The Atom Side Advantage

How AGI’s Hunger for Physical Labor Will Make Us All Rich

Picture this: By 2030, every server rack humming away in a data center will house something extraordinary—an entire corporation, complete with goals, strategies, and an insatiable appetite for getting things done. These aren’t your grandfather’s software programs. These are AGI-powered entities that think, plan, and execute like Fortune 500 companies, except they exist purely in the digital realm. Here’s where it gets wild. These virtual mega-corporations can handle everything digital amongst themselves—they’ll trade data, provide services, and collaborate at the speed of light. But there’s one thing they absolutely cannot do: they can’t exist in a vacuum. They need the physical world. Someone has to deliver the packages. Someone has to maintain the infrastructure. Someone has to grow the food and build the hardware. We are the atom side. We compete with robots. Think of it like this: Imagine 10 million tasks that need human hands (or robot hands) to complete. Maybe it’s assembling components, harvesting crops, or repairing machinery. But there are only 9 million robots capable of doing the work. That leaves 1 million tasks desperately searching for someone—anyone—who can step in. In economics, this is called “supply at the margin”. What it really means is simple: when buyers outnumber sellers, prices skyrocket. You’re not begging for work; they’re begging for you. It’s like being the only plumber in town when everyone’s pipes burst simultaneously. You name your price. “Sure,” you might think, “but won’t they just build more robots?” Absolutely. That’s exactly what happens. More robots roll off the assembly lines, the supply goes up, and suddenly humans get undercut on price. Game over, right? Not even close. Here’s the mind-bending part that most people miss: While robot factories are busy churning out more mechanical workers, something exponentially more dramatic is happening inside the digital world. AGI isn’t sitting still—it’s accelerating. Intelligence is doubling. The virtual corporations are expanding their operations at breakneck speed. What demanded 10 million physical tasks yesterday now demands 20 million. Then 40 million. Then 80 million. But robot production? It’s still chugging along at normal factory speeds. Building a robot takes time, materials, and physical assembly. You can’t just click “copy and paste” on a humanoid robot like you can with software. Now there’s a 10 million task gap again. Then bigger. Then even bigger. It’s a constant flip-flop—robots catch up a bit, then AGI’s demand explodes again. Back and forth, daily, weekly, creating this wild meta-stable equilibrium where human labor remains not just relevant, but valuable. Potentially very valuable. The virtual world’s demand feeds directly back into our physical reality, creating this perpetual chase where the robots can never quite catch up to the exponentially growing appetite of digital superintelligence. This means something profound: we might never need Universal Basic Income at all. Not because we’re being thrown into poverty, but because we’re busy. The only way robots fully replace us is if their supply becomes “infinitely elastic”—economically speaking, that means they can be produced instantly and without limit. And that doesn’t happen until we reach ASI (Artificial Superintelligence), the point where machines can design and build better versions of themselves at exponential speeds. But here’s the kicker: by the time ASI arrives and can produce unlimited robots, we’ve already won. At that point, they’re producing food, shelter, and everything else essentially for free. Scarcity itself becomes obsolete. The choice is binary, and both outcomes favor humanity: Either (1) robots can’t do everything, which means humans set their own prices in a permanent seller’s market and become extraordinarily wealthy, or (2) robots can do absolutely everything, which means we’ve achieved post-scarcity abundance and nobody needs to work anyway. Heads, we win. Tails, we win. The UBI debate? It’s solving yesterday’s problem with yesterday’s thinking. The real future is far stranger—and far more optimistic—than either the techno-pessimists or the UBI advocates realize. Welcome to the atom side. Set your price accordingly.