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 in 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.
Prediction 2: Your retirement pot will be irrelevant
“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.”
Prediction 3: We will all live longer — and potentially become immortal
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 be able 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.
Prediction 4: AI will be more intelligent than the entire human race
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.
Written by Orianna Rosa Royle for Fortune as “Robot surgeons in 3 years, longer lifespans, and no need for retirement savings: Elon Musk shares 4 bold predictions for the future of work” and republished with permission.
