Musk: What AI destroys is the dignity of usefulness; work will become gardening

Musk's latest interview cured my AI anxiety. Many people assume that AI stealing jobs brings destruction, but in the interview Musk offered a completely opposite deduction: what AI truly eliminates is not humans, but the illusory dignity we have tied to usefulness for thousands of years.

Musk gave a very interesting analogy: he said that in the future, human work will most likely become completely like gardening.

You don't need to grow tomatoes and potatoes in your own backyard at all; what you buy in the supermarket is always faster, cheaper, and more consistently good-looking than what you grow yourself.

Yet today many people are still fussing over flowers and plants on their balconies, pulling weeds in their yards, or even spending an entire afternoon cooking a dinner for friends from what they grew themselves.

In terms of pure industrial efficiency, this makes no sense, but humans do it not for efficiency in the first place.

When many people talk about AI replacing humans, their first reaction is always unemployment, mortgage defaults, and downward social mobility.

But the most counterintuitive part is that what AI truly shatters is not our livelihoods, but the value coordinate humanity has relied on for thousands of years: usefulness.

For the past few thousand years, an ordinary person's dignity has rested almost entirely on usefulness.

You can haul bricks, do accounts, write code, make spreadsheets, and society pays you a salary every month, and you confirm that the world needs you.

But when AI can do any specific task faster and at lower cost than humans, usefulness instantly suffers inflation.

Machines handle the efficiency of survival, and humans are forced back to the experience of life itself.

Just like those elderly people who, after retirement, live extremely fulfilling lives—getting up early every day to practice calligraphy, play chess, grow flowers, and fish. None of it creates GDP, yet everyone lives happily and contentedly.

In the future, all practical skills that can be standardized will be completely taken away by algorithms and robotic arms.

And those things that are the least efficient, most time-consuming, and least cost-effective will instead become true spiritual luxuries.

Handwriting a letter with crooked handwriting, baking a loaf of bread with uneven doneness yourself, spending an entire weekend building a treehouse with your child that ignores physics.

The whole meaning of these things lies precisely in the fact that they are inefficient, clumsy, and retain the warmth of your own lived life.

If in the future all the social identity earned by working is devalued—let me speak for myself first: I hand code and typesetting to AI in a second, but when it comes to making a slow, handmade meal for friends, I will definitely do it all myself 😄 https://t.co/H9l6MWncQ8