Elon Musk makes another disturbing prediction about AI: “There will come a point when you won’t need a job”
Elon Musk has chosen not to stay out of the discussion about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). Although the businessman has been involved in some way in this interesting discipline for years, recently he has been very active making predictions about the impact that its development could have on humanity.
At the beginning of this year, he joined a letter from several personalities in the technological world 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 we work. As more and more people turn to ChatGPT or GitHub Copilot to do their work tasks , some studies indicate that the existence – and evolution – of these types of tools translates into potential layoffs due to automation .
Musk’s vision on the matter is quite peculiar. After a summit on the safety of AI developed in the United Kingdom, the CEO of Tesla participated in a meeting with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in which he spoke about the capabilities of AI and how this will directly affect the current work scheme .
At the beginning of the conversation, the tycoon noted 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 every year”, which has turned it into the “most disruptive force in history” that will have an enormous 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 said at 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 wrapped in a chaotic social and economic experience due to a lack of employees for employment , according to Musk. The businessman has gone one step beyond the universal basic income that we have been hearing about for a long 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 translate into a positive effect in which there is no shortage of goods and services. But not everything is rosy. “If you have a genie who can grant wishes, those stories usually don’t end well. Be careful what you wish for,” he concluded.
As we said, the entrepreneur has been in the world of AI for years. In 2015 he co-founded OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT now led by Sam Altman , although he soon left the project . And recently, he launched his own AI company, xAI. This technology is also essential in many of his other companies.
Algorithms are almost everywhere. In Musk’s sphere, for example, they promote Tesla’s driving assistance system, Twitter’s advertising and content recommendation platform, and the anti-collision system of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, as well as autonomous systems. of Falcon rockets.