25 October 2026AI

Fresco got the robots right and the humans wrong

I first watched the Venus Project films around 2010, when Zeitgeist: Addendum was doing the rounds. Jacque Fresco, then in his nineties, walks you through models of circular cities and explains, quite calmly, that money will go, jobs will go, and machines will run the lot. I thought it was a lovely idea and a very long way off. Not because of the cities. Because of the machines. I’m a tech optimist and always have been, so I never doubted they would come, but nothing around in 2010 came anywhere near today’s AI, and I had them down for 2050 at the earliest. The half I couldn’t buy was the people. Human nature, and men in particular, has run the same way in every civilisation we know of, including the ones we like to call civilised.

Watching it again now, the half I believed in is turning into the news. Robots are being taught to work on building sites. Surgeons supervise machines that do the cutting. Tractors drive themselves. It is arriving well ahead of 2050. The half I doubted hasn’t moved.

So it seemed worth grading him properly. He made two kinds of prediction, one about machines and one about people. I think he got the first right and the second wrong, and the second is the one that matters now. I worked most of this out on a walk, which is how I think these days, and then went looking for the research to see whether my gut was right. Mostly it was.

What Fresco actually said

Jacque Fresco was an industrial designer who spent the second half of a long life (1916 to 2017) building a model of the future on a plot of land in Venus, Florida, with his partner Roxanne Meadows. Most people met it through Zeitgeist: Addendum in 2008, which is roughly when I did. The organisation still exists and Meadows still runs it.

The title card of Paradise or Oblivion, the Venus Project’s 2012 film: the Earth from space — **Paradise or Oblivion** (2012), the Venus Project’s own film, with Fresco making the case in his own words. 48 minutes, played from YouTube.

Strip away the domes and the argument has five steps:

Total automation. Any job a machine can do, a machine does. Farming, building, manufacturing, surgery, transport.
Cybernation. A central computer system manages the world’s resources, matching what people want to what the planet can sustain, with no markets in the loop.
A resource-based economy. Because machines make everything and nobody needs to be paid, money goes. Goods are available to all without price, debt, barter or servitude.
Politics replaced by engineering. Meadows put it plainly in a 2016 interview: the role of politics would be surpassed by engineered systems. Decisions become technical questions with technical answers.
Crime and poverty mostly vanish. Fresco held that most antisocial behaviour is a product of scarcity. Remove scarcity and you remove the behaviour.

The first two are predictions about machines. The last three are predictions about people. He treated them as one chain, each step following from the one before. That is the mistake, and the rest of this piece is about where the chain breaks.

The scorecard

Here is each prediction graded against October 2026. I started with three grades, landed, underway and not happening, and nothing earned the first. The grades are my argued positions, not measurements, and the sources are there so you can argue with a particular one.

Prediction	What Fresco said	Where it is in 2026	Grade
Farming without farmers	Fully automated food production	John Deere’s autonomous 8R has been shipping since 2022, and Deere’s stated goal is a fully autonomous corn and soybean system, from tillage to harvest, by 2030	Underway, row crops furthest along
Robots on building sites	Construction done by machines	Humanoids learning tasks by watching tradespeople; McKinsey puts large-scale use about a decade out	Underway, pilots
Surgery by machine	Operations performed by automated systems	A Johns Hopkins robot did the clipping and cutting stage of gallbladder removal on its own (July 2025), on organs taken from pigs rather than in a living patient	Underway, early
Machines make everything	Lights-out factories and distribution	Lights-out factories exist but are rare; most factories and warehouses are automated in parts, with people still on the floor, and the last mile and anything bespoke are further off	Underway, furthest in factories
A computer runs the economy	Central resource management, no markets	Nothing of the sort. AI is deployed inside markets, by companies, to compete in them	Not happening
Money goes	A resource-based economy	The opposite: the returns from automation flow to whoever owns the models and the machines	Not happening
Work goes	Nobody needs a job to live	Jobs are shifting, not vanishing, and nobody’s rent has been cancelled	Not happening yet
Politics becomes engineering	Decisions made by systems, not people	Governments are arguing harder than ever about exactly who gets to decide what AI may do	Not happening
Crime fades with scarcity	Antisocial behaviour is a product of want	See below. Some of it is. Most of the violent kind is not	Not happening

Read down the table and the pattern is obvious. Every machine prediction but one is underway. Everything about people is not happening. The hardware predictions were the ones that sounded far-fetched to most people in 2010, and they are the ones coming true.

Fig. 1 · Where the chain breaks

Fresco’s chain holds for one step, then breaks.

The top row is Fresco’s argument as he made it, each step following from the last. The bottom row is the same starting point run through the world as it is. They share the first box and nothing after it.

The second box is the interesting one. Cybernation is a machine prediction, and it is the only one in the table that isn’t happening, because it fails for a people reason rather than a machine one. Economists argued about exactly this in the 1930s and 1940s, and Friedrich Hayek’s answer, in The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945), still stands: most of what an economy knows is scattered across millions of people, much of it never written down, so no central planner can gather it, however fast it can compute. Chile tried anyway. Project Cybersyn, built for Allende’s government in the early 1970s, linked factories to a control room in Santiago by telex, and it was abandoned after the 1973 coup.

Status is older than money

The question that stopped me on the walk was simple. Say nobody needs to work. There are still decisions to make, and someone has to make them. Those people are not going to want to live exactly like everyone else. In a world with money you pay them more. In Fresco’s world there is no money. So what do you pay them with?

My answer, before I looked anything up, was that you pay them in status, and that status would go on being the thing people fight over because it was there long before money was. Chimps have it. Money is a few thousand years old. Status is as old as living in groups.

Fresco’s answer was the opposite. He was a strict environmentalist about behaviour: people are shaped by their conditions, and the drive to be above your neighbour is something scarcity taught us. Take away the scarcity and the drive goes with it.

The research is on my side, and more firmly than I expected:

Frans de Waal’s Chimpanzee Politics (1982) documents coalition-building, deposed leaders and years-long status campaigns in a chimp colony at Arnhem zoo. No money in sight.
Robert Sapolsky spent decades with wild baboons in Kenya and found that in a settled troop, rank predicts stress hormones: low-ranking animals carry chronically high levels of the same hormones that wreck human health. (When the hierarchy is in upheaval, it is the ones at the top who suffer.) His Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers has the story.
Michael Marmot’s Whitehall studies followed British civil servants, every one of them with a secure job and free healthcare, and found that health tracked grade step by step down the ladder. Not poverty. Position. The Status Syndrome (2004) is the write-up.
Cameron Anderson and colleagues asked directly, in a 2015 review in Psychological Bulletin, whether the desire for status is a fundamental human motive. Their answer was yes: it shows up in every culture studied, in children and adults, and people pursue it even when it costs them.

So status does not fade when money goes. It re-routes. Remove the currency and it flows into whatever is scarce next: the house with the view, the place at the table where decisions are made, attention, the partner other people wanted. The Soviet Union had no meaningful consumer market for seventy years and ran a vivid status economy on access instead: the dacha, the special shop, the car with a driver. Prisons run one on cigarettes. Academia runs one on citations. If you want to see it with no money involved at all, watch a group of collectors compare shelves. I wrote a book about collectors, Turn Down the Tap, and the shelf is never just a shelf.

This is where Fresco’s chain breaks for good. Abundance does not dissolve hierarchy. It changes what the hierarchy is denominated in.

Fig. 2 · Status re-routes

Remove the money and status picks a new currency.

Status is the constant. Money was only ever one of the things it ran on, and the four on the right are where it goes when money is taken out. None of them can be made abundant, because each is valuable precisely because not everyone can have it. That isn’t my idea. The economist Fred Hirsch called these positional goods, in Social Limits to Growth (1976): things whose value lies in where they put you relative to everyone else, which no amount of growth can make plentiful.

Who decides

Fresco’s escape from the status problem was step four: nobody decides, the system does. Resource allocation becomes a calculation. Politics becomes engineering.

I do not think that holds, and not because a machine could not do the sums. It could probably do them better than we do. It fails because legitimacy is not a technical property. People accept a decision when they believe they consented, somewhere up the chain, to the process that produced it. Tom Tyler’s work on procedural justice (Why People Obey the Law, 1990) found that people care more about whether the process felt fair and gave them a voice than about whether the outcome went their way. A verdict handed down by a system nobody voted for and nobody can argue with fails that test even when it is right.

There is a smaller, well-measured version of this. Berkeley Dietvorst and colleagues showed in 2015 that people lose faith in an algorithm faster than in a person after seeing both make the same mistake, even when they have watched the algorithm do better overall. They called it algorithm aversion. We forgive people their errors more readily than we forgive machines theirs. A system deciding who gets the house with the view, or who goes to prison, would be judged on its mistakes, not its record.

So the decisions that carry moral weight stay with people who can be held to account. That means a class of deciders. And deciders, being human, want the thing from the previous section. Fresco’s chain breaks in the same place twice.

The crimes money solves and the ones it doesn’t

Give Fresco his due here, because he was half right. Counted by how often it happens, most crime is acquisitive. In the Crime Survey for England and Wales for the year to March 2025, fraud alone was about 4.2 million of the 9.4 million crimes people said had happened to them, with theft a large part of the rest. Police records put violence first, but the survey, which asks people directly, is the better count of what actually happens. If the thing you would have stolen or been swindled out of is free, a large slice of crime does go away. The police force of an abundant society really would be smaller.

The other half is the problem. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s Homicide (1988) went through murder records across cultures and centuries and found the same drivers again and again: sexual jealousy, wounded pride, disputes over status between young men. The single most common motive in a man killing his partner was possessiveness, not money. None of that is about a shortage of things. People in Fresco’s cities would still fall in love with the wrong person, still be humiliated in front of their friends, still want the partner someone else has.

Fig. 3 · What abundance fixes

Abundance clears the acquisitive crimes and leaves the rest.

The left box is the bulk of crime by count. The right box is the bulk of the crime that frightens people. Fresco solved the first and said nothing about the second.

There is a catch, and it comes from my own source. Martin Daly spent the next thirty years on the question, and in Killing the Competition (2016) he argues that inequality predicts a society’s murder rate better than any other measure: the wider the gap between the top and the bottom, the more dangerous the competition between the men at the bottom. So abundance would help, if it were shared. It would take some of the heat out of the status fight. What it would not do is end the fight. That is a smaller claim than Fresco’s, and I think it is the true one.

So you keep the courts, you keep a police force, and you keep the decider problem from the last section, because someone has to run them. What changes is the mix. The crimes that remain are the ones that were always hardest to police, because they happen between people who know each other and are driven by feelings nobody can redistribute.

I would add one caution against my own argument. More free time does not automatically mean more trouble. Retired people do not go on crime sprees. The group that does is young men with status to win and nothing structured to do, and an abundant society would have to find them something that is not a job. That is a design problem Fresco never mentioned, and it is a harder one than the cities.

The bit I believe

Having pulled the chain apart, here is the link I think holds, and it is the one that makes the whole thing worth wanting.

When effort is no longer the bottleneck, people make things. I see it already: the cost of producing a competent video, song, app or book has fallen close to zero, and the result is not that people stopped making them. It is that everyone started. I wrote about that shift in the seven pillars: the floor has risen to where the ceiling used to be, and what is left to compete on is taste and an audience.

Take the job away entirely and I expect the local, human-scale end of culture to come back. Not influencers broadcasting to millions, but the thing that existed before broadcasting: the village play, the pub band, the comedy night in the back room, the neighbour who turns out to be a very good painter. Those were ordinary parts of life before everyone was too tired and too busy. Fresco’s films are full of people with time, and I think he was right that a lot of them would spend it making things for each other.

The catch is the previous three sections. The renaissance happens, and the status competition runs straight through the middle of it. Who gets the good room for their play. Whose band the town turns out for. The fight does not go away because the stakes are no longer rent. If anything it gets purer, because there is nothing else to compete over.

Unequal abundance

Fresco got the hardware right and the humans wrong. He was an engineer, and he designed people the way he designed cities: from a clean sheet, assuming they would behave as drawn.

What we are actually heading for, on current evidence, is something he would have hated. Call it unequal abundance. Material scarcity mostly solved, by exactly the machines he described. Status scarcity fully intact, because it was never about the material. And a long political fight over who owns the machines, because the automation arrived inside the money system rather than instead of it, and the gains are pooling with whoever holds the models and the robots.

That is not a worse future than the one we have. Most of it is better. But it is not Fresco’s, and the gap between his and ours is a good map of what AI cannot do. It can run the tractor. It cannot make the farmer not mind that the next farm has a bigger house.

What I would watch

Who owns the machines. Every argument about the future of work is really this argument. If automation stays privately owned and the returns are not shared, you get abundance for the owners and a benefits system for everyone else.
Whether any state tries to allocate abundance. Universal basic income pilots are the nearest thing to Fresco’s step three anyone has tested. Watch what happens to status, not just income, when one runs at scale.
What the young men do. The group with the most to lose from the end of work is not the one with the most to lose financially.
Whether the local stuff comes back. If you start seeing village plays and back-room gigs again, Fresco’s best prediction is coming true, and I will be at the front.