Elon Musk has chosen not to remain on the sidelines of the discussion about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Although the entrepreneur has been involved in some way in this interesting discipline for years, he has recently been very active in making predictions about the impact that its development could have on humanity.
Earlier this year he signed on to a letter from several tech personalities to pause the training of AI models. He later suggested that there was a small chance that algorithms could wipe out our species. He now believes that “there will come a point where no work will be needed.”
Elon Musk, AI and work
It’s no secret that AI is changing the way people work. As more and more people turn to ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to do their work tasks, some studies point out that the existence-and evolution-of these types of tools translates into potential layoffs due to automation.
Musk’s view on the matter is quite peculiar. After a summit on AI safety held in the UK, the Tesla CEO participated in a meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in which he talked about AI capabilities and how this will directly affect the current work scheme.
At the beginning of the conversation, the tycoon pointed out that AI will reach a level that will far surpass human intelligence. For him, the capacity of this discipline is multiplying “by five or ten times every year”, which has made it the “most disruptive force in history” that will have a huge impact on society.
“We will have, for the first time, something that is smarter than the smartest human being. There will come a point where no work will be needed,” he assured the meeting. In that sense, he added that “you could have a job if you wanted to have a job, for personal satisfaction, but AI will be able to do everything.”
This hypothetical scenario will not come shrouded in a chaotic social and economic experience due to a lack of wage earners for employment, according to Musk. The entrepreneur has gone a step beyond the universal basic income we have been hearing about for some time: “we will have a high universal income,” he said with conviction.
Musk imagines a world in which everyone will have access to AI and where its development will have a positive effect in which there will be no shortage of goods and services. But not everything is rosy. “If you have a genie that can grant wishes, usually those stories don’t end well. Be careful what you wish for,” he concluded.
As we said, the entrepreneur has been in the AI world for years. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT now led by Sam Altman, although he soon moved away from the project. And, recently, he introduced his own AI company, xAI. These technologies, moreover, are central to many of his other companies.
Algorithms are almost everywhere. In Musk’s sphere, for example, they drive Tesla’s driving assistance system, Twitter’s ad and content recommendation platform, and in the anti-collision system of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, as well as in the autonomous systems of the Falcon rockets.