Elon Musk says AI will make retirement savings irrelevant as robots reshape the future of work

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.

Musk Predicts AI Will Lead to Abundance When AGI Arrives | PYMNTS.com

The multibillionaire businessman made these remarks last week on the podcast Moonshots With Peter Diamandis, saying that artificial intelligence's (AI) advancements will bring about a world in which people no longer need to save for retirement. "Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years. It won't matter," Musk said, arguing that AI will bring about people having a "universal you-can-have-whatever-you-want income." "My best guess for how this will manifest is that prices will...drop. So as the efficiency of production or the provision of services drops, prices will drop," the Tesla chief added. "I mean prices in dollar terms are the ratio between the output of goods and services and the money supply. So if your output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you will have deflation, or vice versa," added Musk, whose other companies include the AI startup xAI. In addition, Musk predicted the imminent arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that can perform at or above the level of humans. "I think we'll hit AGI next year in '26," he said. "I'm confident by 2030, AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined." As PYMNTS wrote last year, fear of a day in which AI overtakes humanity in terms of intelligence is at the root of Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI. "It all started, according to the 2024 suit, in 2012 when Musk was giving Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, an AI research lab, a tour of SpaceX's Hawthorne, California, facility. They discussed the greatest threats facing society," the report said. Hassabis listed AI advancements among those threats, the complaint says. Computing circles have long theorized about an event known as the "singularity," in which technology substantially surpasses human intelligence, with unclear outcomes for humanity. "Following this conversation with Mr. Hassabis, Mr. Musk became increasingly concerned about the potential of AI to become super-intelligent, surpass human intelligence, and threaten humanity," the complaint reads. These concerns, the suit says, led Musk to Sam Altman and the founding of OpenAI. The basis for the suit is Musk's claim that Altman has diverged from the company's initial non-profit mission. A judge ruled last week that the suit can proceed to trial. OpenAI has called Musk's suit "baseless" and part of a "campaign of harassment."

Musk says AI will lead to universal abundance and saving for retirement will be irrelevant

Billionaire businessman Elon Musk last week called artificial intelligence and robotics a "supersonic tsunami" that will lead to abundance for all humans, making saving for retirement irrelevant. Musk's remarks came in an appearance on Peter Diamandis' podcast on YouTube last Tuesday. He Musk claims AI-driven abundance will make saving for retirement irrelevant, as universal income and deflation lower living costs. Musk predicts white-collar jobs will be replaced first, with AI or robots performing much of the work currently done by humans. The analysis lists trending AI stocks and AI/robotics-focused exchange-traded funds such as (PATH), (DELL), (AIQ), (BOTZ), and others.

World's richest man Elon Musk says saving for retirement will soon be 'irrelevant' thanks to AI - VnExpress International

Elon Musk, the world's richest billionaire, has said saving for retirement will be "irrelevant" in a future where artificial intelligence helps create so many resources that everyone can "have whatever they want." "One side recommendation I have is: Don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in 10 or 20 years," Musk said in an episode of the "Moonshots with Peter Diamandis" podcast aired last week, as quoted by Business Insider. Musk said rapid progress in artificial intelligence, robotics and energy would reshape daily life and sharply boost productivity. He predicted that by 2030, AI would exceed "the intelligence of all humans combined," and that humanoid robots would eventually outnumber people, with white-collar roles being displaced first. This would create an "abundance" of resources that would allow everyone to "have whatever they want," including universal access to medical care "better than anyone has today" within five years and "no scarcity of goods and services." "If any of the things that we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant," Musk said. But the transition to that future would be "bumpy," with abrupt disruptions and social instability as people grapple with a loss of purpose as their job "won't matter," he added. Musk is the world's richest person, with a net worth exceeding US$720 billion. He is the CEO electric carmaker Tesla and aerospace firm SpaceX, according to Forbes. His latest forecast contrasts with the financial reality for many in the U.S., where a large share of Americans is struggling to put money aside amid stubborn inflation and sluggish wage growth. Just 55% of U.S. adults said they had an emergency fund covering three months of expenses, down from 59% in 2021, Fortune reported, citing data from the Federal Reserve. Fewer than half said they could pay an unexpected expense of $2,000 or more using savings. Other surveys also show that many Americans are behind on retirement savings or have little saved for their post-work life. Musk's outlook on AI also clashes with warnings from Geoffrey Hinton, a scientist widely regarded as one of the "godfathers of AI," according to News.au.com. Hinton, who received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, is known for pioneering neural networks that underpin modern AI systems such as ChatGPT, facial recognition software and autonomous driving technology. He cautioned last September that rapid progress in AI means more workers will be replaced. "It's going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer," he warned, but added that the fault would lie not with AI, but with "the capitalist system."