Net abundance describes a dynamic that has always existed across civilisation and the biosphere, from technological development to ecosystems, cognition, and culture, but has never been conceptualised as a single design criterion applicable across scales. 

Examples:

• Agriculture that restores soil health preserves versus agriculture that destroys it and consumes the very system it depends on. 

• Long-term supplier relationships generate compounding industrial capability and tacit knowledge, while short-term outsourcing fragments and dissipates it. 

• A building engineered to last 500 years versus 50 years.

• A child learning mathematics builds cognitive depth, while the same hours spent in passive media consumption erodes it.

• Interoperable data standards allow knowledge to compound across disciplines and institutions, while locked platform ecosystems capture and terminate it. 

• AI used to augment heterogeneous human reasoning expands the generative range of cognition, while AI that homogenises human thinking converges culture toward uniform outputs and produces measurable psychic entropy at civilisational scale.

Indications of this dynamic appear across thermodynamics (Prigogine, 1978), complexity science (Kauffman, 2019), and positive psychology (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, 1993). The Economic Complexity Index (Hidalgo & Hausmann, 2009) demonstrates that nations generating more heterogeneous, diversified economic output consistently outperform those that optimise narrow comparative advantage, which points to generative complexity as a driver of long-run prosperity rather than a byproduct of it.

It is hypothesised that this dynamic shows recurring features and, when they are present, net abundance can grow. One key feature is heterogeneity. The Principle of Maximum Heterogeneity (Artis, Akarca & Achterberg, 2026) shows that in computational and biological systems, heterogeneous architectures achieve performance, resilience, and efficiency simultaneously to a degree unreachable by homogeneous optimisation. In the terms of this thesis, this heterogeneity is not just variety for its own sake. It is structured diversity that increases the depth of assembly and the range of possible futures the system can realise. That increase in generative capacity is what I define as net abundance.

What has been missing across all of these literatures is a way to conceptualise this dynamic from a civilisational decision-making and governance standpoint. It is hoped that if we understand this we can govern civilisation for the better, particulary as society radically changes with the implementation of AI at scale.

This leads to three research questions:

1. What is net abundance in the age of AI?

2. What does increasing net abundance look like on a civilisational level in the age of AI?

3. How can net abundance be envisioned and co-created?