Elon Musk says AI will make everyone rich, but jobs will change

Elon Musk said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence will most likely lead to an "age of abundance" in which everyone has a high income and better healthcare than the world's richest people have today, though he acknowledged that jobs will change along the way.

"I think by far the most likely outcome is an age of abundance where we don't have just universal basic income, we have universal high income," Musk told reporters at the White House, where he had joined other technology leaders for a meeting and lunch with President Donald Trump.

"When you have robots, and you have superintelligence, it means that everyone in the world can have better medical care than anyone here, including me," he said, calling that prospect "wonderful."

Asked whether AI would destroy jobs, Musk said work had always evolved. He pointed out that "computer" was once a job title held by people who spent their days doing calculations by hand, including working out interest rates for banks, and said he did not think anyone wanted to go back to that. He added that unemployment had not risen because of AI and that there was still "tremendous demand for people."

A voluntary accord

The remarks came after Musk and five other technology executives signed what the White House calls the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence," a voluntary pledge on developing advanced AI safely. The other signatories were Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Trump also signed it.

The document, subtitled "Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities," asks companies building the most advanced AI models to put in place internal controls, an internal oversight team, external audits and an independent oversight board. It carries no legal force. The text says that over time it may make sense to write these steps into laws or regulations.

Asked whether the accord was binding, Trump said it was "morally binding," and he compared it to a constitution. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who attended the lunch, described it as a "statement of principles."

The signing capped a day in which Trump also signed an executive order adopting "super intelligence" as the administration's term for artificial intelligence.

Musk's more cautious side

The accord followed a public debate over how fast the industry should move. On Sept. 12, Amodei published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling on AI companies to slow the rate at which they improve their models' capabilities. Musk responded on X with three words: "Dario is right." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also backed the call, and AI and chip stocks fell when markets reopened. Trump rejected the idea, saying any slowdown would erode America's lead over China.

Musk has struck a darker tone about AI on other occasions. He has said the risk of AI and robots going catastrophically wrong is "not zero" and that the transition to the future he described on Tuesday is likely to be "bumpy." In April, he posted on X that universal high income paid through checks from the federal government was the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI.

He has also raised the question of what people will do with their lives if machines outperform them. At a technology conference in Paris in 2024, he said that in a benign scenario "probably none of us will have a job," and asked whether life would still have meaning if computers and robots could do everything better than people.

Musk, the world's richest person, has made AI central to his business empire. He runs Tesla and SpaceX, and he founded xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot.