The future isn't coming. It's already here — and most people don't recognize it yet.

On a Wednesday morning in November 2025, a warehouse manager in Nevada called a meeting. Thirty-seven night-shift workers sat down. He explained, calmly and without malice, that their jobs would end in six months. Not because the business was struggling. Because robots could do the same work around the clock, without health insurance or overtime, and pay for themselves in under two years. Every competitor was making the same move. The math was settled.

None of those workers made the news. There were no protests, no viral videos. Just thirty-seven people learning, in an unremarkable conference room, that the economy had stopped needing what they were offering.

This is how the transformation actually arrives. Not with spectacle — with spreadsheets.

The Age of Abundance is about what happens next. Not just to warehouse workers, but to radiologists, lawyers, engineers, and everyone whose livelihood depends on selling their time and expertise. It is about the economic engine driving this transformation, why it cannot be stopped, and — most importantly — what it makes possible on the other side.

Because here is what almost every conversation about AI gets wrong: the destination is not scarcity. It is abundance. The same forces eliminating jobs are collapsing the cost of almost everything — goods, healthcare, energy, education. The challenge is not that we will not have enough. The challenge is that we will have more than enough, and the systems we built for a world of scarcity have no idea what to do with that.

Leandro Maya spent years at the intersection of this transformation — as a finance executive at Circle, as an investor in Bitcoin, as a Brazilian who watched hyperinflation destroy a generation's savings, and as someone who has seen firsthand how fast the tools of the automation era are moving inside real companies. This book is the product of that position: informed, honest about the disruption, and clear-eyed about the opportunity.

The Ladder Problem is the book's central argument. When automation eliminates entry-level jobs, it does not just disrupt workers at the bottom of the economic ladder — it breaks the ladder itself. The path from education to employment to stability that every previous generation could follow no longer exists in the same form. Understanding that structural shift — and what must replace it — is the foundation for everything the series explores.

This is not a book about fear. It is a book about a turning point, and the choices we make at turning points determine everything.