There’s now widespread acceptance that the advent of AI will cause job losses, but AI itself might end up creating a solution.
Elon Musk says that while jobs will be lost to AI, it will also cause goods and services to become nearly free. This will help mitigate the job losses caused by the new technology.
“If AI will be smarter than any person, how many jobs go away because of that?” Ted Cruz asked Elon Musk on a podcast.. “What do people do if you’ve got millions of people that are losing their jobs? Like that, a lot of people are understandably freaked out about that,” he added.
“Goods and services will become close to free, so it’s not as though people will be wanting in terms of goods and services,” Musk replied.
“Why is that?” Cruz pressed him. “Why are goods and services free in an AI world or close to free?”
“Well, you’ll have tens of billions of robots,” Musk replied. “They will make you anything or provide any service you want for basically next to nothing. It’s not that people will will have a lower standard of living. They’ll have actually a much higher standard of living,” Musk said.
But Musk said that this world of abundance where good and services are nearly free would come with its own downsides. “But the challenge will be, uh, fulfillment. How do you derive fulfillment and meaning in life?” Musk said.
Musk has previously spoken about how robots could become ubiquitous. Earlier this year, he’d said that there would be five humanoid robots for every human on earth. Musk has again talked about billions of robots, and these robots will use AI to build goods and services for nearly free. Musk’s timelines might always be accurate — he’s been overly optimistic about when humans would get to Mars, or create self-driving cars — but given his position in running one the world’s top AI labs in xAI, and one of the most high-profile robotics companies in Tesla, people would do well to take his predictions seriously.