Today the vast majority of the goods we buy are made in factories by low cost labor doing redundant and boring work.

In the future most of our purchasing power will be directed away from these physical goods and toward virtual goods.

To be practically applicable, these pixeled goods will need to be created in 3D by armies of high paid and creatively talented designers.

They will be the equivalent to the armies of cheap labor we have manufacturing the foundation of our physical, real world economy but instead of pumping out threads and doo-dads, they will be pumping out pixels.

Due to the high level of skill, education and creativity required for this foundational labor of our new virtual economy, there simply won’t be enough supply to meet the soon to be insatiable demand.

This basic economic reality of the new virtual economy will skyrocket salaries in similar fashion to what we saw with software engineers in the digital revolution except at a supercharged pace.

If you have any kind of design skills, this is where your labor will ultimately be most highly valued.

As demand grows and the market for 3D designers sucks up increasingly greater numbers of designers from tangential fields who choose to retool their skill set, we’ll see design related salaries begin rising across the board to eventually even surpass those of software engineers.

The engineers will still be critical for maintaining the virtual infrastructure of course however there are far more of them already trained up to a high degree in today’s world and far fewer creative professionals.

AI and software itself will increasingly take over many of the mundane and routine technical tasks freeing up large amounts of today’s programming and engineering workload and providing greater market flexibility within this specialty.

While AI is getting quite talented at design as well, it is far more esoteric and less rooted in basic mathematical functions and will still require a greater degree of human oversight and direction per pixel to produce the ideal virtual products and spaces that need to be realized.

Gaining any kind of skills in today’s market related to our new mixed reality world will be extremely lucrative but it is the 3D designers who sit atop the career pyramid as the highest paid profession in the land.