Ownership concentration × Deployable task coverage

The abundance dream's catch: the binding constraint stops being capital or capability and becomes coordination — deciding what to point the engine at. That decision layer can quietly re-grow a feudal structure one level up even while the compute stays commons-owned, and status competition intensifies exactly as material scarcity relaxes. It isn't a resting state, either — recursive leverage keeps pulling ownership rightward, so holding it broad is a permanent, active tax, not a default.

The deepest basin on the map: owners of a rail that can do nearly everything need the population less as workers, customers, or voters and more as dependents to pacify — the social contract loses its mechanical basis, and no strike or boycott bites the way it used to. Recursive coverage makes the moat self-sealing, since the same capability that out-improves challengers also manufactures consent. The twist: near-free capability could fund a lavish material floor as a rounding error — comfortable, gilded, and managed at once.

The danger isn't capture, it's boredom: broadly-owned rails promised a windfall and delivered a utility, so the public coalition that funded the commons — cooperatives, open weights, sovereign compute — loses patience and sells out right before coverage broadens, handing the eventual upside to whoever stayed. What fills the gap is real, though: guilds regain status as the trusted interface to unreliable tools, and a whole audit-and-certification economy blooms around verifying what the AI can't be trusted to do alone.

The quiet one: a few owners control a tool that doesn't do much yet, so they extract rent from dependency and gatekeeping rather than capability — and it's in their interest to keep it narrow-but-essential, since brittleness itself becomes the moat (the worse the edge cases, the more customers need handholding, indemnity, proprietary eval suites). The real danger is timing: ownership lock-in hardens here, cheaply and unopposed, precisely because the stakes still look too small to fight over.