One of the themes that we come back to on FFR (perhaps shows you’ve missed as you listen off and on) is the difficulty of the transition you’re describing. We discussed this at length in our shows with guest Martin Ford both in 2010 and more recently last summer as part of The World Transformed, and on other occasions. As we have framed the discussion up to this point, it has generally been about the challenge arising from abundance of productivity — which takes the form of increasingly pervasive and sophisticated automation replacing human beings in the workforce.

The good news is that we get more productivity and everything becomes cheaper. The bad news is that the scarcity of labor, which has made individual human workers valuable in the economy, is eliminated. That is to say, people don’t have jobs and don’t have any way of participating in the economy.

There are numerous scenarios for how this is addressed. Ford talks about wide-ranging redistributionist government programs. On another show with guest Alvis Brigis we discussed how the economy may shift towards prosumerism, with consumers earning back a portion of their economic life by producing content. (I blogged about that here just last week.) Other models include shifts towards towards information-based productivity (with or without the prosumer idea), shifts towards individual personal services, and more radical ideas like an economy based on reputation or influence.

I don’t know which of these ideas will win out. My suspicion is that it will be a combination of things — certainly prosumerism alone won’t do it. And it could very well be an approach that we just haven’t thought of yet: an economic singularity, if you will. It’s interesting to note that all of the ideas listed here continue to rely on scarcity in one form or another; it’s just not the scarcity of energy or material resources that we’ve faced in the past.

The transition may well be bumpy. Ford thinks that economic catastrophe is imminent if we don’t take huge steps now. Stephen is on the record predicting that things will get worse before they get better. (In fact, I’m pretty sure he reiterated that last week.)

So I may be the “Pollyanna,” believing that the economy is likely to evolve fairly smoothly in response to these changes. In fact we’ll be talking about this on tomorrow’s show as we look at how dematerialization drives abundance and the challenges it brings for economic transition.

I’ve been listening to FFR on and off for a year or two now, and was pleased to see that the new Diamandis & Kotler book would be covered. I was hoping for (though not really expecting) a more balanced reading. Alas it still remains for someone to seriously address the glaring, critical hole in Diamandis & Kotler story — which Kotler himself acknowledged in another podcast (Singularity 1-on-1?) last month — namely how the technological potential for abundance might actually be fulfilled in an economic environment that only rewards scarcity consistently, and that consistently produces nothing more than the scarcity-preserving minimum except as an absolute last resort, when no other form of competition is possible.

Aluminum is a great historical example, but not I think in the way that you suggested in the podcast. Nor is the possibility of another, present-day “Aluminum in absentia age” all that remote — just Google “IPv6″ from time to time over the next few years…