- Elon Musk predicts AI will make money irrelevant and work optional within 20 years
- He envisions robots handling most labor, turning jobs into passion-driven hobbies
- Musk stated AI and robotics will eliminate poverty by reducing costs of essentials
Billionaire Elon Musk has laid out a bold picture that shows what an AI-powered future would look like, as he says currency will become "irrelevant" and jobs will be "optional", Fox Business reported. What he says, his ideas, are basically anchored in his ongoing ventures, including xAI, Tesla Bot, space-based solar power, and Grokipedia.
Musk said that artificial intelligence and humanoid robots will be so productive that money will eventually become irrelevant, most jobs will turn into optional hobbies, and poverty will be eliminated.
The comments, made during a conversation with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, went viral, sparking excitement across social media, especially among tech enthusiasts.
He made similar comments in October, when he said in a post, "Working will be optional in the future. There will be universal high income."
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"Currency becomes irrelevant. There will still be constraints like electricity and mass, but money will stop being relevant," said Musk while speaking at the US-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington, DC, alongside Huang and Saudi Arabia's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Eng. Abdullah Amer Alswaha.
"I don't know what long-term is, maybe it's 10, 20 years or something like that. My prediction is that work will be optional," he said, predicting that within the next two decades the transition will be well underway.
Musk said that with robots doing the bulk of labour, "work will be optional like growing your own food instead of buying it". People will choose employment based on passion rather than necessity.
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"It'll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that. If you want to work in the same way, you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables."
He said that AI and robotics will "eliminate poverty" by removing the cost of basic goods and services.
"There's been a lot of talk and many NGOs have tried to address poverty but have not succeeded, and the evidence speaks for itself. AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty, and Tesla will not be the only company that makes them. Tesla may pioneer this, but many other companies will build humanoid robots. There is only one way to make everyone wealthy, and that is AI and robotics."
