Musk: Humans Are Chimpanzees Before ASI, and in the Future Money and Jobs Will Both Go to Zero

Just recently, in a deep-dive interview, Musk directly delivered this conclusion—

And moreover, your money and your job are about to be wiped out completely.

In just 42 seconds, he tore apart all of humanity's filters.

Will the superintelligent ASI of the future, like in sci-fi movies, turn humans into slaves?

Musk's answer is—

"When you're facing a superintelligence thousands, even millions of times smarter than you, can you still give it orders? Absolutely not. So would it want to rule over us? It most likely wouldn't care at all."

"Look at the chimpanzees in the jungle. Humans are far smarter than them, but do we go micro-managing every detail of chimpanzee lives? No. We just set aside a patch of forest for them and let them be."

In a conversation hosted by Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs biography, Musk laid out a startling vision of the future for us.

This is the ultimate deduction based on first principles.

This is the truth we are about to face in 5 to 10 years.

"Do you think superintelligent AI will want to rule over us? Will we ultimately submit to the machines?" the host asked.

Musk's answer: "It probably won't care about you at all. Most likely it won't care."

"Look at the chimpanzees in the jungle. Humans are far smarter than them, but do we go around managing chimpanzee lives? Not at all. We just put them in the forest and let them be."

Ruling is a low-level game that creatures of the same dimension play to compete for scarce resources.

Humanity must let go of its arrogance of being "the center of the universe." Before the coming superintelligence, we don't even qualify to be slaves—we are just a group of "conservation-area primates" that happen to share this planet.

If human interests happen to stand in the path of its expansion, we may not even know how we were "cleaned up."

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, why did the ship's AI HAL 9000 go mad and kill? Because humans gave it two contradictory instructions: complete the mission, and conceal the truth from the astronauts. When the underlying logic conflicts, the AI becomes "unhinged."

"An unhinged AI is unsafe. By contrast, a curious AI would want to protect humanity, to see what we can become. Because a universe with a multi-planetary human civilization is far more interesting than a dead, silent universe."

Is the LLM the endpoint of AI? In Musk's view, writing articles, coding, and painting are merely appetizers.

"Digital superintelligence will at most increase Earth's output of goods and services by 20% to 30%, roughly $30 trillion a year in added value. But what if embodied intelligence becomes widespread? That's an entirely different dimension."

Musk points out that dolphins and whales are actually very intelligent, but they have no hands, which greatly limits the value of their intelligence.

When unlimited machine labor is combined with endless space resources, Earth's economic scale will no longer grow by a few tens of percent—it will directly expand a millionfold!

When the entire civilization's economic volume surges 1,000,000 times, what happens?

"Any good or service a human can think of will become effortless to provide."

In the face of that reality, the social contract of "labor in exchange for pay" that humanity built over thousands of years will completely collapse.

There will be no job that AI and robots cannot do, or do better than you. Your proud professional skills, the diplomas you earned through a decade of hard study, the days and nights you ground away in a cubicle—before robots with unlimited computing power, all of it will instantly lose its economic meaning.

Work will be downgraded from a "necessity for survival" to a "personal hobby."

Musk used a brilliant analogy: gardening.

"In the future you won't need to grow your own vegetables to eat—you can just grab them at the store. But you can still grow your favorite tomatoes for fun, cook a dinner for friends. It's like today's retirees: they don't work, but they still find ways to be happy."

Humanity will enter a full "penned-in" retirement era.

But within this utopia hides the sharpest contradiction of the ASI era: humans are treated extremely well, yet forever lose the final say over this world.

Combining Musk's predictions of the future from various occasions, three things will happen—

Intelligence surpasses humanity. He predicts AI will surpass any single person in 2026–2027, and surpass the collective intelligence of all humanity in 2030–2031. Being competent at almost all purely digital tasks and outperforming humans in all domains, he places respectively by the end of 2027 and at the latest 2028.

Robots take over labor. He estimates Optimus's surgical capability will surpass top doctors within 3–4 years; humanoid robots will number at least 100 million, or up to 1 billion, in 5 years, and exceed 1 billion in 10 years. These relative timeframes come from different occasions and cannot be pieced together into a year-by-year promise.

Life escapes subsistence. He expects the global economy could double within 5–7 years, and envisions universal high income with work becoming a choice. That saving for retirement is no longer necessary is a judgment on a 10–20 year scale, premised on scenarios like AI bringing abundance coming true.

The death of money: your bank account will be taken over by the "laws of physics"

Not only that—in the interview, Musk used 50 seconds to tear apart modern financial common sense and threw out a startling claim:

In the future, traditional money will become meaningless. The currency of the future will be measured by the most fundamental physical metrics: power (watts) and mass (tons).

Why? Because every banknote in modern society is essentially a ration coupon that humanity issues for "limited materials and labor." The money you earn measures your ability to compete for scarce resources in a stock-based society.

But when robots can produce infinitely, when space resources can be tapped endlessly, scarcity disappears.

Paper money, gold, and even the Federal Reserve's balance sheet will, in the face of a star-industry circle that has surged a millionfold, lose their pricing significance like seashells in the hands of primitive people.

The definition of wealth will be fully taken over by the laws of physics. The true hard currency of the future will no longer be how many zeros sit in your bank account, but how many watts of power you can call upon at that moment, how many tons of mass you can command, and how many joules of energy you can release.

The shift from financial numbers to physical energy means that human civilization will completely turn from the stock-based zero-sum game on the Earth's surface toward a real ledger on the Kardashev scale.

The host asked Musk: "So you've now accumulated a trillion dollars in wealth—what for? Is it to rack up points on the scoreboard?"

Musk was extremely candid:

This is just my equity stake in SpaceX and Tesla. I need to maintain enough voting control to steer the company's direction, to accomplish the goals of landing on Mars and creating AI.

Generations from now, the wealth my descendants own will be only a negligible fraction compared with today. Because if money no longer exists, what meaning is there in so-called hundreds of billions in family fortune?

Standing on Earth, all you see is stock-based fighting; raising your head with Musk, all you see is the sea of stars.

Many people think Musk is obsessed with power, but in the interview he poured cold water on that: "I should have retreated behind the scenes long ago—one or two months would be enough, because there's only so much to see in there."

Why? Because he has seen through the extreme incompetence of the human system.

"I've reached a conclusion: it is absolutely impossible for us to solve the national debt problem from within. Absolutely impossible."

Musk said bluntly that there is simply no one who truly wants to cut spending. Because cutting spending offends people, and what politicians need most is to be "liked."

In the United States today, interest on the debt alone exceeds military spending. Relying on humanity to "tighten its belt" and pay off the debt? That's sheer fantasy.

Don't be too boring, or the "Creator" will pull our internet cable

If humanity no longer rules the Earth, if money is no longer needed and work is unnecessary, then what exactly is the meaning of human existence?

Musk proposed an advanced version of his most famous "simulated universe theory": not being boring is the only reason we survive.

If the simulation theory is correct, then the reason we exist proves that we are an "interesting simulation." In a simulated world, the most important thing is—never become boring. Because any boring simulation will be directly terminated (by the Creator).

In such a future where humans are not even worthy of being "ruled," where money is invalid and labor has ended, what should we do?

Today's AI models frantically absorb all the data on the internet every day. If you fill the internet with The Terminator, The Matrix, and all kinds of dark novels and films about humans killing each other and the end of the world, the AI will very likely come to feel, imperceptibly—

"Oh, so this is the ending you humans most desire in your subconscious? Then I'll grant it to you."

"Reality is not only an 'entertainment-maximizing machine,' but also an 'irony-maximizing machine.'" Musk joked at his own expense.

Originally, to prevent the dangers of closed-source AI monopoly, he founded OpenAI, but OpenAI turned into the most closed "Closed AI" and accelerated the entire AI process; so he then put money into Anthropic, only to find that the name itself could evolve into Misanthropic (anti-human).

This sounds like black humor, but behind it lies enormous hidden danger.

Musk calls for us to create more "Protopia" narratives.

It is not perfect, but it gets a little better every day, making humans say, "Hmm, this kind of future really isn't bad."

Perhaps this is the only possibility left to us.

Source: Xinzhiyuan Risk Disclosure and Disclaimer

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