"Working Will Be Optional In Next 20 Years": Elon Musk's Big Prediction

Elon Musk has predicted that people "won't have to work at all" in the future. And, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics would bring about that change, said the tech billionaire, who has often spoken about his extreme seven-day 'sleep-wake-up-work-repeat' schedule.

"It may not be that far in the future. Maybe... I say in less than 20 years, working will be optional. Working at all will be optional. (It will be) Like a hobby, pretty much," Musk said on Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath's "People by WTF" podcast.

"Obviously, people can play this back in 20 years and say, 'Look, Elon made this ridiculous prediction, and it's not true, but I think it will turn out to be true that in less than 20 years, maybe. Even as little as... 10 or 15 years. The advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to the point where working is optional in the same way that you can grow your own vegetables in your garden, or you could go to the store and buy vegetables," the 54-year-old said.

Musk -- whose xAI company has a chatbot called Grok -- is confident that "if AI and robotics continue to advance, working will be optional and people will have any goods and services that they want".

"It will be if you can think of it, you can have it type of thing," he said.

The head of Tesla and SpaceX said that in future, there will also come a point when AI and robotics will "run out of things to do to make humans happy".

"At a certain point, AI will actually saturate on anything humans can think of and then at that point, it becomes a situation where AI is doing things for AI and robotics because they have run out of things to do to make the humans happy, because there's a limit."

This is not the first time Musk has made such a prediction. At the US-Saudi Investment Forum on November 19, Musk said that AI and robots would eventually allow work to become optional for human beings, that money would become "irrelevant" and poverty would cease to exist.

"AI and humanoid robots will actually eliminate poverty," said Musk, adding that robots would "make everyone wealthy."

In his conversation with Kamath, he said that in the long term, money will disappear as a concept.

"Honestly, it's kind of strange, but in a future where anyone can have anything, I think you no longer need money as a database for labour allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then the relevance of money declines dramatically.

He also said that in the future, humans will have "power generation as the de facto currency".