CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk he stirred the public again with his views on the future. Guest on the Moonshots podcast Peter Diamandissaid that people should not worry about setting aside money for retirement in the next ten or twenty years, reports Dnevno.hr.
“Don’t worry about putting money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years. It won’t matter,” Musk said, making a point that runs counter to traditional financial advice. His statement is based on the belief that technological advances, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, will completely change the way we live and work.
Musk predicts that artificial intelligence will surpass the total intelligence of humanity by 2030. In such a scenario, he claims, there could be more humanoid robots than humans on Earth.
According to him, artificial intelligence will take over most jobs, especially in office and intellectual occupations. “Anything but the physical shaping of atoms, artificial intelligence can probably do right now, half or more of the jobs,” he estimated.
Such a development, he believes, would lead to an explosion of productivity and a level of abundance that is hard to imagine today. In his vision of the future, Musk goes one step further. Instead of a classic universal income, it talks about a system where people could have “whatever they want”.
In such a society, he claims, wages, savings and the standard of living as we know them today would lose their meaning. People without any savings could already have better health care in the next five years than they do today, and restrictions on the availability of goods, services and education could disappear.
Work as a hobby, not a necessity
Musk believes that in a world dominated by artificial intelligence, work would become a matter of personal choice, not a necessity for survival. He compared it to today’s hobbies such as sports or playing video games. Speaking at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, he explained it with a simple analogy: work would be like growing your own vegetables, something people do because they want to, not because they have to.
“If you want to work, it’s the same as when you can go to the grocery store and buy vegetables or grow them yourself. It’s harder, but some people do it because they enjoy it,” he said. However, Musk does not ignore the darker side of such development. He warns that a society in which people no longer have to work could fall into a deep existential crisis.
Without the need to work and earn money, many could lose a sense of purpose, which could have serious consequences for mental health and social structure. As reported by foreign business media, Musk believes that the issue of meaning will become one of the key challenges of the future.
