Everything Is About to Get Cheaper — Except Us
Everything Is About to Get Cheaper — Except Us
A completely different world is being built right now. And in this new world, some people are going to be far luckier than others — not because they worked harder, but because of where they happen to be standing when the ground starts to move.
Here is what I actually believe: the price of almost everything is about to collapse. Not a little. By hundreds of times. What costs a hundred today could cost less than one tomorrow, and before long we’ll all act like it was always that way.
I think this happens in waves, and I think the order is already visible. It starts with the internet, because digital things are the easiest to copy and the cheapest to produce once the machine does the work for us. From there it spreads into technology as a whole. Then it pushes into advanced industry — the heavy, complicated things we used to believe only humans with decades of training could build. And after that it reaches medicine and health technology, which to me is the wave that will change ordinary lives the most, because the things that used to bankrupt a whole family suddenly become something almost anyone can afford.
But there is one place this wave never really reaches. One area that stays human, and that I think actually becomes more valuable as everything else gets cheaper: care. Looking after the elderly. Looking after children. The personal, hands-on skills that can’t be downloaded or copied a million times. You can automate a factory. You cannot automate sitting beside someone who is frightened, or holding a child’s hand, or the patience it takes to teach a real skill to a real person. So as the price of everything else falls toward zero, the price of genuine human presence moves the other way — it rises.
That is the world I see coming. Almost everything cheaper than we can imagine, and at the same time the human things — caring, touching, simply being there for someone — quietly becoming the most precious things we have left.
But what about the physical world?
When I say everything gets cheaper, people push back with the physical world. Land. Energy. Raw materials. “You can make software almost free, but you cannot make dirt or atoms free.” For a while that stopped me too.
Then I looked at what actually happened with rockets. Sending something to space used to be one of the most expensive things humans did — tens of thousands of dollars for every single kilogram. And here is the strange part: the fuel was never the expensive bit. The fuel was cheap. The cost was the rocket we threw away every single time, and all the human work and engineering baked into it. The moment that rocket became reusable, the price did not drop a little. It fell by something like ten or twenty times, and it is still falling.
That changed how I see the whole thing. The cost of “physical” stuff was almost never the atoms. It was the intelligence buried inside them — the design, the labor, the coordination, the trial and error. And intelligence is exactly the thing that is about to become almost free. A house is not expensive because dirt and wood are expensive; it is expensive because of the people, the permits, the financing, the time. A medicine is not expensive because of the molecules; it is expensive because of the years of human work behind it. Strip the expensive intelligence out, and the atoms underneath were cheap all along.
So I have come to think the wall between “digital, which gets cheap” and “physical, which stays expensive” is mostly an illusion. Energy is already collapsing in price, and cheap energy quietly unlocks the rest — water, materials, even access to space itself. You can already see it: small teams, far from the old centers of power, are now doing things that only entire national governments used to be able to do.
The people who proved it
And I want to name the people who proved it, because none of this happened by magic. A small team in New Zealand — Rocket Lab, started by Peter Beck — was among the first to make cheap, dedicated launches for small satellites real, sending rockets to orbit from a quiet peninsula in a country most people never even associate with space. In Australia, a young company called Gilmour Space is still climbing that same mountain, building and testing its own rockets from the ground up. And SpaceX is the one that finally broke the back of the cost itself, by daring to do the obvious thing nobody had managed before — stop throwing the rocket away. None of them had to be a superpower. They simply refused to accept that the old price was the only possible price. That refusal is the whole story.
Where the floor still holds
There is still a floor under a few things, and I want to be honest about that. Truly unique locations. Status, art, the things whose entire value is that they are scarce. And anything a government decides to keep artificially expensive with rules and licenses — but that is a human choice, not a law of physics. That list is short, though. For almost everything else, the price was always the intelligence, and the intelligence is running out of reasons to stay expensive.
A completely different world is being built right now. And in this new world, some people are going to be far luckier than others — not because they worked harder, but because of where they happen to be standing when the ground starts to move.
Here is what I actually believe: the price of almost everything is about to collapse. Not a little. By hundreds of times. What costs a hundred today could cost less than one tomorrow, and before long we’ll all act like it was always that way.
I think this happens in waves, and I think the order is already visible. It starts with the internet, because digital things are the easiest to copy and the cheapest to produce once the machine does the work for us. From there it spreads into technology as a whole. Then it pushes into advanced industry — the heavy, complicated things we used to believe only humans with decades of training could build. And after that it reaches medicine and health technology, which to me is the wave that will change ordinary lives the most, because the things that used to bankrupt a whole family suddenly become something almost anyone can afford.
But there is one place this wave never really reaches. One area that stays human, and that I think actually becomes more valuable as everything else gets cheaper: care. Looking after the elderly. Looking after children. The personal, hands-on skills that can’t be downloaded or copied a million times. You can automate a factory. You cannot automate sitting beside someone who is frightened, or holding a child’s hand, or the patience it takes to teach a real skill to a real person. So as the price of everything else falls toward zero, the price of genuine human presence moves the other way — it rises.
That is the world I see coming. Almost everything cheaper than we can imagine, and at the same time the human things — caring, touching, simply being there for someone — quietly becoming the most precious things we have left.
But what about the physical world?
When I say everything gets cheaper, people push back with the physical world. Land. Energy. Raw materials. “You can make software almost free, but you cannot make dirt or atoms free.” For a while that stopped me too.
Then I looked at what actually happened with rockets. Sending something to space used to be one of the most expensive things humans did — tens of thousands of dollars for every single kilogram. And here is the strange part: the fuel was never the expensive bit. The fuel was cheap. The cost was the rocket we threw away every single time, and all the human work and engineering baked into it. The moment that rocket became reusable, the price did not drop a little. It fell by something like ten or twenty times, and it is still falling.
That changed how I see the whole thing. The cost of “physical” stuff was almost never the atoms. It was the intelligence buried inside them — the design, the labor, the coordination, the trial and error. And intelligence is exactly the thing that is about to become almost free. A house is not expensive because dirt and wood are expensive; it is expensive because of the people, the permits, the financing, the time. A medicine is not expensive because of the molecules; it is expensive because of the years of human work behind it. Strip the expensive intelligence out, and the atoms underneath were cheap all along.
So I have come to think the wall between “digital, which gets cheap” and “physical, which stays expensive” is mostly an illusion. Energy is already collapsing in price, and cheap energy quietly unlocks the rest — water, materials, even access to space itself. You can already see it: small teams, far from the old centers of power, are now doing things that only entire national governments used to be able to do.
The people who proved it
And I want to name the people who proved it, because none of this happened by magic. A small team in New Zealand — Rocket Lab, started by Peter Beck — was among the first to make cheap, dedicated launches for small satellites real, sending rockets to orbit from a quiet peninsula in a country most people never even associate with space. In Australia, a young company called Gilmour Space is still climbing that same mountain, building and testing its own rockets from the ground up. And SpaceX is the one that finally broke the back of the cost itself, by daring to do the obvious thing nobody had managed before — stop throwing the rocket away. None of them had to be a superpower. They simply refused to accept that the old price was the only possible price. That refusal is the whole story.
Where the floor still holds
There is still a floor under a few things, and I want to be honest about that. Truly unique locations. Status, art, the things whose entire value is that they are scarce. And anything a government decides to keep artificially expensive with rules and licenses — but that is a human choice, not a law of physics. That list is short, though. For almost everything else, the price was always the intelligence, and the intelligence is running out of reasons to stay expensive.