Could Elon Musk’s AI Utopia See a Future Without Money?

Turning a tricky sci-fi page, tech visionary Elon Musk, has recently doubled down on his prediction that the advancements in AI and robotics will bring us to a future where working will become optional. 

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO, who recently signed a pay package for US$1tn, suggested in a recent interview with Nikhil Kamath that we are likely moving towards a world of abundance where “if you can think it, you can have it”. 

“In a future where anyone can have anything, you no longer need money as a database for labour allocation,” he says.

“If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then the relevance of money declines rapidly, I’m not sure we will have it.”

Elon’s predictions aren’t that of a time far away, instead, he thinks this reality could be upon us in less than 20 years where working will become more of a hobby. 

His wager rests on a world where AI and robotics are able to provide tremendous goods and services output, that will transform us into a Universal High Income Society. 

Transformative AI: 'A country of geniuses in a data centre'

A recent National Bureau of Economics Research paper titled A Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI defines Transformative AI (TAI) as “AI that enables a sustained increase in total factor productivity growth of at least 3- 5x of historical averages”.

This AI could be visualised as Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei’s picture of a “powerful AI” that he envisions as “a country of geniuses in a data centre”. 

According to Musk’s previous comments, once humanoid robots are in the picture, there will be a significant increase in the production of goods and services, which will bring about a world of abundance. 

With AI that surpasses human intelligence, TAI could be capable of connecting innovative dots between disciplines that humans whose expertise is limited to a single field may not be able to do, significantly compounding the rate of innovation. 

However, some research warns that gains from such automation could possibly accrue to the capital owners and not the workers, unless automation is directed to compliment labour instead of replacing it. 

But Elon argues that accumulating wealth in an abundant economy will be pointless. 

“If you are stranded on a desert island with a trillion dollars, it will be pointless because there is no labour to allocate,” he says. 

Will money disappear and what stands in the way of Transformative AI?

Taking Elon’s theory, in an economy of abundance where money becomes irrelevant, he believes “energy will be the true currency”. 

If AI and robotics start producing chips and solar panels and mine resources to further power AI and robots, it then closes the energy cycle. 

“Once that cycle is complete,” Musk claims, “we decouple from the monetary system”.

What might ensue henceforth, he considers, could be a crisis of where the question becomes “If AI can do things better than you, what is the point of doing things?”

While Elon’s vision for the future is fairly utopian, a lot stands in the way of attaining that particular economic heaven.

We could run up against energy and technology bottlenecks during AI development, which can slow down the acceleration towards abundance. 

Further, IMF research suggests that AI adoption will be uneven across nations of varying infrastructure development, hence favouring advanced economies over developing ones. 

This could widen the economic gulf between the haves and have nots exacerbating cross-border income inequality.

Dario expressed this concern on inequality in his essay Machines of Loving Grace: “Ideally, powerful AI should help the developing world catch up to the developed world, even as it revolutionises the latter.

“I am not as confident that AI can address inequality and economic growth as I am that it can invent fundamental technologies, because technology has such obvious high returns to intelligence, whereas the economy involves a lot of constraints from humans, as well as a large dose of intrinsic complexity.“ 

AI regulation, the alignment problem and AI safety are further avenues that require cautious consideration as we get closer to a powerful Artificial General Intelligence. 

Elon Musk’s Utopia is also tainted by his comparison of AI as a blackhole, where we cannot see past the event horizon.