Elon Musk says AI will make retirement savings irrelevant as robots create world of abundance

Robot surgeons in 3 years, longer lifespans, and no need for retirement savings: Elon Musk shares 4 bold predictions for the future of work | Fortune

Since ChatGPT's explosive debut in November 2022, fears of robots replacing humans at work have been rampant. And according to Elon Musk, these fears are about to become very real, very soon. The Tesla, SpaceX, and X app (formerly known as Twitter) boss just put doctors and surgeons on a three-year deadline before robots can not only do their jobs but also outnumber them in practices and hospitals. And his eyes, job losses aside, that'll be a good thing for humanity: "Everyone will have access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now," Musk said on the podcast Moonshots with Peter Diamandis. "Right now there's a shortage of doctors and great surgeons. It takes a super long time to learn to be a good doctor, and even then, the knowledge is constantly evolving. Doctors have limited time. They make mistakes." Musk pitched that his own Tesla Optimus robots will be the solution -- despite previous hiccups and missed ambitious production targets. By 2030, he said, "there will probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth." And that was just one of four predictions the world's richest person made in the interview. "Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years. It won't matter," Musk said. Essentially, if robots can build houses, grow food, manufacture goods, and even provide services like health care and education at a near-zero cost then wages stop being the mechanism that determines who gets what. Money (and with it savings and retirement pots) become unimportant. "You won't need to save for retirement," he added. "If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant." Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei thinks that human lifespans will double in the next decade thanks to AI. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind "Blueprint," Bryan Johnson, says he'll make humans immortal by 2039. And Musk agrees that immortality could be unlocked thanks to AI. While he didn't put a timeline on it, he described death as a human programming issue. "I have long thought that longevity or semi-immortality is an extremely solvable problem," Musk explained. "I don't think it's a particularly hard problem. When you consider the fact that your body is extremely synchronized in its age, the clock must be incredibly obvious." "You're programmed to die," he added. "And so if you change the program, you will live longer. In retrospect, the solution to longevity will seem obvious." With money irrelevant in his vision for the future, Musk didn't suggest how jobless humans will to feed and house themselves for decades longer -- or even, forever. But he has previously called for a universal income that will foot the bill. Technologies such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini have already alleviated the burden of some time-consuming work, such as data cleaning, summarization, and other administrative tasks. By 2029, one survey last year found that AI will save workers up to 12 hours per week. But Musk predicts that this is just a warm-up act. "I'm confident that by 2030 AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined," he said, while adding that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or rather, AI with human-level cognitive abilities) will land this year. "I don't just have court side seats -- I'm on the court, and it still blows my mind sometimes multiple times a week. In Musk's view, most people, even inside the AI industry, are dramatically underestimating what's coming. "The intelligence density potential is vastly greater than what we're currently experiencing," he explained. "So I think we're off by two orders of magnitude in terms of intelligence density per gigabyte -- characterized by the file size of the AI." That's at the current capacity of computers but as he pointed out, those keep getting better too -- and budgets keep getting bigger. "That's why I think it is a 10x improvement per year type thing. 1,000% And that's going to happen for the foreseeable future." He's not alone in sounding the alarm. Bill Gates admitted that AI is moving faster than he expected. But the Microsoft founder said that it's precisely because of the speed it's moving that none of these predictions are actually accurate. In his eyes, no tech expert (including Musk) can really know whether AI will replace workers in one year or ten.

Elon Musk says retirement saving 'may not matter' in an AI future

Elon Musk has never been shy about promising the future. Last week, he took the extra step of giving the future budgeting advice. On the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast, Musk said: "Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years ... It won't matter." It's a line that lands somewhere between prophecy and provocation because it's coming from the world's richest man, delivered with the casual certainty of someone explaining why you don't need an umbrella in a hurricane. Musk's argument is straightforward, and very Musk: AI and robots will drive productivity so aggressively that scarcity -- the thing retirement planning quietly assumes -- collapses. If he's right, traditional retirement saving won't just be difficult or inadequate; it'll be beside the point. "If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant," he said. The abundance pitch is the sales pitch. The asterisk is the price of admission. In the same conversation, Musk described the force behind the forecast in language that's less personal finance and more disaster movie trailer: "I call AI and robotics the supersonic tsunami," he said. And he doesn't offer a comforting pause button. "There's no on-off switch," he added. "It is coming and accelerating." The result, he said, is unlikely to feel like a smooth handoff from jobs to leisure. Musk promised that "the transition will be bumpy." That tension -- utopia eventually, chaos on the way -- is doing a lot of work here. Musk's retirement line is built on a world where "universal high income" shows up on schedule, goods and services become plentiful, and the basics of life are simply handled. In a more immediate world -- the one most podcast listeners actually live in -- retirement planning exists because rent, health care, and time don't negotiate. Musk has, to be fair, been unsurprisingly consistent about this sci-fi promise. In December, responding on X, Musk wrote: "There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money. There will be universal high income." Not every CEO doing the AI prophecy circuit is selling the same ending. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has pushed a different, more plausible vision: AI makes work easier, which means we do more of it. "We will be more productive and yet still be busier because we have so many ideas," Huang said, predicting that both he and Musk would be "busier as a result of AI." Goldman Sachs has warned that shifts in workflow could "expose the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs to automation." The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2023 said 23% of jobs are expected to change by 2027, with 69 million created and 83 million eliminated. And Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been blunter still. "AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs -- and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years," he told Axios. Other CEOs split the difference by focusing on distribution -- the part Musk gestures at, but doesn't really solve. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that a simple dividend "is not going to feel good," and pushed instead for society to have "an ownership share in whatever AI creates," which means "universal basic wealth," not just checks. Bill Gates has floated a gentler destination -- a shorter workweek -- imagining a world where "machines can make all the food and the stuff." Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, meanwhile, says "radical abundance" only works if it gets "distributed fairly," which he calls "more of a political question." Musk's version depends on the part CEOs tend to glide past: governance and distribution. Even in his own telling, the world doesn't currently have "any system ... to make this go well." If abundance arrives without a plan for who owns the machines that produce it -- and who gets paid while work evaporates -- a "retirement won't matter" podcast prophecy starts sounding less like liberation and more like a threat.

Elon Musk says saving for retirement is irrelevant because AI is going to create a world of abundance: 'It won't matter' | Fortune

Saving for retirement is pointless thanks to the impending "supersonic tsunami" of AI and robotics, which will bring about a world of zero scarcity, according to Elon Musk. While the Tesla and SpaceX CEO admitted he's "more optimistic" than most, he insisted people shouldn't stress over building a nest egg for the distant future, contrary to the staid advice of nearly all other financial professionals. "Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years," said the world's richest man on the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis podcast last week. "It won't matter." Part of Musk's controversial take lies in his vision of a world transformed by rapidly improving AI, robotics, and energy technology. By 2030, AI will surpass "the intelligence of all humans combined," Musk predicted. He also claimed eventually there will be more humanoid robots than humans on Earth. Slowly, the traditional job will be replaced as well, with white collar positions first on the list. "Anything short of shaping atoms, AI can do probably half or more of those jobs right now," he said. The advances could lead to such big productivity increases, he said, that they will surpass "what people possibly could think of as abundance." Rather than a universal income, everyone will enjoy a "universal 'you can have whatever you want' income" in the future, he claimed. In this world, the link between individual wages, savings, and living standards no longer makes sense. Even without savings, AI will help people obtain better medical care than currently available within five years, as well as remove any limit on the availability of goods, services, or educational opportunities. Musk's comments build on his earlier claims that AI and humanoid robots will make work "optional" within 10 to 20 years and render money itself irrelevant. Musk previously compared the future of work to leisure activities like playing sports or video games rather than a survival necessity. "If you want to work, [it's] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables," Musk said during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in November. To be sure, Musk's predictions about the future come at a time where many Americans are struggling to save. In part due to persistent inflation and weak wage growth, only 55% of American adults said they had a "rainy day" fund of three months expenses saved up for an emergency, down from a high of 59% in 2021, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve. Fewer than half of those surveyed said they could cover an expense of $2,000 or more with their savings. Surveys also consistently show a large share of Americans are behind on retirement savings or have little to nothing set aside for their post-work life. Musk is also not blind to the potential downsides of a society without the need to earn a living. A high universal income could come hand-in-hand with social unrest, as people may face a deeper crisis of meaning, he warned. "If you actually get all the stuff you want, is that actually the future you want? Because it means that your job won't matter," Musk said.