From screens to atoms
Almost everything we’ve pointed AI at so far lives behind glass. Search, feeds, ads, code, chat, images: the digital world. It’s an enormous market, and it has made the digital economy feel like the whole economy. It isn’t. It’s the small, well-lit room next to a continent we’ve barely walked into.
The physical-AI economy, spanning robotics, manufacturing, energy, agriculture, the oceans, and ultimately space, will end up two to three orders of magnitude larger than the digital one. Not because digital stops growing, but because the physical world is simply that much bigger. Atoms outnumber bits by an amount that’s hard to hold in your head. The reason it hasn’t felt that way is that, until recently, acting in the physical world was prohibitively expensive and the physical world was mostly unmeasured.
Both of those constraints are breaking at once. The collapse in launch costs is the clearest example. When it gets cheap to put sensors in orbit, the cost of measuring the Earth collapses too, and measurement is the precondition for everything AI does well. Consider how little of our own planet we’ve actually charted: more than eighty percent of the ocean floor has never been mapped in detail. Vast stretches of the planet’s mineral, biological, and energy resources remain uncharted. You cannot allocate, optimize, or build around what you can’t see. We’re about to be able to see it.
Cheap launch doesn’t just open space. It turns the entire Earth into something AI can finally perceive.
That’s the unlock. Once the physical world becomes legible (mapped, sensed, instrumented), AI can do for atoms what it already does for bits: model them, predict them, and act on them at a scale no human organization can match. The space economy isn’t a side quest here. It’s the infrastructure layer that makes the physical-AI economy measurable in the first place.
We are at the nascent stage of all of this, which is exactly why it’s the interesting place to work. The digital frontier is crowded and mostly fenced. The physical one is wide open, and most of it hasn’t even been mapped yet. I’d rather build there.