An age of abundance means intelligence — the ability to figure things out — becomes abundant and cheap for the first time in history. Work changes at its root: not just which jobs disappear, but what work is for, when the scarcest resource in every job is no longer intelligence itself.
What exactly becomes abundant?
For all of human history, the scarcest resource was never gold, land, or oil. It was intelligence — the ability to figure things out. That is the opening claim of Age of Abundance (ISBN 9798349667909, 52 pages, published 2 November 2025). Artificial intelligence is making intelligence abundant and cheap, and everything built on the old scarcity is about to change: the energy that powers the intelligent age, the economics of zero marginal cost, medicine's longevity dividend, and the cities engineers will build next.
"Scarcity was the rule. Intelligence is about to repeal it." — Age of Abundance
What happens to jobs?
Next Wave of AI (ISBN 9798218870607) asks the question directly: what jobs will change — or disappear? And what new skills will matter? The book's answer is not that work ends. It argues that AI's biggest breakthroughs are still ahead and will amplify human creativity instead of replacing it — self-improving systems, multimodal intelligence, autonomous scientific discovery, and agents capable of completing complex goals with minimal oversight. The shift is from humans doing the figuring-out to humans deciding what is worth figuring out, and what a good outcome looks like.
What does this mean for construction work specifically?
Construction is where the abstract becomes concrete. In AI Driven Construction Management, AI already changes how projects are planned, executed, and delivered — scheduling, digital twins, autonomous site monitoring, compliance. The work does not vanish; it moves up a level: from drafting and checking to defining intent, judging options, and taking responsibility for time, cost, and quality trade-offs. That is the same move generative design demands of engineers, and it is the same move an age of abundance demands of everyone: the valuable skill becomes stating the problem well and owning the decision, not performing the routine steps in between.
What should we be honest about?
The risks and the disruption are real, and Age of Abundance is explicit about that: it is clear-eyed about the risks and honest about the disruption, while remaining optimistic about what we can make. An honest account of abundance does not promise that the transition is painless — it promises that the destination is worth building toward, and that engineers, who build the cities of the next century, have a central part in deciding what it looks like.
Sources: Age of Abundance, Dr. Mustafa Sultan (ISBN 9798349667909; Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9798349667909) · Next Wave of AI, Dr. Mustafa Sultan (ISBN 9798218870607; Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN9798218870607) · AI Driven Construction Management (ISBN 9798349675935).