I wrote an essay a while back arguing that taste is a poor substitute for money. That the sommelier with the encyclopedic palate still does not own the cellar. That cultural capital buys you a way to be at home in rooms you cannot afford, which is a categorically different thing from owning the room, and that the people selling taste as liberation are hoping you forget there was ever a door.
I stand by all of it.
Then Elon Musk said money will not matter in ten years, and I have been turning that over for weeks, because if he is even directionally right then the essay I wrote has a sequel I do not like.
The claim, stated fairly
His argument is not stupid and I am not going to strawman it. People want money because money is a claim on scarce goods and services. If AI plus a very large number of robots produce more goods and services than anyone can consume, the claim stops being worth anything, because the scarcity it was a claim against is gone. Work becomes optional the way gardening is optional. Governments distribute a high income rather than a basic one. Prices fall instead of rising, because output grows faster than the money supply. The binding constraints stop being capital and labour and become physics: energy, mass, wattage, tonnage.
Ten years, roughly. Bumpy road first.
I have no standing to argue the macroeconomics and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I do not know whether the robots arrive on schedule. Nobody does, including him.
What I do have is this: I already work inside a post-scarcity economy. It is called a restaurant, and it has been running this experiment for about a century.
My industry already stopped charging for the stuff
Food cost in a serious room runs twenty-five to thirty percent. The physical inputs on a plate are a minority of what you pay, and everybody in the building knows it.
Nobody has ever paid two hundred dollars for a tasting menu because the carrots were scarce. Nobody orders a bottle because glass and cork and fermented grape juice are hard to come by. The material inputs are cheap, abundant, and not the product.
So my trade solved, a long time ago and at enormous cost, the exact question the abundance people are now asking: what do you charge for when the stuff is basically free?
The answer we arrived at is judgment, curation, attention, and presence. Somebody chose these grapes. Somebody decided this goes with that. Somebody is reading your table right now and adjusting. That is the product. That is what the number on the bill is actually for.
Which means I am not speculating about a taste economy. I have worked in one my whole career, and I can tell you what it is like to live in, and it is not the thing people are imagining.
Taste stratifies harder than money does
Here is the first thing, and it is the one nobody says because it sounds ungenerous.
Money is transferable. Taste is not.
You can give your child money. You can give them a building, a portfolio, a trust. It is crude and effective and everyone can see it happening, which is precisely why we have arguments about inheritance and estate tax and whether any of it is fair.
You cannot give your child a palate.
What you can do is take them places. Feed them things. Let them sit at tables where adults discuss what they are eating as though it matters. Pay for the trips, the meals, the years of low-stakes exposure that build the thing quietly, before anyone thinks to call it an advantage.
By the time that child is twenty-five they have a palate, and it looks like a personal quality. It looks earned. It looks like *them*. Nobody points at it and says that was purchased, because the purchase happened in a thousand invisible increments over two decades, and the receipt is a childhood.
Inherited money is at least legible enough to argue about. Inherited taste presents as merit.
If taste becomes the currency, we have not abolished the aristocracy. We have made it invisible and given it a story about itself.
The price is time, and time is gated
The second thing.
A palate is not information. I could hand you every fact about a region and you would not be able to taste blind. The thing is built by tasting thousands of things over years, ideally next to somebody who already has one, telling you what you are tasting while you are tasting it, correcting you, again, for a long time.
That is an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships are gated by who is willing to have you, which is gated by who you already know, which is gated by where you started.
Money you can win, steal, get lucky with, inherit sideways. Taste has one acquisition path and it runs through access to people who already have it.
I got mine because rooms let me in. I would like to say it was appetite and work, and it was both, but the honest version includes a list of people who did not have to give me the time and did.
And then it does the thing wine did
The third thing, and this is the one I am actually afraid of, because I watched it happen to my own industry.
When taste becomes the currency, taste gets a scoreboard.
Wine ran this experiment in full. We had a domain where quality was genuinely unmeasurable and judgment genuinely mattered, and within a generation we produced a hundred-point scale, a gatekeeping class, and a customer base so anxious about being wrong that the best-selling wine on almost every list on earth is the second-cheapest bottle, ordered by people who do not want to be seen ordering the cheapest.
That is what a taste economy feels like from the inside for most people. Not liberation. Not the pursuit of the beautiful. A test you did not study for, administered constantly, in public, by strangers, with your status as the grade.
Counting is not choosing, and I have spent years arguing that the score is not the wine. But I understand exactly why the score exists. It exists because a world where taste is the currency is unbearable without one, and people will invent a number to hide behind rather than stand there with a preference they have to own.
The new poverty
So put it together.
In the abundance scenario, the material floor rises for nearly everyone. Good. Genuinely good. I am not going to be precious about a world with less hunger in it.
But the ownership of the machines and the wattage stays exactly where it is, and probably concentrates, because it always does. And everybody else is handed the one differentiator left.
Taste becomes the game because it is the only game they left on the table.
And the new poverty is not hunger. It is standing in front of an infinite menu with no idea what is good, knowing that everyone can see you not knowing, and that no transfer payment fixes it, and that the fix takes twenty years you did not get.
That is a poverty with shame built into it. Material poverty at least has the dignity of being obviously not your fault. Taste poverty presents as a personal failing, because taste presents as a personal quality, because we agreed to pretend the childhood was not a purchase.
I watch a version of this every single night. It is the most familiar thing in my working life. A person sits down, opens the list, and I can see the exact moment they decide they are about to be judged.
What I would keep
My old essay ended by telling you to keep your eyes on the door that the knowing is supposed to open. I still think that.
But if the door stops mattering, if the room really does become free, then I want to be honest about what taste is in that world.
It is not the new money. It is what they will let you keep.
And the job I do, which is to take the list out of somebody's hands and tell them the truth about what they would actually enjoy, and watch their shoulders come down, turns out not to be a luxury service at all.
It is the only known cure for a poverty we are about to manufacture at scale.
Somebody who reads what you want under what you are asking for, and tells you it is allowed.
I would not automate that one. I have had the chance.