The automation that comes with AI is certain to affect jobs, but when recently asked about this topic, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as is his way, went a step further and declared, “My prediction is that work will be optional.”
Now, this is a bold statement, though perhaps Musk, who appeared alongside Jensen Huang (who has his own strong opinions on AI and jobs) at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., thought this kind of global stage was the perfect place to make such a wild prediction.
I think at some point, currency becomes irrelevant.
Elon Musk
“In the same way, you can go to the store and buy some vegetables or you can grow vegetables in your backyard…it’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like, optional.”
This premise doesn’t hold up in any logical sense, but Musk buttresses the argument with a rather magical leap.
“Now, there will still be constraints on power, like electricity and mass – the fundamental physics elements will still be constraints – but I think at some point, currency becomes irrelevant.”
Look, I know we just ended the Penny in the US, but we still need all those other nickels, dimes, and dollars to buy all those vegetables we’re not growing in our backyard.
On the one hand, Musk is not wrong that AI is eating into the job market. McKinsey reported that 92 million jobs could be displaced by automation by 2030. Goldman Sachs put the number at 300 million jobs globally, though the timeline is not clear.
So what’s the problem with Musk’s dystopian view? Like him or not, the world’s richest man is a change- and taste-maker. He has the ear of at least one President (when they’re not fighting) and is revered on his owned and operated platform X (formerly Twitter) by millions.
He is also, arguably, often unable to control impulsive thoughts or think through the ramifications of his words.
I’ve covered Musk for over a decade (for two years I ran podcast on his daily doings) and this attitude of bold pronouncements often followed by confusion or consternation has been pretty much on brand for him for over a decade.
A change maker but what’s the agenda?
Some of what Musk promises or says comes true. He willed Tesla into becoming a global EV brand and applied the same kind of drive to making SpaceX the shuttle for both the International Space Station and thousands of Starlink satellites. He talked himself into owning Twitter and then refashioned it in his own unpredictable image.
Musk has often said he cares most about the Internet, energy, and becoming a multiplanetary species (he once said it to me), but it’s often hard to know what he stands for. He tweeted in 2020, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,” and yet he is not only the richest man in the world, but does seem quite concerned with monetary wealth, having just negotiated one of the largest CEO pay packages in history.
It’s easy, I think, for the world’s richest man to tell people, many who are struggling paycheck to paycheck, that money won’t matter and work will be optional because AI and robots will do everything for us. Musk says it’ll take a lot of work, but he has never offered any plans for helping regular people through that work to arrive at this utopia or dystopia.
Well, no plan beyond AI and humanoid robotics, which he said “will actually eliminate poverty.” How this happens is unclear, and I doubt Musk has a plan for making it so.
Instead, he just keeps building rockets to take I don’t know who to an uninhabitable Mars, and keeps building tin car trucks that most consumers could never afford, let alone want. He aligns himself with a US administration that cosies up to the wealthiest nations while people in small towns hold down two or more jobs to pay for next week’s Thanksgiving dinner.
I think back to the man I met more than a dozen years ago. I thought he was brilliant, a little shy, and probably overworked. Even back then, he was running Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. He told me how he used email to manage it all and keep it all straight.
It was a good talk, and I felt comfortable asking him about his hobbies or skills outside of business. He had none but shared that he could whistle. So I asked him to whistle something, and he chose, “Fly me to the moon.”
It was a sweet and fairly innocent moment. What, I wonder, would Musk whistle today? Maybe this?
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