Humanoid robots are on the cusp of bringing real-world abundance.
We’re past the sci-fi phase.
- Automakers and logistics giants are already piloting humanoids on factory floors and in delivery/logistics flows.
- Mercedes-Benz is trialing Apptronik’s Apollo on production tasks;
- Figure raised heavyweight funding, partnered with OpenAI, and has been piloting at BMW;
- Amazon has publicly explored humanoids alongside its warehouse robotics; and
- Nvidia just launched Jetson Thor, a compute platform purpose-built to run “physical AI.”
Together, that’s capital, customers, and compute lining up — the usual ingredients before scale.
Content already hit abundance — and it changed the value of each piece. You can see the flood in the metrics.
- YouTube still sees ~500 hours of video uploaded every minute.
- WordPress.com users publish ~70 million posts each month.
- Common Crawl adds roughly 3–5 billion new pages monthly to its open web corpus.
- And watchdogs now track 1,200+ AI-generated news/information sites with minimal human oversight.
- Hundreds of Finxters in our community have auto-generated passive content websites with AI – e.g., by using Koala AI (ref link, special discount).
In a world like this, any single content item is worth less unless it’s differentiated (source).
Knowledge used to be scarce. Now it’s abundant — and knowledge workers feel the price pressure
Large parts of what coders, lawyers, analysts, and writers do are newly automatable or easily assisted.
The IMF estimates ~40% of jobs globally will be affected by AI (≈60% in advanced economies). McKinsey’s analysis suggests current tech could automate activities that absorb 60–70% of employee time over the long run.
On the ground, demand signals are softer: US tech job postings on Indeed were ~36% below early-2020 levels this summer, and cumulative tech layoffs since 2022 remain elevated. None of that says “zero value”; it says “more replaceable at the margin,” so market value compresses unless you’re at the very top or close to the money.
But scarcity still lives in the real world: construction, healthcare, local services
Even with cyclical cooling, structural shortages persist where physical work meets aging demographics and infrastructure needs.
- The EU projects a shortage of ~4.1 million healthcare workers by 2030;
- Germany alone expects a deficit of 280,000–690,000 nurses by 2049.
- In construction, US industry groups estimate a need for ~439,000 additional workers this year to meet demand.
- Across Europe, vacancy rates have eased from 2024 highs, but services still outpace industry/construction — and Germany’s own economic surveys flag skilled labor as a key bottleneck.
👉 Translation: there’s still unmet work in the physical world.
So what should a job-seeking “knowledge worker” do?
Go where scarcity is. Move toward industries with durable, real-world demand — construction trades, healthcare, field operations, and service businesses.
Keep your burn rate low, and invest your surplus into scarce, desirable assets (skills with licensing or strong barriers, relationships, or financial assets you actually understand). The playbook is simple because the world is telling you, loudly, where the gaps are.
