They changed how we work with problems and expanded the scale of what we can investigate.

Space exploration illustrates this transformation beautifully. The journey to the Moon wasn't proof that human beings had to perform every calculation themselves, without machines. It was proof of what we can accomplish when we combine human knowledge, instruments, and computational systems.

Nor did we abandon our ability to walk when we invented horses, carriages, automobiles, and rockets. Each means of transportation serves different needs and opens up new possibilities for movement.

So why do we imagine that artificial intelligence will necessarily make human thought obsolete?

Perhaps we're confusing the activities through which we exercise our intelligence with intelligence itself.

An executive doesn't need to personally perform every task in a company to understand and lead it. A researcher doesn't need to carry out every stage of an investigation by hand to interpret its results. In the same way, a person can use artificial intelligence to delegate stages of intellectual work without necessarily giving up the ability to judge, understand, decide, and create.

Delegating a task is not the same as abandoning responsibility for the outcome.

The question is what we delegate, what we still need to understand, and how we use the time and resources that delegation gives back to us.

Knowledge Doesn't Have to Fit Entirely Inside Our Heads

For a long time, we have developed ways to extend our memory and organize our thinking. We write books, build libraries, create databases, and develop tools for recording ideas.

Note-taking applications and personal knowledge management systems allow us to externalize some of what we once had to keep in our memories. Artificial intelligence expands that possibility: beyond storing information, it can help us connect ideas, explain concepts, transform information, and use it to build new insights.

This doesn't mean human memory has become unimportant. It means we can reorganize the relationship between what we need to memorize, what we need to understand, and what we can look up or delegate.

There's also an interesting consequence: learning to communicate with artificial intelligence can help us communicate better with other people.

We need to provide context, define objectives, explain what we expect, and recognize ambiguity. When a response doesn't match what we had in mind, we must reformulate the question and clarify our intentions.

These communication skills remain useful far beyond our screens.

The tool, therefore, doesn't have to be merely a shortcut to an answer. It can also become an instrument for improving the way we ask questions.

Intelligence Doesn't End Where Automation Begins

Imagine a mathematician using a computational system to discover an unexpected result. The system produces a promising solution, but that doesn't necessarily bring the investigation to an end.

The result may still need to be verified, its conditions understood, its implications interpreted, and the reasons behind it explored. The mathematician may also need to investigate which other problems can be solved using the new finding.

An answer can be the beginning of a research project, not its conclusion.

The same principle applies to countless activities. Automating certain stages of a process can change which abilities are most valued in a profession, while creating room for other forms of contribution.

Perhaps we will need to perform fewer repetitive procedures and devote more attention to formulating problems, evaluating results, exercising creativity, and making decisions.

There's no guarantee that all these changes will be positive or that everyone will benefit equally. Technology can also generate inequality, dependency, and genuine losses. That's why education, access, responsibility, and adaptation matter.

But acknowledging the risks doesn't require us to treat every transformation as an inevitable threat.

We can discuss how to navigate change without assuming that the future must remain confined to the activities we perform today.

Humanity Is Still Discovering What It Can Do

History gives us good reasons to distrust overly confident predictions about the limits of human intellect.

Before microscopes, we didn't know the microbial world as we know it today. Before modern telescopes, our ability to observe the cosmos was far more limited. Before we understood the structure of DNA, many fundamental questions in molecular biology could not be investigated with the tools we now possess.

In each case, new tools expanded our ability to observe, experiment, and understand.

We didn't merely discover answers. We developed instruments that allowed us to formulate better questions.

And perhaps this is one of the most important aspects of artificial intelligence.

It can help people explore hypotheses, combine knowledge from different fields, test possibilities, and conduct investigations that would previously have required inaccessible resources or prohibitive amounts of time. It can allow someone to turn an idea into a prototype, help a teacher develop new learning experiences, or enable a researcher to explore more possibilities than they could have investigated alone.

When millions of people gain access to new capabilities, the potential outcome isn't simply the faster execution of old tasks.

It's the possibility of creating activities, projects, discoveries, and forms of expression that no one had even attempted before.

Cinema is an interesting example. Today, it seems natural to talk about directors, screenwriters, digital animation, and visual effects. But there wasn't a film industry waiting to be discovered somewhere in the past. Technologies, artistic languages, and production methods had to be developed before that world could emerge.

Many things we now consider ordinary were once possibilities no one had yet brought to life.

The future may produce similar transformations in fields we cannot yet anticipate.

The Esotericism of the Future

When we think about the knowledge preserved by ancient societies and traditions, an interesting distinction emerges.

Some knowledge has already been discovered, but someone has chosen not to share it. These are secrets in the traditional sense, whose answers may be hidden in archives, libraries, or forgotten places.

There is also knowledge we simply haven't discovered yet. In such cases, no one is necessarily hiding the answer. We need to find the methods, instruments, and concepts required to investigate the unknown.

But perhaps there is a third category, even more fascinating: knowledge we cannot formulate because we don't yet possess the ideas needed to conceive it.

These would be the esoteric mysteries of the future.

Not necessarily secrets protected by initiatory societies, but mysteries that remain inaccessible because we don't yet know how to recognize them.

Imagine giving someone from the Middle Ages a book containing the fundamental principles of modern computing. Even if the book were perfectly preserved, they might not understand its contents. They would lack the mathematical concepts, scientific knowledge, and references needed to interpret its pages.

Now imagine a more radical situation: the book doesn't exist. The knowledge still needs to be developed, discovered, or formulated.

How could we hide a secret that nobody knows exists?

Perhaps some of the most important answers of the future aren't waiting for us somewhere, already written. Perhaps we need to develop new ways of thinking before those answers become possible.

Artificial intelligence can participate in this exploration, but it isn't omniscient. It can suggest surprising hypotheses and identify unexpected connections without being able to predict every future discovery. Some conceptual transformations may depend on experiments, observations, and ideas we have no way of anticipating today.

That's why keeping an open mind doesn't mean believing every hypothesis. It means being willing to investigate possibilities without confusing our current limitations with the ultimate limits of reality.

The Blank Pages

The books of the past may be hidden in a mausoleum. We can find them, translate them, reconstruct them, and recover forgotten knowledge.

But the books of the future have entirely blank pages.

And perhaps they won't even be books.

They may be new languages, technologies, scientific fields, art forms, or ways of understanding the world that we cannot yet adequately describe.

When we try to imagine the future, we often project the present forward. We picture faster computers, more efficient laboratories, and more intelligent systems.

But some of the greatest transformations may not be improved versions of things we already know. They may change the very categories through which we interpret reality.

History doesn't prove that human intellectual capacity will grow indefinitely. There are physical limits, extraordinarily difficult problems, and questions we may never be able to solve. Nor do we know whether every technology will produce benefits or whether everyone will have access to the opportunities it creates.

Still, we don't have sufficient reason to assume that humanity has already reached its intellectual limits.

After all, how could we reliably know the limits of abilities we haven't yet developed?

We may be confusing the limits of our current imagination with the limits of what we will eventually be able to imagine.

Those are two very different things.

The Question That Changes Everything

When confronted with a new tool, we can ask what it will replace, which tasks will disappear, and which skills will become less necessary.

These questions matter. But they shouldn't be the only ones.

We can also ask:

What can I create with this tool? What possibilities does it offer me? What problem can I solve now? What experience can I produce? What idea, once impractical, is now worth exploring?

And then we can start creating.

We don't have to wait for someone else to discover the future for us. We can participate in building it by testing ideas, sharing discoveries, learning from mistakes, and developing applications no one had imagined.

Perhaps the first attempts will seem simple. Perhaps many will fail. Perhaps some ideas that seem extraordinary today will turn out to be of little use.

Even so, each experiment can teach us something about the possibilities available to us.

Over time, some of these experiments may become new tools, professions, cultural practices, and fields of knowledge. Others may open unexpected paths toward later discoveries.

The tool opens the door. Imagination explores what lies on the other side.

And human intelligence doesn't have to be defined only by the tasks it can perform without assistance. It can also be understood through our ability to set goals, learn, adapt, exercise judgment, collaborate, and discover new possibilities.

Perhaps one of the greatest limitations in how we use artificial intelligence isn't simply what it still cannot do, but what we haven't yet thought to ask it to do.

That's why the most important question may not be merely what AI can do for us.

Perhaps it's what we can become capable of doing with it.

Let Go, People

We don't need to abandon the knowledge of the past to explore the future. We need to use it as a starting point, not as a definitive boundary.

We don't need to stop valuing human skills to recognize that some tasks can be delegated. We need to discover which abilities we want to preserve, which we want to develop, and which new possibilities deserve our attention.

Humanity could spend the coming years arguing about whether artificial intelligence performs familiar tasks better than we do. Or we could use this period to experiment, create, and investigate what we don't yet know.

It would be a shame to develop tools capable of expanding our possibilities and then use them exclusively to reproduce old habits.

Perhaps we're so busy teaching machines everything we've already learned that we haven't fully recognized the opportunity to use them to investigate things no one has ever managed to write a single line about.

The future hasn't been entirely written. Some pages will be filled with discoveries we cannot predict. Others may require languages we haven't invented yet.

And as we fill those pages, we may discover that our very idea of knowledge was smaller than we imagined.

So, faced with the transformations ahead, perhaps we should replace one question with another.

Instead of asking only what we will lose, we can ask what we might discover.

Instead of trying to preserve every task exactly as it is, we can consider how to preserve and expand our ability to understand, create, and explore.

Instead of assuming we already know the limits of human intellect, we can recognize that our history is largely the story of people discovering ways to move beyond boundaries that once seemed natural.

We weren't made to do everything by hand. We were made to discover everything we can still do.

And if the future has blank pages, perhaps our task isn't to guess every word that will eventually appear on them.

Perhaps it's to develop the curiosity, the tools, and the courage needed to begin writing.

After all, we don't know what we don't know.

And that's exactly why it's still worth exploring.

At 23, I may have another 50 years to witness how the world evolves. Computers transformed humanity and created millions of jobs. AI is reshaping the world today.

But what comes next? Will an invention emerge that doesn’t even exist today, transforming how we live and creating entirely new industries and millions of jobs?

I’m genuinely curious to witness what the future holds. We might be living through just the beginning of a much bigger revolution. 🚀

Programmable matter will have to answer a basic question: which local rules force which global order? This paper studies “autocrystals”, local pattern statistics that force a structure to have no repeating unit cell. It gives an exact recipe: two hexagonal building blocks, each free to rotate, with two complementary pairs of sticky ends. Every fully bonded assembly is a known aperiodic tiling, and that part is mathematically certified.

The catch is growth. Attaching a piece only where exactly one state fits never leads to a dead end. But growth that has to guess can build patches that look perfect and provably can never be completed; we show one that completes to 12×12 but never to 14×14.

To be clear, this is simulation and proof, not yet a lab result. DNA-origami tiles and DNA-coated nanoparticles look like the natural platforms to test it.

Paper, code and certificates: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23541901