A future without jobs? What Elon Musk and Bill Gates are saying

Elon Musk is on track to become the world's first trillionaire. But the CEO of Tesla and xAI recognizes the potential of AI and robotics to enrich everyone, an outcome he calls “universal high incomes.”

“There is no need to save money because there will be no poverty in the future,” Musk wrote to X in December while discussing the idea of ​​a Trump account.

In this scenario, Musk said work would become something like a hobby or a video game. The billionaire said the idyllic world was “like heaven.”

“Everyone has abundance,” Musk told comedian Joe Rogan on his podcast in October. “Everyone has access to excellent health care and everyone has access to the products and services they want.”

Bill Gates said that while humans will keep some tasks for themselves, AI will allow us to consider changes that were once unthinkable, such as working two or three days a week.

Gates told late-night host Jimmy Fallon in February that “in terms of making things, moving things, and growing food, those problems will basically be solved over time.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a world that is “universally extremely prosperous,” where UBI exists so the world can share in the benefits of advances in AI.

Altman told comedian Theo Fung during an appearance on Fong's podcast in July.

Altman theorized a system in which society would “share ownership of everything AI creates.” This “universal basic asset system” allows people to exchange shares of the world’s AI capabilities.

Fong said he fears a world in which humanity's purpose is hollowed out by reliance on AI. Altman said he worries about that, too, but takes solace in the fact that humans are “trying to find ways to feel like the protagonists in the stories we tell.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is thinking more of a middle ground. He said it was unlikely that UBI and Musk's “universal high income” would exist at the same time.

Mr. Huang said the concept of AI-generated wealth should not only focus on monetary wealth.

“For example, today we have a wealth of information,” Huang told Logan in December when asked about Musk's theory. “This is a concept thousands of years old and only a few people had.”

Overall, there are too many variables to make definitive predictions, Huang said.

“It's hard to answer. Part of the reason is that it's hard to talk about infinity, and it's hard to talk about things that are far in the future,” he said. “The reason is that there are too many scenarios to consider.”

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said everyone needs to “think about how we operate in the post-AGI era.”

“Can we create a world where work isn't necessary for many people, where work doesn't have to have such centrality, and where people can find their own place of meaning elsewhere?” he said from the stage at the New York Times' Dealbook Summit in December. “Or does work mean something else? It's more about fulfillment than economic survival.”

Amodei said this future could look a lot like the technological unemployment that John Maynard Keynes once thought was possible.

“He suggested that his grandchildren might only have to work 15 or 20 hours a week,” Amodei said. “It's a different way of building society.”

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis sees a future of “radical abundance.”

“We have to make sure it's distributed fairly, but that's more of a political issue,” Hassabis told the Guardian in August. “If that's the case, we should be in an amazingly rich world where things don't have to be zero-sum, perhaps for the first time in human history. And if it works, we should really be able to travel to the stars.”

Asked whether that meant humanity would become too dependent on AI company managers, the Nobel laureate said it remains to be seen how the wealth aspect of abundance will be sorted out.

“That's going to be one of the biggest things we have to resolve,” he said. “Let's say you have radical abundance and distribute it in a good way. What happens next?”