Elon Musk predicts that in 5 years there will be 100 million robots working away, possibly a billion, and everyone will have anything they want, virtually free. That money will become meaningless, so people should stop saving for retirement now. This latter advice sounds like a terrible idea to me. If you won’t need to save for retirement, why keep working so hard? Why not go on welfare for the next five years until everything is free like Elon says?
The first Tesla, Nickola Tesla, built a tower paid for by financier J.P. Morgan. The tower broadcast free energy, Tesla demonstrated that you could light up light bulbs a mile away, and when J.P. Morgan found out that the energy was being given away free, that there was no way to meter it and charge people for it, he had the tower torn down because he was a Capitalist and there was no profit in it.
The only way all this free abundance can happen is if self-replicating and repairing robots are doing all the work of making themselves so they can make and maintain everything else. There will be no profit in it it the robots do literally everything. Billionaires will own worthless money, people won’t join armies and navies unless they’re forced to, no one will want to fight wars and die so the military/industrial profit machine will stop, everyone will want everything everyone else has, everyone will want a fabulous villa and a yacht and on and on, which is impossible unless there’s way less people. If there’s a way this can actually work, maybe, but all I see happening is total anarchy and everyone running amok unless there’s robot police to apprehend criminals and actually kill the really crazy, homicidal ones. Where would the robots draw a line? Would they draw one at all?
So Nope, Elon, you’ve been smoking dope with Willie Nelson, I think.