Is AI ushering in an “age of abundance” — or a digital apocalypse?

Whether people like it or not, it’s clear there is no stopping the artificial intelligence freight train now barrelling towards some kind of final destination.

The data centers are being built, automation is already nibbling away at jobs and governments around the world are in a Manhattan Project-style race to reach the holy grail of AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

Big change is coming.

The only debate now is about the scale and speed of the economic shock on the horizon, who’s going to lose their jobs — and whether you think any of this is a good thing, not that you have a say one way or another.

“The future is going to be very, very different from the past and there is no analogy or metaphor that illustrates the magnitude of change we’re going to experience here,” Elon Musk said this week.

Speaking to The Economist in his first sit-down interview since SpaceX’s blockbuster IPO, the world’s first trillionaire offered the maximalist techno-optimist view of AI.

He believes that within just a few years, artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence, there could be as many as one billion humanoid robots, and an AI-fueled “age of abundance” will make cash meaningless.

“There really won’t be anything AI won’t be able to do better than humans, apart from being human, perhaps,” he said.

“I think AI may exceed the sum of human intelligence in around five years. The most likely outcome is an age of amazing abundance where anyone can have anything they can think of. This may sound preposterous … of course there (are) things that might derail this, like a massive global thermonuclear war … but assuming there is not World War III, I think we’re headed for age of amazing abundance. So this is a message of optimism and excitement about the future.”

Mr. Musk, whose Tesla carmaker is developing a general-purpose worker robot called Optimus, believes that within five years there could be “at least 100 million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion” replacing manual labour.

“I would predict the economy is probably twice its current size in five, maybe six years, because you’re going to hit a doubling period where economic output is increasing so fast,” he told Forbes in May.

He has also previously declared that saving for retirement is now pointless.

“Don’t worry about squirrelling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years — it won’t matter,” he said on a January podcast.

“You won’t need to save for retirement. If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.”

In that post-scarcity scenario — which AI boosters argue will inevitably result in some form of universal basic income (UBI) to support humans with nothing left to do — co-host Peter Diamandis predicted, “the services will be there to support you — you’ll have the home, you’ll have healthcare, you’ll have entertainment”.

AI entrepreneur Dave Blundin agreed “the way this unfolds is fundamentally impossible to predict because of self-improvement of the AI and the accelerating timeline”.

“It’s called ‘singularity’ for a reason,” Mr. Musk said.

“I don’t know what happens after the event horizon.”

But not everyone agrees that AI is leading humanity to a good place.

At the other extreme, energy researcher Dr Chris Martenson, speaking to podcast host Tucker Carlson this week, likened the race for AI to the Tower of Babel — the Biblical tale of humanity’s catastrophic hubris.

“There’s nothing new under the sun,” he said.

“I honestly truly believe this AI thing, this is our Tower of Babel. It’s a device by which we’ve convinced ourselves we can finally get that exalted seat next to God, even parity, we are God now … and of course that lack of humility, that pride, that arrogance, has always backfired.”

So is it a story of doom or boom?

Australian futurologist Professor Rocky Scopelliti, author of Perceptive Machines, said he was more optimistic than many commentators — but only if we prepare to accept a fundamental break in the way we think about prosperity and work.

“The future of work isn’t fundamentally a labour problem — it’s becoming a governance problem,” he told news.com.au.

“The biggest disruption won’t be robots taking jobs. It’ll be the decoupling of income from labour. Automation can create extraordinary abundance. It doesn’t automatically create fairness. Ownership will matter more than technology.”

Prof Scopelliti said the defining economic question won’t be, “Will AI replace workers?”

“It’ll be, ‘Who owns the robots, the data and the intelligence?’” he said.

“Every industrial revolution changed how people worked. AI may be the first that changes why people work.”

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that around 40 per cent of jobs worldwide are exposed to AI disruption, rising to 60 per cent in advanced economies.

Goldman Sachs says 300 million full-time jobs globally are at risk of automation.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) projects 170 million jobs will be created and 92 million displaced by 2030, a net gain of 78 million jobs.

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, dubbed the “Godfather of AI”, predicts mass joblessness.

“I think for mundane intellectual labour, AI is just going to replace everybody,” Prof Hinton said on the Diary of a CEO podcast last year, referring to white-collar jobs, while also challenging the notion that AI would create new jobs.

“You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it [AI] just couldn’t do,” Prof Hinton added.

Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman is also on the pessimistic side.

Speaking to the Financial Times in May, he predicted “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” being done by AI, with most jobs that involve “sitting down at a computer” being fully automated within the next year to 18 months.

Prominent Stanford University economist Dr Erik Brynjolfsson, meanwhile, led 16 Nobel Laureates in a joint statement earlier this month calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI over the next 10 years.

“This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,” the statement read.

“It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”

David Autor, Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is in the camp that argues AI is more likely to reshape occupations rather than “wiping out sectors or industries”.

“It will affect tasks and occupations and roles,” he told the Financial Times last year.

“There will be many new jobs and opportunities and forms of expertise created by the way we use AI. There will also be … specific skills and forms of expertise and roles that are wiped out.”

Prof Scopelliti said whether AI would surpass human intelligence was no longer the most interesting question.

He argues we are now entering what he calls the “participation age” of AI — that while the last three years have been about AI generating content, the next decade will be about AI participating in decisions, organisations, economies and increasingly our everyday lives.

The big questions going forward, according to Prof Scopelliti, will be how we govern machine participation, how we distribute the wealth AI creates, how we ensure technology strengthens society rather than weakens it — and how we preserve meaningful human agency.

“We’re moving from machines that answer questions to machines that participate in society,” he said.

“That’s a much bigger transition than generative AI.”