Elon Musk drops wild 5-year prediction about AI and humanity

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 wit...