Elon Musk is the world’s richest man and one of the leading voices in support of AI.
Americans are worried about what that means for the future.
And now Elon Musk has made one prediction about AI you’ll need to sit down for.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI would wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs.
Americans worry that the construction of hyperscale AI data centers will drive up electricity rates as these mammoth campuses increase power usage.
Against that skepticism, Elon Musk predicts AI will deliver a land of plenty where no one has to work, and money is optional.
“My prediction is that work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that. If you want to work, it’s the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables,” Musk said at a US-Saudi investment conference in Washington, DC.
Musk claimed AI would transform the world into a cashless society like those in the science fiction novels written by Iain M. Banks.
“In those books, money doesn’t exist. It’s kind of interesting. 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,” Musk added.
Billionaire Michael Saylor, whose net worth is $3.3 billion and who founded the software firm Strategy, argued in a Diary of a CEO interview that AI would still leave the same classes of rich and poor, just that the standard would rise.
“Everybody doesn’t get a Hampton’s house. Not everybody gets their own private jet. They don’t get their own private yacht.”
Saylor asserted that AI wouldn’t change anything since humans are “status-oriented animals” and would always seek out trophies to demonstrate their rank.
“If I give you universal healthcare, people want private healthcare. If I give everybody a house, someone’s going to want a house twice as big,” Saylor argued. “Everybody’s always going to have a reason to want something more because we’re status-oriented animals. That’s the cynical way to look at it.”
Saylor contended that technological advances would increase the baseline standard of living since necessities could become more widely available to the general population.
“Henry VII didn’t have dental crowns. He didn’t have X-rays,” Saylor said. “[We] get modern medical care. The infant mortality rate has plunged. Life is safer. Clean water, clean air, right, clean food — and technology gave them to us.”
If everyone is a millionaire, the person whose income is $1,000.000 per year would technically be the poorest person in the world because the cost of luxury goods would skyrocket to accommodate the new reality.
“What happened with the explosion of affluence? Massive utilitarian entitlement,” Saylor added. “Everybody gets a car, but how many people get a Porsche? What happens with humanity is we always invent the luxury car — we come up with the trophy asset.”
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