Quote · The a16z Show
Building the Physical AI Stack | Travis Kalanick on TBPN
Where this was said
Automation, Jobs, and the Surplus Economy
At 40:15 · chapter starts 39:25
A host raises the jobs-versus-tasks distinction and the fear that automation could hollow out employment. Kalanick's response is a confident restatement of the pro-automation abundance thesis. When food gets automated, prices fall. Robots don't have bank accounts — so all the value flows to the humans in the system. Those humans then have more money to spend on other things, generating demand for new goods, services, and jobs that don't yet exist. He's explicit that he's not making a naive 'everyone eats 10 hamburgers' joke — he's making a structural argument about surplus creation. The caveat is the one genuine risk: as long as humans retain things that robots cannot replicate, it's 'go-go time.' He references his previous prediction on the show — the plumber paid like LeBron James — and extends it to a thousand job categories we haven't yet named.
Kalanick argues that automation lowers prices, creates consumer surplus that humans spend on new things, generating entirely new job categories that don't exist today.
Kalanick told the hosts that a16z should have been an Uber investor — a partnership that never happened and that he believes would have changed the outcome of his turbulent 2017. Now they're finally working together, and he's calling the moment what it is: unfinished business.
