Abundance: Beyond Scarcity and Self-Devouring Cycles
About this audiobook
Artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology in human history — and the window for governing it is open but closing. In Red Lines Rising, psychiatrist and author Ravinder Nath Bhalla, MD applies a clinical lens to the defining question of our era: will AI serve what we have built together, or concentrate power beyond recovery?
Dr. Bhalla identifies five red lines that must not be crossed — dignity, agency, genocide prevention, economic participation, and shared reality. These are not idealistic aspirations. They are survival requirements, each specifically threatened by AI at a scale, speed, and permanence no previous technology has matched. Without dignity, people become objects. Without agency, democracy is theater. Without shared reality, collective deliberation itself becomes impossible.
Drawing on documented cases — from AI-powered surveillance in Xinjiang to algorithmic bias in hiring and healthcare, from social media's role in Myanmar to the rise of autonomous weapons — this book shows what happens when boundaries exist only on paper. Part I defines the red lines and what enforcing them would require. Part II exposes the structural forces and institutional incentives that keep them from being established despite their obvious necessity. Part III offers a practical path forward: how citizens, workers, veterans, small businesses, and international coalitions can force accountability while enforcement is still possible.
The third volume in The Abundance Series, Red Lines Rising argues that governing AI from a scarcity orientation will produce exactly what scarcity always produces — extraction, concentration, and collapse. The alternative is still available. The mechanisms are still buildable. The window is still open.
But it will not stay open forever.
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About the author
RAVINDER BHALLA, M.D. is a board-certified psychiatrist who has spent forty years examining why people and institutions remain trapped in patterns that harm them.
Born to parents who survived the partition of India in 1947-his father narrowly escaping death in violence that killed millions-Bhalla grew up with intergenerational trauma and chose to study cycles rather than perpetuate them. He has treated thousands of patients across four decades, watching individuals struggle with the same patterns he sees operating at civilizational scale: scarcity thinking creating self-devouring cycles that consume everyone they touch.
His clinical work has focused particularly on patients cycling through incarceration, addiction, and mental illness-experiencing firsthand how systems designed to punish rather than heal perpetuate the conditions they claim to address. This experience informs the book's central argument: that our major crises are not separate problems but manifestations of operating from scarcity when we are, at our deepest nature, abundance.
Bhalla brings together clinical psychiatry, Nietzschean philosophy, systems thinking, and historical analysis to examine why we remain trapped despite knowing better-and what it would take to choose differently. His work has appeared in [publications if any], and he has lectured on [topics if applicable].
He lives in New Jersey where he continues to practice psychiatry and plant trees in whose shade he will never sit.
