Elon Musk, the world's richest man, has predicted a future where traditional money loses its significance. In an interview for "The Builders" podcast, recorded in August and released Tuesday, Musk told biographer Walter Isaacson that once robots and space travel reach a high level of advancement, "conventional currency will not matter."
Musk elaborated that future technology is poised to fundamentally reshape the global economy, making money as it is currently understood irrelevant. He posited that wealth in this future society would be measured by "fundamental physics metrics," such as mass, power, or energy, rather than fiat currency.
"If you're several orders of magnitude bigger than the Earth's economy, then providing humans whatever goods and services they can think of that they might want is trivial," Musk explained.
He also commented on humanity's purpose in such a technologically advanced future. "I think people will find ways to be happy in the same way that, say, people who retire seem to be fairly happy even though they're not working," Musk said. "But I think the reality is there won't be anything that humans can do that that the AI and the robots can't do better."
Addressing concerns about economic inequality, Musk dismissed anxieties about the wealth gap, emphasizing the diminishing returns of accumulating vast sums of money. "Going from say a billion dollars net worth to $10 billion of net worth doesn't make you 10 times happier or mean you have 10 times more stuff," he stated. "It actually means you've got a resource allocation problem, assuming that you wish to be an efficient resource allocator."