All Value Becomes Digital
All wealth becomes digital. Everything becomes a set of digital instructions. A printer or robot then executes those instructions to affect the real world. Amazon Prime, drop shipping, food delivery, ride-sharing…all of them involve a digital frontend and a human backend.
Over time, more pieces are getting automated, so the backend becomes digital too. AI (in general) and virtual influencers (specifically) are obvious examples of this trend, where the human backend is no longer as necessary.
Even when the goods themselves can’t be digitized, the interfaces to them will be.
If you think about what comes after what comes next…you’ll see that just being good at building software may be sufficient by 2050, because a lot of physical production will be automated through robotics.
All property will become digital because much of the physical world will become printing. Obviously, you can print out a digital document on a piece of paper today. But think about a supply chain of robots delivering food to your door. We are already doing some autonomous food prep. For delivery, we have autonomous cars or sidewalk delivery robots. You can imagine the whole food creation and delivery process being fully automated, all robots—an electromechanical process that has no human intervention. It would be just like printing something out.
I think in the future, most value will be created online, and you'll print it out by invoking robotics. Robotics is sort of happening in our peripheral vision now. In the 2020s, we're going to see more actual robots in the field. That's going to come pretty quickly, because once a robot can do something, you've turned labor into capital.
All labor can become capital. When that happens, being really good at engineering just gets higher and higher and higher leverage. The robotic world I just described is not only for food delivery. The same dynamic will exist in warfare, agriculture, and manufacturing. Being really good at software is going to keep earning compounding returns. That's important.
I’m increasingly thinking of the physical world as a printout of digital wealth. Ask yourself: what can hitting a button do? In 2010, one button could print a PDF. In 2020, one button can deliver any item. In 2030, maybe one button can build anything.
In crypto, much of the labor in the financial system is being automated with smart contracts and digital signatures. Because all wealth goes digital, all wealth will go crypto over the next few decades—not just currencies, loans, stocks, commodities, art, and video game items, but every type of human wealth. It all will become natively digital, the input to a robotic "printer."
