The other day, I heard a quote from the founder of Uber that really stuck with me.

Travis Kalanick was on a podcast called Technology Business Programming Network, or TBPN, in a rare public interview to discuss his newest business venture: a robotics company focusing on developing specialized robots that can automate tasks in the food, mining and transport industries. He envisions a future where automation goes far beyond what many people deem possible.

According to the company’s website, their goal is “physical automation to transform industry and move the world.” That goal relies heavily on AI. “Physical world autonomy requires AI for the physical world.”

But, I’m not here to discuss the inner workings of this upcoming company. What stood out to me from this interview was Kalanick discussing the role of people whose jobs can’t be automated in the future – namely, plumbers.

“Let’s just talk about plumbers,” Kalanick said. “Let’s say the entire world, everything in our world, was automated except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day; a thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Just machines doing it. Except plumbers. How valuable would those plumbers be?”

“Each and every plumber would be like LeBron.”

While this future is, of course, not the current reality that we’re living in, it goes to show that the idea that plumbers being less-valuable than those working big-time office jobs is very much outdated.

For years, there’s been a cultural narrative that success looks like a white-collar job: an office, a degree, a career path that feels “future-proof.” Meanwhile, the trades have often been overlooked or misunderstood, seen as less glamorous or less stable.

But Kalanick’s point flips that assumption on its head.

In a world where more and more knowledge work can be automated, replicated or scaled through AI, the jobs that remain hardest to replace are the ones rooted in the physical world: jobs that require adaptability, hands-on problem solving and real-time decision-making in unpredictable environments. Plumbing is a perfect example.

No two service calls are exactly the same. Every system has its quirks. Every building has its own history. And, every solution requires a level of judgment that’s difficult to standardize, let alone automate.

Even with advanced robotics, replicating that kind of variability is incredibly complex. A robot might be able to install a pipe in a controlled environment, but can it navigate a 50-year-old mechanical room with undocumented changes, limited access and unexpected failures? That’s where human expertise still wins.

And as the built environment continues to grow (faster construction, denser cities, more complex systems) the demand for that expertise is growing just as fast.

That’s what makes Kalanick’s hypothetical so interesting.

If everything else becomes more efficient, faster and automated, the bottlenecks become more obvious. And in his example, plumbing becomes one of those bottlenecks. If buildings are going up at unprecedented speed but skilled labor can’t keep pace, the value of that labor skyrockets.

Suddenly, plumbers aren’t just part of the process; they’re the limiting factor. And in economics, the limiting factor is often the most valuable.

That’s where the “LeBron” analogy really lands.

LeBron James isn’t valuable just because he’s good at basketball — he’s valuable because what he does is rare, difficult to replicate and consistently high-performing under pressure. Kalanick is essentially arguing that, in a highly automated future, skilled tradespeople could occupy a similar position: rare, indispensable and highly compensated.

Of course, we’re not living in that fully automated world — at least not yet. But, if this interview is any indication, we’re seeing early signs of this shift.

So, while Kalanick’s scenario may be hypothetical, the underlying message is very real: the value of skilled trades is increasing. And, in an era where automation is reshaping entire industries, that shift in perspective feels long overdue.