Introduction — The Time Bank of Machines

Labor is being redefined.

Not just the human effort bought by wages — but a new asset class of embodied robot-hours, leased, redeployed, and compounded like capital. Imagine a time bank in which every robotic hour deposited today yields more autonomous hours tomorrow, producing a compounding balance of machine labor.

We've long measured the digital explosion — exponential compute, data, and intelligence. Yet the true revolution may lie not in cognition, but in embodiment — the physical realization of work.

The next decade will be defined by which nation can convert robotic hours into capital and output most efficiently.

China, with its manufacturing density and energy abundance, already sits near the inflection point. The United States, constrained by energy ceilings and fractured supply chains, must rely on software, finance, and high-leverage policy to keep pace.

This essay introduces two scalar metrics — the Unified Labor Index (ULI) and the Embodied Productivity Index (EPI) — to quantify this shift, models the logistic "inflection curve" of embodied growth, and argues that the 2020s will be remembered as the decade of Liquid Labor: a global race to transform time itself into capital.

Table of Contents

• Introduction [this page]
• Chapter I — From Compute to Actuators: The Emergence of Embodied Labor
• Chapter II — Tracking Orders of Embodiment
• Chapter III — Inflection Point: The Race to the Time Bank
• Chapter IV — The Generalization of Labor
• Chapter V — The Role of Energy
• Chapter VI — Governance and Industrial Strategy
• Chapter VII — Toward the Von Neumann Machine
• Chapter VIII — Policy Imperatives
• Chapter IX — The Embodied Capital Decade

Next post in series:
Chapter I — From Compute to Actuators