Elon Musk said this week that in 10 to 20 years, work will be optional. He was sitting onstage at the U.S.-Saudi Arabia Investment Forum in Washington, D.C., along with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Since the Tesla CEO was awarded a $1 trillion pay package in November, he’s remained in the news as he continues to make big claims about the future of AI and robots.
“It will be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said of work in the long term. “The same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables or you could grow vegetables in your backyard. It’s much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, but some people still do it because they like growing vegetables. That will be what work is like. Optional.”
The comment comes amid large-scale layoffs being attributed to AI and growing concerns that the technology is taking jobs.
Musk admitted that there’s much to be done before working could become optional. But he pointed to Iain Banks’s science fiction Culture series as a predictor of what life could be like.
“Interestingly in those books, money is no longer … it doesn’t exist,” Musk said. “And my guess is if you go out long enough, assuming there’s a continued improvement in AI and robotics, money will stop being relevant at some point in the future.”
When asked for comment, Nvidia’s Huang didn’t directly touch the claim. The two joked about Musk’s prediction dropping right before the Nvidia earnings call on Wednesday.
While he didn’t offer a comment on the potential that currency will become irrelevant, Huang agreed that all jobs will be different.
“A lot of the things that we do mundanely or arduously or very difficultly are going to be done very simply, and so we’re going to be more productive from that sense,” he said.
But to Huang, increased productivity translates to having extra time to get things done.
“In the near term, I would say that there is every evidence that we will be more productive and yet still be busier, because we have so many ideas,” he said.
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