AI plus robots won’t just dent labor—they’ll bulldoze a lot of it. When autonomous factories, farms, and mines can run with minimal humans in the loop, both digital goods and many commodities race toward near-zero labor cost. That doesn’t make money irrelevant; it reassigns its job. As production becomes cheap, value migrates from “making stuff” to “passing through gates” that can’t be mass-replicated: location, grid interconnects at peak times, verified identity and attention, safe compute, scarce inputs. Wealth, in this new age, is the durable right to traverse those bottlenecks.

Think of the economy as a “scarcity stack.” Land and rights-of-way (ports, fiber corridors, substations) remain fixed by geography and policy. Energy and inputs—especially at 6pm on a hot day or when HBM supply is tight—don’t scale as smoothly as code. Compute is gated by fabs and capex cycles. Distribution and identity throttle who can reach whom with credibility. Safety and assurance—proving a system is compliant and insurable—become their own choke points. Money’s role shifts from paying for human hours to prioritizing metered rights: kWh, GPU-hours, verified attention, and safe access. That’s the new meaning of wealth: claims on constraints, not piles of widgets.

So who actually prospers when robots make “everything”? Owners of the scarcity stack—and the orchestrators who combine it. If you control strategic land and interconnects, long-term energy and storage, compute capacity and packaging, proprietary data with legal cover, and trusted distribution rails, you sit where supply can’t elastically catch up. Open-source AI will compress software rents, and robotic labor will crush wage costs, but neither can 3D-print coastline, fabricate chips without fabs, or conjure peak-hour electrons out of thin air. Profits accrue where demand outruns feasible expansion—exactly at those bottlenecks.

The assignment for policy—and for investors who want durable, legitimate wealth—is to match mechanisms to physics. Use land value taxes to capture unearned location rents; Harberger (self-assessed, must-sell) taxes to kill holdout; VCG auctions and congestion pricing for fixed slots and peak capacity; community land trusts to preserve affordability; and public options (including sovereign compute) to discipline private pricing while keeping the edge competitive. Treat critical layers like utilities with transparent, non-discriminatory access, then let builders race on top. Do this right, and money keeps coordinating what’s truly scarce while AI + robotics make everything else abundant—turning wealth from hoarded outputs into stewarded access that widens prosperity.