Translated from French
Elon just responded to François Chollet that his prediction was "conservative."
In 2021, Chollet announced that within 10 to 20 years, almost all sciences would become branches of computer science.
Elon: AI will beat all fields by the end of 2027. 2028 at the latest.
All disciplines are going to be cracked wide open.
I'm pretty much in agreement with him. And the question is no longer whether it's going to happen, but what the world after will look like.
Here's how I see the future of humanity.
Grueling work is going to disappear. Not diminish. Disappear. Everything that's repetitive, backbreaking, or dangerous will be handled by robots. The idea that a human spends 40 years repeating the same motions will seem as archaic to our grandchildren as child miners do to us today.
The floor is going to rise to the level of today's ceiling. The minimum standard of living will be that of someone very rich today. Louis XIV had neither antibiotics, nor central heating, nor all of human knowledge in his pocket. This movement already exists. It's just going to accelerate brutally.
Maslow will be fulfilled by default. Food, shelter, healthcare, safety: the base levels of the pyramid won't require work anymore. Doing things in the real world will mostly become a way to impress others. We won't build to survive. We'll build to be seen.
Our real occupation will be to orchestrate. Thousands of agents and robots to direct in order to fix real-world problems. And that's exactly why bureaucracy has to go. When intelligence and execution become nearly free, the only remaining bottleneck is permission. A country where it takes years to approve a factory will never benefit from abundance. It'll just watch it pass by.
Status is going to come back, in another form. Humans are mimetic animals. Girard understood it: we don't desire things, we desire what others desire. When everything is accessible, we'll reinvent artificial scarcity. Handmade objects, exclusive access, closed circles, codes. Society will strangely resemble 19th-century aristocracy: a leisure class, salons, art, conversation, duels of refinement. Except this time, the aristocracy will be almost everyone.
Those who keep working will do so on the essentials. Humanity's grand projects: colonizing the cosmos, exploring new horizons, going where no one has gone. Not to pay rent. For meaning, for glory, for adventure. We'll enter a new type of civilization. A civilization that no longer works to survive, but to expand.
So, how do you prepare?
Be polymaths. Curious about everything. Specialization was the answer to a world where learning was expensive. That world is over.
Learn with AI. It's the greatest tutor in history. Aristotle taught a single Alexander. Today, everyone has their own.
Develop your taste. Your discernment. Your ability to choose. When everything can be produced, value shifts to the one who knows what to produce, and what to discard.
And learn to tell stories with a unique angle. It might be the most enduring skill of all. Because great works almost always come from suffering. Telling what it feels like to be human, to doubt, to lose, to fear dying—that will remain our territory. An AI can write a movie. It hasn't lived what it describes.
We're not living the end of work. We're living the end of work as a condition of survival.
The 20th century asked us: "What do you do for a living?"
The 21st will ask us: "What are you doing with your life?"
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