AI might be what wipes out humanity, but it could also create a utopia where no one needs to work and everybody is paid a “universal high income,” according to Elon Musk.
Musk landed in Britain this week to take part in an AI Safety Summit that saw government officials from across the globe meet with industry leaders—including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis and Anthropic boss Dario Amodei—to discuss the safe development of artificial intelligence models.
Speaking at an event in London with U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after the summit, Musk argued it was “easy to see where things are going” when it comes to the technology.
AI discussion with @RishiSunak
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2023
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“We’ll have profound artificial intelligence at a level that far exceeds human intelligence,” he predicted. “It seems to be growing in capability by perhaps five or tenfold per year. It’ll certainly grow by an order of magnitude next year.”
Labeling AI “the most disruptive force in history,” Musk said the technology would have huge impacts on society—including the way we work.
“We will have, for the first time, something that is smarter than the smartest human. There will come a point where no job is needed,” he told Sunak. “You could have a job if you wanted to have a job, for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything.”
Musk isn’t the only high-profile figure predicting a future where we’ll all work less thanks to AI. Both JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon and billionaire investor Ray Dalio have argued the working week will be reduced massively once superintelligent machines start filling job vacancies.
Since the phenomenal rise of OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, billions of dollars have been poured into the development of artificial intelligence. However, the AI boom has prompted warnings that millions of workers could be displaced by machines, potentially boosting corporate earnings but widening the wealth gap.
The prospect of computers being capable of doing almost every job in existence has also raised questions about how human beings will earn enough money to survive. Musk had a potential answer for that problem during Thursday’s conversation with Sunak.
“We won’t have universal basic income, we’ll have universal high income,” he argued. “So, in some sense it will be some sort of level up, or an equalizer, because everyone will have access to this [technology].”
A future of mankind living alongside AI with superhuman intelligence wasn’t guaranteed to be a utopia, though, Musk noted.
“I do think overall the potential is there for AI to have most likely a positive effect, and create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods or services,” he said. “But it is the magic genie problem: if you have a genie that can grant wishes, usually those stories don’t end well. Be careful what you wish for.”
Finding meaning
One of the problems that could arise is people struggling to find meaning in life if they couldn’t build a career, he added. But the Tesla and SpaceX CEO concluded that AI filling in for humans in most jobs was “probably a good thing.”
“There are a lot of jobs that are uncomfortable or dangerous or tedious—and the computer will have no problem doing that. It’ll be happy to do that all day long,” Musk said.
Musk himself is famed for working intense hours, having simultaneously held the CEO position of Tesla, Twitter (now renamed X) and SpaceX last year.
“I’m putting so much blood, sweat and tears into a work project and burning the 3 a.m. oil, then I’m like, wait, why am I doing this? I’ll just wait for the AI to do it,” he joked on Thursday.
While the serial entrepreneur and world’s richest person touted the benefits AI could bring to the workforce on Thursday, Musk has long been warning that artificial intelligence could also pose serious risks to the global population.
He has previously gone on record to warn the tech will hit people “like an asteroid” and insist there’s a chance it will “go Terminator.”
Earlier this year, he signed an open letter alongside more than 1,000 tech luminaries—including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak—urging a six-month pause in AI development, arguing that decisions around the technology “must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”
He later launched his own AI firm, xAI, in what he says is a bid to “understand the universe” and prevent the extinction of mankind.
During Thursday’s talk with Sunak, Musk reiterated that the development of machines that, he predicted, would soon be smarter than people, could be a dangerous pursuit.
“On balance I think AI will be a force for good, most likely, but the probability of it going bad is not 0%,” he said.
Ahead of the AI Safety Summit this week, 28 countries—including the U.S. and China—and the EU signed a “world first” agreement acknowledging the need to international cooperation to prevent “catastrophic harm” being caused by the technology.
While he admitted during Thursday’s talk that regulation would be “annoying” for developers, Musk conceded that “having a referee is a good thing.”
