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AI

Elon Musk Says AI Could Eliminate Our Need to Work at Jobs (cnn.com) 289

In the future, "Probably none of us will have a job," Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby — "But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."

CNN reports that Musk added this would require "universal high income" — and "There would be no shortage of goods or services." In a job-free future, though, Musk questioned whether people would feel emotionally fulfilled. "The question will really be one of meaning — if the computer and robots can do everything better than you, does your life have meaning?" he said. "I do think there's perhaps still a role for humans in this — in that we may give AI meaning."
CNN accompanied their article with this counterargument: In January, researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab found workplaces are adopting AI much more slowly than some had expected and feared. The report also said the majority of jobs previously identified as vulnerable to AI were not economically beneficial for employers to automate at that time. Experts also largely believe that many jobs that require a high emotional intelligence and human interaction will not need replacing, such as mental health professionals, creatives and teachers.
CNN notes that Musk "also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because 'they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI'."
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Elon Musk Says AI Could Eliminate Our Need to Work at Jobs

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  • Everything? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @05:42PM (#64498997)

    if the computer and robots can do everything better than you

    Like driving? :-)

    More to the point, I'm sure there will *always* be things machines can't actually do cheaper, easier and/or better than humans. That will probably narrow over time, but at increasing expense / difficulty, lowering the ROI.

    • Re:Everything? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by HiThere ( 15173 ) <.charleshixsn. .at. .earthlink.net.> on Saturday May 25, 2024 @06:21PM (#64499043)

      To be fair, I expect that AI will eventually be able to do all jobs.

      What's not clear is how to survive the transition, and who will be left standing at the end.

      FWIW, I still expect a rudimentary AGI by 2035. But expect a really rough decade ahead. Some jobs need to be done that currently only people can do...and those doing the jobs won't be happy if others are paid to do nothing. (This is true even if they don't want to do nothing themselves.) Also, an AGI isn't sufficient. There also need to be capable robot bodies...which are still works in progress.

      So paint his happy picture around 2040, and wonder how much turmoil lies between here and there. (FWIW, Heinlein called this period "the crazy years", even if he did get all the details wrong.)

      • Re:Everything? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 25, 2024 @06:28PM (#64499061)
        There are four options, really:

        - Plenty and equality: Star Trek future goes here.
        - Plenty and inequality: All the replicators have DRM and intellectual property is everything.
        - Scarcity and equality: If the AIs are too expensive for everybody to use, but we ration its use sanely.
        - Scarcity and hierarchy: The owners hoard the supercomputers and let everybody else enjoy a working poor life.
        • Scarcity is not optional. It's mandatory. You can hide it partially , but you can't eliminate it.

          • by mysidia ( 191772 )

            Scarcity is not mandatory, BUT If there is abundance instead of scarcity - You Must have some kind of system to Prevent actors from "eating up" any surplus In order to recreate Scarcity and pocket the profits from scarcity for themself.

            For example.. If there is a Surplus in food, Then it would still be profitable for a Pirate to Buy up all the surplus food and create an Intentional shortage so that they can share portions of their surplus for More than the whole lot would have gone for on its own.

          • Re:Everything? (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @12:09AM (#64499557)

            Whether scarcity is optional depends on your goals. When you just want humanity to live properly, scarcity is not only not optional, it needs to be eliminated because anything scarce will be hoarded, to the point where something that is not scarce will become so.

            If you want our capitalist system to survive, you're right, scarcity is pretty much a requirement or that system is dead in the water.

      • Re:Everything? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sonicmerlin ( 1505111 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @07:33PM (#64499161)

        There is literally nothing being researched that could lead to an actual AI, let alone in 10 years. We can't create something we don't even remotely understand.

        • by mysidia ( 191772 )

          We are, but you dont know it yet

          The big research is in hardware and Quantum computing.

          Once you have enough computing power to simulate 120 billion neurons and 4 quadrillion connections: the problem of simulating the human brain changes into a biology question.

          The AI doesn't have to be as smart as a human to be real AI.. reaching the intelligence level of certain animals would suffice for a lot of jobs.

          • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @08:39PM (#64499245)

            Do you have a reference for who is working on real AGI?

            Also, you can have a gigajillionzillion mega neurons and a googleplex of connections yet still be nowhere near AGI. That doesn't turn it into a biology question. It remains a software question. If it was a biology issue, we already solved that: don't wear a condom, wait 9 months, voila, general intelligence in biological form!

            Current AGI is non existent. No one is working in it for real afaik. I've yet to see a reference to anyone having made -any- progress.

            My "AI powered" pool sweeper can barely clean the surface of a flat rectangular area and still slams into walls. I have no fear AGI is coming for us anytime in my lifespan.

            • by gweihir ( 88907 )

              Current AGI is non existent. No one is working in it for real afaik. I've yet to see a reference to anyone having made -any- progress.

              /quote>

              All serious AI researchers have given up on AGI a long time ago. They all know it is at the very least completely out of reach and something really fundamental is missing. You cannot do targeted research after something fundamental unless you have a good idea what it looks like. There was some hope that neurosciences could deliver some ideas with better imaging methods, but all they have delivered is confusion how the observable mechanisms could create intelligence, because it just does not seem to make sense.

              And, obviously, the usual dishonest marketing people have tried to redefine AGI to something that it is not. They did that before with "AI", which still is merely dumb automation and will remain that for the foreseeable future.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            That is a pure hallucination on your part.

            First, simulating a human brain will only ever be possible with a massive slowdown, because communication is prohibitive. There is no way around the speed of light and there is no known tech that could even remotely get that brain simulation into the same volume. If an artificial brain takes a billion times more time than a real one, it is not going to be very useful. Maybe an entirely new hardware paradigm could do it, but we do not have that. And looking at the ex

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Indeed. That said, optimization will kill a lot of jobs and it will not be for new products, i.e. new jobs. There needs to be a way to keep society functioning. LLMs are not intelligent in any way, but they are easy to adapt if reliability is not an issue. For many desk-jobs, it it not.

        • Re:Everything? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @02:32AM (#64499739) Homepage Journal

          We can't create something we don't even remotely understand.

          Anyone can create a human level intelligence. Couples do it all the time, even if very young and completely clueless. Fuck around and find out.

      • AGI by 2035?

        I'll take that bet. This was my field in school ~30 years ago. Since then zero progress has been made on AGI.

        The odds it suddenly comes to exist in the next 10 years is extremely low. No one can even define what general intelligence and cognition really is; how can they code for it?

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Yep, same here. And there is this little problem with consciousness, which is not even possible with known Physics (there is no mechanism for it), yet clearly can influence reality, so much have some Physical form.

          This believe that computers can do anything is not new, though. It nicely places itself in a long time of beliefs in gods, alchemy, magic, fairies, etc. It never has panned out in a single instance, but people keep coming back to it in new and inventive forms. This belief does form an indication t

      • Maybe by 2135 (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @07:54AM (#64500147) Journal

        I still expect a rudimentary AGI by 2035.

        Barring some as yet unforeseen huge breakthrough it is much, much further away than that. All current AI algorithms require training in the specific task that they are supposed to be doing. They cannot take that training and use it to do different tasks like any human or even animal can. Even the most human-sounding ones are just trained to select the next word in a sentence based on what sounds best.

        Until we have an algorithm that can understand basic facts and concepts and then, using its trained skills, apply those learned facts and concepts to different situations accurately we will never have anything close to an AGI. That does not mean that "AI" is not going to feature far more in our lives because there are enough basic "single task" jobs that we can train an AI to do now or in the near future. But jobs that require applying learned knowledge to new and different situations, like scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, teacher etc are not going to be replaced by AI anytime soon although current/near-future AI could certainly assist those professions.

    • Desk Jobs. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @06:34PM (#64499079) Homepage
      If it isn't manual labor or some physical activity most commodity (non specialized) jobs will be obsolete. Sure someone will be needed to run the AI but all the data entry and script readers that line the cubicles will be unnecessary.
    • Re:Everything? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @07:10PM (#64499131)

      I wonder if we will ever see the guys in hard hats and high-vis on the construction sites of the world replaced by robots and AI...

      • I wonder if we will ever see the guys in hard hats and high-vis on the construction sites of the world replaced by robots and AI...

        And, if so, will there be one doing all the work while three stand around watching and drinking coffee? :-)

      • Sure, there will still be difficult-to-automate jobs that MUST have humans involved. But once all the factory workers, call center staff, warehouse staff, etc. are displaced, they're going to show up applying for those jobs. The saturation will cause the wages to drop through the floor.

        Specific to your example, a lot of earth moving work is getting automated using GPS. Go search Ask Jeeves for "Autonomous Bulldozer" and you'll see examples dating back 12+ years.
      • See here [youtube.com]. We've also got robot berry pickers. About the only thing we can't do is make good shirts and fold them, and that's only a matter of time.

        The reason we're still using humans is that we've got a ton of disposable people we treat worse than machines.
    • Driving is one task AI can *already* do better than humans. Sure, there have been some high-profile accidents. But measured in terms of accidents per mile, AI is definitely safer. https://thelastdriverlicenseho... [thelastdri...holder.com]

      • Those numbers don't tell the whole story. The AI miles are all easy driving because that's all AI can handle reliably - things like driving on a clearly marked road in good, clear weather. The human driving miles contain a lot of miles in more challenging driving situations which AI isn't even capable of driving - so it's no surprise really that the human driving pool has worse numbers.

  • Huh, ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @05:46PM (#64499001)

    "Probably none of us will have a job," Elon Musk said Thursday, speaking remotely to the VivaTech 2024 conference in Paris. Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby — "But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want."

    Every time I think Musk is about as full of shit as a human being can be he opens his mouth and proves to us that there's still room for more.

    • He could have been right except he said "us," which implies it would happen in the hearers lifetime.

      Never place a time limit on your prognostications. Then you always might be right... in the future.

      • Key to being a futurist from Nostradamus seminal book on prophecy making is:
        1. Never provide any dates. If you must do so, make sure you can contrive a success or have an excuse for it not happening. For example, if you predict an economic collapse .. make sure you stated it broadly enough that you can point to a recession somewhere as proof that it happened.
        2. Never provide measurable specifics. For example, if you predict "the economy will crash" .. never state how many percentage points exactly.
        3. Make a

  • by theweatherelectric ( 2007596 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @05:53PM (#64499011)
    Musk doesn't do much work at Tesla. Tesla employees describe him as a "pigeon CEO" [electrek.co] because "he comes in, shits all over us, and then leaves."
  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @06:14PM (#64499027) Journal
    In fairness to Musk he does know something about what he's talking about. Absolutely nothing useful about 'AI'; but he's certainly eliminated some jobs; which counts as subject matter expertise on the easy half of his claim.

    Why we're supposed to take him even slightly seriously when he speculates that the jobless will still have robots providing them with goods and services; rather than just being left to either starve or get killed by the security robots is deeply unclear, however.
    • Why we're supposed to take him even slightly seriously when he speculates that the jobless will still have robots providing them with goods and services; rather than just being left to either starve or get killed by the security robots is deeply unclear, however.

      Just don't joke have having hair products [youtube.com] in your backpack when the security robots stop you...

      [Also... wondering which character Elon would/will be in that future?]

    • In fairness to Musk he does know something about what he's talking about. Absolutely nothing useful about 'AI'; but he's certainly eliminated some jobs; which counts as subject matter expertise on the easy half of his claim.

      Because of Elon, we've actually seen a rise of at least two industries that were technically there but basically nothing prior to his companies existing. I don't believe he's correct about robots replacing jobs, rather they'll just change the way we do them. It's entertaining though watching the hate club deny all of it, but at the same time they're also likely the ones who will believe him on this particular topic.

  • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @06:16PM (#64499031) Homepage

    CNN notes that Musk "also used his stage time to urge parents to limit the amount of social media that children can see because 'they're being programmed by a dopamine-maximizing AI'."

    He's made it more than clear through many interviews that he thinks that the internet and educational institutions "trans'ed" his eldest child and made her hate him, so you should tightly regulate your children's lives to keep this from happening.

    • He's made it more than clear through many interviews that he thinks that the internet and educational institutions "trans'ed" his eldest child and made her hate him, so you should tightly regulate your children's lives to keep this from happening.

      Uh-huh. What made everyone else hate him?

      • by quall ( 1441799 )

        Jealousy, spite, their own daddy issues? You name it. I bet that there are even people who google other people's reasons to hate him in order to jump aboard.

  • OK so how will everyone pay the robot owners for providing everything one needs if they don't have a source of income.
    OK free money(Universal High Income) from the government that is BS. The US government has been bankrupt for years.
    It just takes a while to burn up the accumulated capital of a few centuries.
    You can not make something from nothing .
    I am surprised Elon does not see that.
  • ...and living on people kibble when we can't prevail on one of our betters to give us a few pence for some soup.
  • cut stuff by half and make leftovers work 60 hours an week with no OT pay

  • To feel emotionally fulfilled!
    • My two sons are in their 20s. They both came from the same prosperous parents. Neither finished college. Both work jobs making less than $20 per hour. One is always broke, the other has $10K in the bank. The difference? How they spend money. One has a hole in his pocket, if there's money in the bank, he spends it. The other is in no hurry to spend. Guess which one has the $10K!

      • My two sons are in their 20s. They both came from the same prosperous parents. Neither finished college

        To feel emotionally fulfilled!

        . . . and more pathetisad . . .

        Do you seriously not understand sarcasm, Slashdotter? Really? Gimme back your nerd card, now! Nerdizen's arrest, pal!

        • Sadly, there are plenty of slashdotters who would have written what you wrote, in complete seriousness. No, you can't assume people will understand that what you write is sarcastic, when others actually do believe the plain version to be true.

  • If they can do everything better, we'll be at their mercy.

    Maybe they'll do it for free, maybe they'll require 8 hours of prayer a day or maybe they'll just require us to die ... hard to predict if you don't believe alignment is possible, which I don't (even if we could agree how they should they be aligned, which I also don't).

  • Lack of meaning tackled by former AI doomster, now AI positive Nick Bostrom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    David Shapiro has a lot of videos like this: Post-Labor Economics Explained in 8 minutes - How will the economy work after AGI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    and finally, if it all falls through and the elite don't share robot labor: how to get free food for life https://www.genolve.com/design... [genolve.com]
    • And it's all bunk. AI will do to office work, what machinery did to farm work, what factories did to blacksmith work. In 100 years, no one will care that all those office jobs are gone, and everyone will be employed doing something else that, perhaps, we can't even imagine today.

      • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @12:52AM (#64499629)

        That's the thing, though: What kind of employment?

        Every single paradigm-shifting technological advancement that displaced people also mean that these people sooner or later (sadly, often later than sooner, with the ensuing problems in between) turned to a different kind of income.

        When machines started to replace farmhands and a lot of former farm aides became superfluous, they moved to the cities and the emerging factories that required the same kind of unskilled labor. When they in turn got displaced by automation, the emerging service industry took them. And so on.

        What did happen with every step, though, was that the demand for the, let's say, mental capabilities of the person increased. A farmhand just had to be able to do manual work. Nearly no mental capacity required. It was already a bit more challenging for factory work, even conveyor belt work required you to understand abstract, if uniform, work steps. And in a service oriented job, you had to be presentable, able to work with people and very likely required to be able to communicate properly and possibly even read and write.

        And so on.

        The requirements for taking one of the "replacement jobs" went up with every iteration of the automation game.

        The first step, from farmhand to factory worker, left the people out that we'd call imbeciles, who were certainly capable of tossing hay and carrying bales of corn from A to B but couldn't grasp the abstract requirement to put cog A on sprocket B. Moving on to more challenging tasks like serving food left another lot of people in the dust who couldn't communicate properly or couldn't learn how to write down an order. Moving on meant learning a trade, which again was outside the reach of a set of people.

        You may argue that all these examples only exclude a very tiny portion of the population, and you're right. How many people would be unable to learn how to read? Or a simple trade? 2%? Maybe 5% of the population?

        With the advent of AI, though, we displace average IQ people and push the bar for "jobs that can't be done by AI" a lot higher now. And that means we're putting a critical mass of people outside the reach of jobs.

        People are not fungible. Yes, we have a severe lack of people who can do some of those jobs that AI simply cannot do. But we can't train someone whose mental capacity isn't up to it to do it.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @07:14PM (#64499135)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • And just as the player piano didn't put piano players out of business, AI won't put humans out of business.

  • Instead, jobs will be optional — something we'd do like a hobby ...

    Material things -- including necessary things, like food and medical -- will still have a cost. How will people who opt out of work pay for that? Will there be universal (at least basic) income and free healthcare? For everyone? Ramped-up Socialism where everyone just gets what they need? Who defines "need"? What's the next step after companies fire everyone to replace employees with robots?

    • by haruchai ( 17472 )

      If you want to have anything beyond the barest necessities you'll have to work at something.
      Elon will still need flesh drones to populate Mars Colony.
      Just make sure your manager is obsequious so he doesn't cut off your air supply when he fires her out the airlock

  • by KaLeVR1 ( 34637 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @08:21PM (#64499227)

    Like the 1964 World's Fair when they said productivity would be so high by the turn of the century that people would only need to work 2 or 3 days a week. What they didn't tell you was that instead of getting more time off, work would transition to service sector jobs at stagnant wages. Also that when people complain, the Jim Cramers of the world will threaten to punish you by sending even more jobs overseas. Even now Elon is threatening to move factories when workers try to unionize, ask for more wages, or states ask for his fair share of tax revenue. So who does he expect to pay for the "high universal income." Companies will spend millions lobbying Congress to make sure it won't be them. He needs to STFU.

  • by pitch2cv ( 1473939 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @08:39PM (#64499243)

    Is that the new "Kim Jung Un looking at" meme?

    Asking for a friend.

  • If you do nothing how do you "earn" a $56B bonus?

    Also if life is meaningless (for Elon) if you aren't at a desk working (he's not a WFH guy) then where do the arts and sciences come in?

    He's just the definition of vapid high moron with too much money. Imagine if HE ran for President.

  • took me a week just to redo the railing, who is going to replace the deck boards, BING?

    god damn musk is just going more stupid every day

  • by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Saturday May 25, 2024 @09:02PM (#64499273) Journal

    Which are increasingly becoming scarce if you pay attention to global climate change even slightly.

    It must be nice to have everything you ever wanted just apparate in front of you at your every whim from birth. What a petulant spoiled cunt. Musk embodies the Hunger Games ruling class and that is the actual goal.

    • The thing is, though, history doesn't quite support the end point of this development being hunger games like situations.

      It usually ends in something like France 1789,

  • The Technocracy movement in the early 20th century predicted the same thing. That as productivity increases, fewer and fewer people are needed to work in order to support the needs and wants of the rest of us. That automation would eventually eliminate labor. And one consequence is that the price system would also end, as personal wealth ceases to be meaningful. I don't necessarily agree with their hypothesis, but Elon Musk stumbling onto the idea like a high frat boy isn't surprising.

    • Well, that first part was right, productivity increase led to fewer people being employed. New jobs emerged, most of them being meaningless busywork, granted.

      Why that would eliminate the need or want for personal wealth is beyond me, though. Why would greed suddenly become a thing of the past? Quite the opposite would happen, since fewer people compete in that greedier-than-thou competition, the greed must increase for these people that they can stay "relevant" in that game.

      • The Technocracy movement overlooked that GDP growth is fundamental to macroeconomics. That you don't just stop producing once everyone's belly's are full. We know that producing exactly the amount you need doesn't work, because the early Soviet government tried it. They centrally planned to meet exactly their needs and kept coming up short. Simple things like delivery delays in raw materials could cascade into a major annual shortfall in entire industrial sectors, as the Soviets weren't keen on building in

  • These are the same lies we were told about technology in general.

    That it would make our lives easier and wouldn't have to work as much so we could enjoy life.
    Guessing we were fed this lie so we wouldn't cause trouble while the transition was happening.

    And, here we are today, working more hours than ever. Able to afford even less than our parents did while working even more hours.

    So, I suppose the 1% are far better off because of it but, maybe I'm wrong.

    Any of you putting in fewer hours these days than the f

    • The promises of the 1970s were right. "Soon, what you work in 50 hours a week today can be done in 10!"

      That is true. Productivity went up 2-20 fold in the past 50 years. The more of that task could be taken over by computers, the higher the productivity gain.

      What these "futurists" failed to take into consideration was corporate greed. So instead of 10 people working 10 instead of 50 hours a week, what you have now is 2 instead of 10 people working 50 hours a week.

  • If he's talking about his ilk of useless C-Level spongers, I believe him. That particular type of "worker" (I'll use that term loosely here) can already be replaced by AI at the current time with the current models without any loss of quality.

    Technically, most of them were already obsolete in the 1950s when the magic-8-ball was invented.

  • by stikves ( 127823 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @12:30AM (#64499597) Homepage

    "AI Could Eliminate Employers' Need to Have Us Work at Jobs"

    Do you believe, for one second, the large companies that can reduce their workforce will pass this savings onto people who no longer work there?

    To be fair, those who remain at work, will get massive wage increases. Because they either have a skill that is not yet computerized and in high demand, or are the nephews of the owner who no longer needs to pay anyone else.

    It will be a very bad day if this ever happens. However my optimistic side says AI has still long ways to go before they can even return good Google results, let along fix a leaking faucet.

  • by TJHook3r ( 4699685 ) on Sunday May 26, 2024 @07:24AM (#64500081)
    If one country has UBI at a different rate than another country, it would be possible for arbitrage to occur - for example, we have one person in America receiving UBI and they send half their allowance back to family in India. Eventually they move back to India and have enormous wealth. If every country has the same manufacturing and AI, how can there be differences in cost of living, eventually they would need to hit parity?

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