Bob Kinnison

A few years ago, there was a lot of discussion about the elimination of the physical worker - i.e. jobs in the physical goods economy. Think truck drivers, farmers, pilots, oil rig workers, construction, etc. A lot of these ideas were promoted by venture capitalists and tech media that have spent their entire careers working in the digital world and never the physical one. The reality is that digitizing content, insurance, payments, or finance is very easy, while digitizing the 3D world is incredibly difficult. If you aren't convinced, go research the autonomous trucking startups that raised billions in capital from 2015 -2020 (FreightWaves covered many). Most of those businesses are now defunct, even when funded by the largest companies (Google/Uber, etc), most successful VCs, and some of the smartest minds in the digital economy. The reality is that the physical world is incredibly hard to digitize and therefore automate. The real world is messy. Quantum physics and chaos theory reign. Things happen that can't be anticipated in a lab. The massive pay concessions we've seen labor win over the past year are a function of demographics and nothing else. We simply don't have enough young people to do the physical jobs that our modern economy requires. Manufacturing is coming back to North America. Physical labor is going to be a major constraint, but this likely means that those jobs go for much higher salaries than digital ones. This is not a short-term thing. It is a long-term one. Get used to it. It's beautiful.