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Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that AI and robots will do 'so much stuff' that humans will run out of things to do for work and "we'll basically just issue money to people".
Musk painted the picture during a conversation with XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis at the Abundance Summit.
Rather than warning that artificial intelligence will simply replace workers, Musk described a world where AI and humanoid robots become so productive that scarcity itself starts to disappear, leaving governments to rethink how people earn an income.
Musk said the explosion in AI and robotics won't simply automate repetitive work. He believes it could eventually produce more goods and services than people could reasonably consume.
"Yeah, it's basically AI and robots are going to make so much stuff and provide so many services that they will actually run out of things to do for the humans," Musk told Diamandis.
"They'll just run out of things to do for the humans," he continued. "There's only so much that humans can even express that they want."
Musk said that if the economy became hundreds or even thousands of times larger than it is today, human demand would eventually hit a ceiling while machines continued producing at extraordinary levels.
Musk said that abundance will change the economic equation entirely.
Rather than focusing on universal basic income, Musk described what he called universal high income, arguing that governments could simply send people money because AI-generated output would dramatically outpace growth in the money supply.
"I do think we'll have universal high income," he said. "We're basically just issuing money to people."
Musk explained that the massive increase in goods and services would create deflationary pressure instead of inflation.
"So if the rate of growth of goods and services far exceeds the rate of growth of the money supply," he continued, "then you will have deflation."
