Elon Musk says the AI ‘supersonic tsunami’ will eliminate desk jobs ‘at a very rapid pace’

• Elon Musk says AI will continue to replace desk jobs “at an accelerated rate.”
• The xAI CEO told Joe Rogan, “There will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.”
• Musk is still bullish on the future. In one scenario, he envisions a universal high income.

Elon Musk said AI will make desk jobs now feel like when workers used to make calculations by hand before the computer age.

“I think there will be actually a high demand for jobs, but not necessarily the same jobs,” Musk recently told Joe Rogan on the comedian’s podcast. “So I mean this is actually, this process has been happening throughout modern history.”

The xAI CEO says AI is already replacing and will continue to replace desk jobs that are digitally centric, “at an accelerated rate.”

“It’s just happening,” Musk said. “Like I said, AI is the supersonic tsunami.”

Not all jobs are immediately threatened. Musk, like most economists who have studied the topic, said that physical labor jobs and careers that require some element of human interaction are likely to stay around.

“Anything that’s physically moving atoms, like cooking food or farming, anything that’s physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time,” he said. “But anything that is digital, which is just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning.”

Musk is mostly bullish on the long-term benefits of artificial intelligence, provided a Terminator-esque scenario doesn’t come to fruition.

In a much more “benign scenario,” Musk said, wealth will be accessible to virtually everyone, leading to a “universal high income.”

“Ultimately, working will be optional because you’ll have robots plus AI,” he said. “And we’ll have, in a benign scenario, universal high income, not just universal basic income. Universal high income, meaning anyone can have any products or services that they want, but there will be a lot of trauma and disruption along the way.”

Musk’s final point about “trauma and disruption” lies at the heart of the debate roiling AI and tech.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said earlier this year that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white collar jobs within the next five years. Other tech leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, have questioned Amodei’s outlook.

Musk said that his ideal version of the future “kind of sounds like heaven.” Rogan said that without worrying about work, people can now spend their days doing whatever they want.

“Like I said, not every path is a good path,” Musk said. “But I think if we push it in the direction of maximally truth-seeking and curious, then I think AI will want to take care of humanity and foster humanity because we’re interesting.”