There seems to be a great amount of enthusiasm in the zeitgeist about the future, positive and negative predictions. A lot of it  comes with some far out economics baked in nonchalantly. Basic incomes, abundance economies &amp; zero marginal cost everything.<p>I like it and I do quite a bit of indulging in this sort of thing myself. But…<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m seeing the trends in gadgetry, software, and manufactured goods at work everywhere. The production cost (and often the price) of manufactured goods (used to be &quot;mass produced) has come down tremendously compared with average income. The trend is hundreds of years old. Underpants, sugar bowls, cereal commodities and almost everything else you can fit under a very wide umbrella of &quot;manufactured goods&quot; is heading towards free, or at least extremely cheap. We&#x27;ve seen it happen with a lot of things. Clothes pins &amp; pencils used to be worth something, but I can&#x27;t remember cost ever being a factor. They&#x27;re basically free. Software also. I agree that a lot of things are headed towards &quot;abundance.&quot; The things that aren&#x27;t are often things that keep getting better, things where we have an appetite for (qualitative) more, iphones &amp; whatnot.<p>The bicycles come into it at the points where there isn&#x27;t a fruitful trend towards more, better everything. Housing &amp; transport are still most people&#x27;s 2 biggest expenses. These have improved in quality over time and we consume more (bigger house, long commute, overseas holiday…) but there isn&#x27;t an obvious &quot;trend towards abundance.&quot;<p>The fact that a radical idea (radical because of the radical trade off of eliminating cars) like this is interesting is kind of proof that this thing is not moving and we&#x27;re frustrated. We still commute a lot, and we don&#x27;t enjoy it. It pollutes. It&#x27;s noisy. Expensive. Slow. It&#x27;s not much different than 1980 or even 1965.<p>I think housing and transport are the stick in the abundance ideas. In 25 years roads might be full of quite, clean, electric, driverless, parkingless cars but even that amazing achievement will still not match the technology trends that have brought other things up the quality and abundance curve.