A Future Without Work? What Elon Musk and Bill Gates Are Saying

Elon Musk is on track to be the world’s first trillionaire. But the Tesla and xAI CEO sees the possibility that AI and robotics will make everyone rich, an outcome he calls “universal high income.”

“There will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money,” Musk wrote on X in December while discussing the idea of Trump accounts.

In this scenario, Musk has said that work will be like a hobby or playing a video game. The billionaire said this idyllic world, “kind of sounds like heaven.”

“Everyone has abundance,” Musk told comedian Joe Rogan on his podcast in October. “Everyone has excellent medical care. Everyone has whatever goods and services they want.”

Bill Gates said humans will reserve some tasks for themselves, but AI will make it possible to consider once-unthinkable changes, such as a two- or three-day workweek.

“In terms of making things, and moving things, and growing food over time, those will be basically solved problems,” Gates told late-night host Jimmy Fallon in February.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants a world “with universal extreme wealth,” but one in which UBI exists because the world shares the profits of AI’s advancements.

“I think if you just like say, ‘OK, AI is going to do everything, and then everybody gets like a, you know, dividend from that, it’s not going to feel good,” Altman told comedian Theo Von during an appearance on Von’s podcast in July.

Altman theorized a system where society has “an ownership share in whatever AI creates.” In this “universal basic wealth system,” people can barter their share of the world’s AI capacity.

Von said he was fearful of a world where reliance on AI hollows out humanity’s purpose. Altman said he worries about that, too, but that he takes solace in the fact that humans “are going to find a way in our own telling of the story to feel like the main characters.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sees more of a middle ground. He said it’s unlikely that both UBI and Musk’s “universal high income” will exist at the same time.

Huang said the concept of AI-created abundance should not focus solely on monetary wealth.

“Like for example, today we are wealthy of information,” Huang told Rogan in December, when asked about Musk’s theory. “This is a concept, several thousand years ago, only a few people have.”

Overall, Huang said there are too many variables to make a definitive prediction.

“It’s hard to answer, partly because it’s hard to talk about infinity, and it’s hard to talk about a long time from now,” he said. “And the reason for that is because there’s just too many scenarios to consider.”

Everyone will need “to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said.

“Can we have a world where work doesn’t for many people, doesn’t need to have the centrality that it does, that people find their locus of meaning elsewhere?” he said onstage in December at The New York Times’ Dealbook Summit. “Or work is about different things? It’s more about fulfillment than it is about economic survival.”

Amodei said this future could very well resemble the technological unemployment that renowned John Maynard Keynes once thought might be possible.

“He suggested that maybe his grandchildren would only have to work 15 or 20 hours a week,” Amodei said. “That’s a different way of structuring the society.”

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis sees a future of “radical abundance.”

“We’ve got to make sure it gets distributed fairly, but that’s more of a political question,” Hassabis told The Guardian in August. “And if it is, we should be in an amazing world of abundance for maybe the first time in human history, where things don’t have to be zero sum. And if that works, we should be travelling to the stars, really.”

Asked if that meant humanity would become too reliant on the owners of AI companies, the Nobel laureate said it remained to be seen how the wealth side of abundance was sorted out.

“That’s going to be one of the biggest things we’re gonna have to figure out,” he said. “Let’s say we get radical abundance, and we distribute that in a good way, what happens next?”