Your job might not disappear tomorrow. But the ladder you climbed to get it is already breaking.

We're entering an era unlike any in human history. AI and robotics are crossing the threshold where machines can replace both physical labor and cognitive work at scale. Not in some distant future. Now.

But almost no one is asking the right question. The question isn't whether jobs disappear. It's what happens when the entry points vanish: when law firms stop hiring junior associates, when warehouses stop hiring workers, when software companies stop hiring junior developers. When the bottom rungs of the economic ladder dissolve, the entire path to the middle class breaks.

Leandro Maya calls this the Ladder Problem. And it changes everything.

In The Age of Abundance, Maya maps the full transformation ahead:

The Disruption:

• Why "learn to code" is already obsolete, and what's replacing it
  
• How warehouse robotics and autonomous vehicles will trigger the first visible wave of displacement
• Why the gap between productivity and wages is about to become a chasm
• The three-phase timeline: what happens by 2030, by 2035, and by 2045

The Redesign:

• Why universal basic income is no longer radical, it's arithmetic
  
• How AI will detect diseases years before symptoms appear, and what that means for healthcare costs
• Why energy, not AI, is the binding constraint that determines which nations thrive
• How Bitcoin and programmable money fit into a machine-speed economy

The Human Question:

• What happens to identity and purpose when work is no longer necessary for survival
  
• How to position yourself, your career, and your family for what's coming
• Why this era could be extraordinary, if we make the right choices in the next decade

Maya isn't an AI researcher or an academic futurist. He's a finance and technology executive who spent years at Apple, Meta, and Circle watching automation reshape industries from the inside. He writes as an observer, not a prophet, with the clear-eyed perspective of someone who has seen how quickly structural change moves once the economics align.

No utopian fantasies. No dystopian panic. Just an honest map of what's coming, and a framework for thinking about it before it arrives.

This is Book One of The Age of Abundance Series, a multi-book exploration of how to redesign civilization's core systems for an era when scarcity is no longer the default.

The Age of Abundance introduces a new framework, the Ladder Problem, to explain why automation's most disruptive impact isn't mass unemployment but the elimination of entry-level jobs that serve as the path to the middle class. The book covers the full scope of the automation era's impact across work, income distribution, energy, money, geopolitics, education, healthcare, longevity, and human purpose.
Target audience: educated professionals aged 30-55 concerned about career disruption, parents navigating career advice for their children, investors seeking structural understanding of the AI economy, and policy-minded readers interested in income distribution and social contract redesign.
The author writes from the perspective of a finance and technology executive, not an AI researcher, making the book accessible to general readers without sacrificing analytical rigor. Personal threads throughout (the author's Brazilian upbringing, his children's futures, his experience inside major technology companies) give the book warmth and narrative drive alongside its economic arguments.
Simultaneous ebook, paperback, hardcover and audiobook release. Book One of a planned multi-book series.