Crystal ball: Musk’s forecast of nobody needing to work looks flaky but Keynes' life of leisure doesn’t

“It’ll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that,” Musk said. He also likened having a job to the more time-consuming task of farming a vegetable garden instead of going grocery shopping.

Musk believes that robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will deliver any goods and services you desire. In his view, humanoid robots like Tesla’s Optimus may grow to be the biggest industry. According to Musk, AI and robotics could usher in an era in which all people are “far wealthier than the richest person on Earth.”

Additionally, Musk has stated, “We probably won’t have money, and probably we will just have energy [and] power generation as de facto currency.” Musk, however, admitted that we must ensure that AI has a strong concern for truth and beauty.

The English economist John Maynard Keynes made some daring and fascinating predictions in his 1930 article, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’. Keynes foresaw a huge increase in earnings over the course of the following century as well as an unparalleled period of leisure brought about by improved standards of living during which people would “do more things for ourselves... only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines.”

“Three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!” Keynes remarked. But Musk now predicts a workless old Adam!

A future without jobs would be more dystopian than utopian; as one might imagine, civilization would strive to survive.

From the invention of wheels to the introduction of machines in Nottingham’s textile industry, and from steam engines to electricity, the history of human civilization shows that technological revolutions not only increase productivity but also transfer some human labour to machines that humans have created, thereby reducing human workloads. Isn’t AI just another technology that will reduce the need for human labour in some ways?

Also, in 2019, Chinese billionaire Jack Ma predicted that people may work as little as three days a week and four hours a day in the next 10-20 years, thanks to technological advancements and changes in educational systems.

There has undoubtedly been a significant shift in work hours since the Industrial Revolution, when workers put in 10-16 hours a day. A century ago, in 1926, Henry Ford converted the typical six-day workweek to a five-day one.

Will AI’s magic wand finally cause the seismic transformation in workplace culture that Keynes foresaw in his famous essay? Or would it fundamentally change to the degree that Musk has been forecasting?

Scottish author Iain M. Banks’ ‘Culture’ series of sci-fi novels, published between 1987 and 2012, serve as inspiration for Musk’s automated, job-voluntary future, with money not being an issue. The self-described socialist author imagined a post-scarcity society where human labour is voluntary, AI ensures abundance and humanoid aliens as well as superintelligent AI bots are dispersed throughout the Milky Way galaxy.

Elon Musk may well have been inspired by Banks’ concept since he was a student. In essence, Musk may believe that AI will lead to a Banksian ‘space socialism’.

“In those books, money doesn’t exist,” Musk once observed. “It’s kind of interesting.”

Well, Culture’s universe is appealing and emotionally plausible, even though the anticipated AI advancements might take centuries or millennia to materialize rather than decades.

According to Musk, since everyone will have access to this magic genie, AI will act as a kind of leveller. But didn’t he tell Twitter employees in November 2022 to be ready for 80-hour workweeks amid a tumultuous start to his leadership at the company? More recently, Tesla announced Musk’s $1 trillion pay package (though payable only if some targets are met). And how challenging will it be to develop an AI that’s “maximally truth-seeking?”

Robots so far have proven expensive, making them difficult to scale, even as the cost of AI is declining, according to a new working paper by the University of Pennsylvania’s Konrad Kording and Ioana Marinescu, who presented a novel framework for assessing AI and the future of work. “AI transformation will be significant yet bounded, not infinite,” they contend.

There are many experts who do not agree with Musk’s prediction that AI will ransform the workplace beyond recognition. After Musk’s remarks in Bletchley Park, Mustafa Suleyman, a British AI researcher and co-founder of DeepMind, said in 2023, “I think that certainly over a 50-year period, we should be concerned.”

While Musk’s vision of full-scale automation may partly be the future, AI adoption in the workplace is still not happening as quickly as anticipated, despite recent rounds of tech-related layoffs.

Thus, rather than confirming the Muskian prognosis, an AI-driven global labour market may lend credence to a Keynesian scenario. The future that Keynes had in mind was around 2030, right?

The author is professor of statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.