The only limiting thing is energy. Once you have that solved, you solve everything else. And with AI’s help, I believe that will be solved very soon. We already recently had a fusion breakthrough, it won’t take much more. Also, solar will cover the rest in concert with the improvements in battery storage. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if AI will be able to help us figure out zero point energy.

I don’t think you aren’t thinking “big enough,” because every problem you mentioned is easily solved with AI and unlimited energy.

We have everything we could ever need, material-wise, sitting in our landfills and littering the planet currently that we don’t need to mine anything ever again. The only reason we continue to mine is because it’s still cheaper/easier to pull it from the ground than pull the materials from trash. AI will solve this problem.

Also, people will use substantially less. If you had access to everything for free, you wouldn’t want/need most of the crap you own. How much stuff sits in our world unused as a backup or kept around as some form of a sunk cost? You don’t need 99% of it. If everything is free and on-demand, you just recycle stuff once you don’t need it or it breaks and order something new. You could have new clothes made for yourself daily. Why would you need an entire wardrobe? Extrapolate that to everything you use in your life. You could 3D print yourself anything you need. All the extra stuff could be recycled and used as raw materials. And when you multiple this reduction and recycling of materials for 6 billion people, it becomes easy to see how we have more than we could ever need.

Arable land could be solved by huge desalination facilities. Again, this is only restrictive now due to energy consumption. If we had free unlimited energy, the Sahara desert could be reclaimed for everything from farming to lush jungles. Again, that’s more than we would ever need to supply food for the planet—hell, we can feed the planet now if it weren’t for the limiting economic and distribution issues. We throw away so much food away now it’s unbelievable.

I could go on and on, but my point should be clear.

There are only two things that are going to limit this future:

• whether humans can give up need for the few to remain in power/control
• whether we can create an AI that won’t destroy us