If Elon Musk is correct, we could wake up one day in a world in which work is optional and money is no longer relevant.
The world’s wealthiest man made the comment last week during a panel conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Saudi communications and technology minister Abdullah al-Swaha at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C.
The crowd applauded when Musk predicted that “work will be optional” in about 10 to 20 years thanks to artificial intelligence, People reported.
“It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” he went on.
“If you want to work, you know, in the same way — like, you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your backyard,” Musk said.
“It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it, because they like growing vegetables.” he said.
“That will be what work is like — optional.”
Musk admitted that “between now and then, there’s actually a lot of work to get to that point.”
But he also believes that Tesla, one of his companies, is going to “make the first actually useful humanoid robots. This will be quite a revolution and, I think, something that everyone will want.”
He reminded his listeners of the humanoid robot characters in the “Star Wars” movie series. “Who wouldn’t want their own personal C-3PO or R2-D2? Of course everyone would want one, right?”
“That’s why I say that humanoid robots will be the biggest industry or the biggest product ever — bigger than cell phones or anything else.”
“But AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty.”
Without explaining exactly how it will happen, Musk declared, “There is only basically one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics.”
Musk made his comment about work becoming optional when the talk turned to the prospect of AI taking people’s jobs away.
While discussing that, he recommended the works of Iain Banks, author of the “Culture” series, in order to “get a sense for what a probable positive AI future is like.”
“And interestingly, in those books, money is no longer… it doesn’t exist. It’s kind of interesting,” he said.
“And my guess is — if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, which seems likely — money will stop being relevant at some point in the future,” Musk predicted.
“Now there will still be constraints on power, like electricity and mass. The fundamental physics elements will still be constraints,” he added. “But I think, at some point, currency becomes irrelevant.”
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
