So you’ve worked your way up to a comfortable six-figure salary. Or maybe you already have hundreds of thousands in cash in the bank or invested in stocks and retirement accounts. Elon Musk says these may not last long.
The world’s richest man believes money itself is borrowed time. Musk said that in the future workforce will be dominated by artificial intelligence and robotics, wages will cease to exist, so cash will become irrelevant.
“Honestly, I think money as a concept has disappeared,” the SpaceX and Tesla founder said on the show. WTF people podcast.
“It’s a little weird, but in a future where anyone can own anything, you no longer need money as a database for labor allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to meet all human needs, then money is no longer necessary. Its relevance drops dramatically.”
Essentially, if robots can build homes, grow food, manufacture goods, and even provide services like health care and education at near-zero cost, wages will no longer be the mechanism that determines who gets what.
Musk pointed out culture Iain M. Banks’s series of works are regarded as his best “imagination” of the world. Science fiction depicts a utopian future where, thanks to artificial intelligence, citizens can have almost anything they want—making money obsolete and giving citizens the freedom to spend their time doing the things they love.
This is the future that Musk returns to many times. Even two years ago, when ChatGPT was relatively new, he told former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak that “artificial intelligence will be able to do everything” and that work will actually become “like a hobby.”
But Musk’s vision leaves unanswered questions that go beyond science fiction. If money disappears, what determines who gets access to scarce resources—for example, a bigger house in a better location?
The billionaire also didn’t give an exact timetable. when Society will no longer need cash to purchase food, real estate, and other basic necessities. But his bold claims about when work will end suggest the shift could come within the next decade.
“In less than 20 years, maybe even in 10 or 15 years, advances in artificial intelligence and robotics will get us to a point where jobs are optional,” Musk said.
Technologies such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini have eased the burden of time-consuming work such as data cleansing, aggregation, and other administrative tasks. A survey last year found that AI will save workers up to 12 hours a week by 2029. But workers have heard promises like this before.
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, technological advances would allow people to work just 15 hours a week. Productivity has really soared. No leisure time. Instead, workers are generally expected to do more, not less, while saving time.
What’s different about this moment is the pace of change that’s happening now. Artificial intelligence isn’t a far-off theory or science fiction—it’s here, and it’s developing at a rate that worries even Bill Gates and Sam Altman, the man behind ChatGPT.
Avital Balwit, Anthropic’s chief of staff, has previously warned that she expects most jobs, including her own, to become obsolete in just a few years.
In fact, Balvit predicts that within 10 years, a million bipedal robots may already be taking over.
But with the “right policies,” she said, workers can enjoy life just like the upper echelons of society: materially secure, mostly unemployed, and free to pursue pursuits outside of paid labor. Hobbies, relationships and leisure will replace commuting and meetings.
“If we do achieve a world where people’s material needs are met but they don’t have to work, then aristocracy may be a relevant comparison,” Balvert concluded.
Vinod Khosla, the billionaire co-founder of Sun Microsystems and an early investor in companies such as Amazon, Google and OpenAI, said in a lengthy blog post that the key to Musk’s utopian future lies in the hands of governments.
He writes that artificial intelligence will outperform humans in most tasks, faster and cheaper, reducing the need for human labor altogether. But Khosla warned that without intervention, the result could be an “economic dystopia” where wealth is concentrated at the top and both mental and physical work is devalued.
He added: “As AI reduces labor costs and increases productivity, government regulation will play a vital role in managing wealth distribution and maintaining social welfare.”
The solution Khosla proposes is a universal basic income to ensure that people can live well even as jobs disappear. He believes that if done well, it can free people from their daily grind and redefine what it means to live a meaningful life.
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com