Silicon Valley evangelizes a world with no work

The Future. The biggest names in tech and finance are imagining a world with no work, endless resources, and a re-imagined economy. While this pie-in-the-sky, technology-subsidized “true socialism” (Elon Musk’s words) sounds like the C-suite cosplaying as Willy Wonka, the fact of the matter is someone will be in control of these cutting-edge means of production… something they hope to do to get them very, very rich on the way to human obsolescence. For everyone outside of the C-suite, they may be coding their way out of a job.

Tech takes over
In the future, work may be a thing of the past… if some of Silicon Valley’s and Wall Street’s most influential are to be believed.

• Elon Musk says a mix between humanoid robots and super-intelligent AI (both of which he has a major stake in) would take over most of the work people don’t like doing, upending the economy, and making “goods and services close to free in the long term.”
• Goldman Sachs backs that up by estimating AI could “boost the global gross domestic product by 7% during the next decade, and roughly two-thirds of US occupations could be partially automated by AI,” per WSJ. 
• Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures posits work as we currently know it will be gone in 25 years if nations seriously adopt the technology, so there will need to be some form of UBI to support people… which will allow them to pursue their passions.
• But that passion better not be venture capital because Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya thinks the profession will be obsolete, replaced by “an automated system of capital against objectives.” Ouch.

But in speaking with Musk recently, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak skipped the obvious I, Robot jokes and brought things back to a more human level, telling the serial entrepreneur, “I think work is a good thing, it gives people purpose in their lives. And if you then remove a large chunk of that, what does that mean?”

That’s a question we’ll all be wrestling with over the next decade.