PHILADELPHIA - Elon Musk has never been one for the little predictions. His latest one (spewed out in a series of podcast interviews and at a White House tech summit in October) may be his most extreme yet: we're on the cusp of an AI-enabled 'age of abundance' in which saving for retirement will be entirely pointless.
In Musk's vision of the near future, AI and swarms of humanoids will take over the machinery of production. From farming to manufacturing to doing the most complex of medical procedures, it will all be automated. The cost of living will drop to near zero, and instead of a dystopian future of mass poverty, we'll have a 'universal high income' where work is an optional hobby, and you can have the very best of everything at no cost.
It is a deeply seductive utopian dream. Who wouldn't want to trade the daily grind and the anxiety of outliving a 401(k) for a life of boundless leisure? But before you redirect your retirement contributions toward a luxury vacation, it is worth examining the massive blind spots in this Silicon Valley prophecy.
The first and most obvious problem is the reality of wealth in a capitalist system. Musk's entire argument hinges on the idea that the people who created the robotic workforce (the billionaires and huge corporations with the patents, the server farms, and the actual robots) will decide to socialize the massive wealth these machines will generate. History has shown us that technological revolutions don't tend to reduce inequality; they tend to increase it. If automation takes away the leverage of the working and middle classes (their labor), what possible incentive do the owners of the machines have to share the wealth that they generate? Without some fundamental and radical changes to the global economic system, an "age of abundance" is far more likely to be an age of extreme wealth concentration at the top, with everyone else just fighting over the remainder.
Secondly, Musk's vision completely ignores the reality of physical scarcity. Robots can certainly go out and produce cheap clothes, cars, harvest wheat, and so on, and drive the prices of those things to the floor. Robots cannot, however, produce more land. They can't create a second Manhattan; they can't create a second beachfront; they can't create more breathable air or more clean water if climate change continues. The fundamental scarcity of land and other natural resources will still be governed by supply and demand. If everyone is supposedly going to have a 'universal high income,' then the price of the inherently scarce will balloon out of all recognition and will be just as unattainable for the average person as it is today.
Finally, there's the human factor. Musk suggests that in a post-work society, jobs will be "like playing a video game," i.e., you do them purely for fun. That's a massive underestimation of the human psychology, the need for community, and the need to be useful to others embedded in the very concept of work. A world in which human effort is effectively obsolete is a world in which the fundamental crisis of meaning will be absolutely enormous.
Elon Musk is absolutely right that AI and robotics will completely rewrite the social contract and the nature of work. The cost of a whole raft of services and goods is going to go down massively. The idea that you can bank on some billionaire-funded utopia to fund your later years is a very dangerous bet. Until there's a globally guaranteed 'universal high income' in place, keep your day job and keep that retirement account funded.