IRL: the new economic gravity

For the last two decades, technology has steadily disaggregated human social life. First, texting fragmented presence. Then social media atomised relationships into feeds and notifications.

Now artificial intelligence is accelerating that disaggregation by giving individuals hyper-responsive digital companions, assistants and agents... massively useful, but also profoundly isolating.

Between AI and the robotics industry nipping at its heels, we are hurtling toward a post-scarcity era where people can get everything except meaning without leaving their homes.

Paradoxically, that’s exactly why In-Real-Life is about to matter more than ever.

As AI and robotics collapse the cost of goods and services, scarcity shifts from the material world to the biological one. Humans have ancient drives – to be known, seen... valued. Perhaps if AI eventually bleeds into biology, an LLM might suffice as a substitute for meaning, but until then it most certainly cannot. When GPT-powered agents are producing work, solving problems, even shaping preferences, the remaining frontier of value becomes meaning. The resource that remains finite is human connection.

Community becomes an industry when it becomes an economic bottleneck. When everything else is abundant, belonging is what’s left to optimise. We move from “content economies” to connection economies. From endless feeds to engineered belonging. From passive networks to active, intelligence-supported communities that reliably generate trust, introductions, opportunities and support.

And here’s the twist: AI doesn’t diminish IRL – it supercharges it.

AI enables the engineering of systematic serendipity. It helps communities understand the needs, challenges and trajectories of their people; it orchestrates introductions; it removes friction; it ensures that every room feels intelligently composed and every interaction has a high probability of mattering.

Instead of replacing in-person connection, AI becomes the infrastructure that makes IRL more interesting, more intentional, and more valuable.

As social disaggregation increases, the demand for re-aggregation rises. People will pay for tribes that actually function. Companies will pay for communities that unlock trust. Cities will compete on their ability to host IRL density. Platforms will evolve towards hybrid models that treat digital as the on-ramp and in-person as the product.

When the dust settles, we may realise the great irony of the AI age: the smarter our machines become, the more precious our time with other humans becomes. In the future economy, IRL is not nostalgia, it’s the scarce asset everything else orbits around.