What future for desk workers?

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and CEO of xAI, has once again sounded the alarm about the pace of development of artificial intelligence.

In a recent conversation with Joe Rogan, he likened AI to a “sonic tsunami” sweeping through the world of work, especially office jobs that are heavily dependent on computers.

The end of desk jobs?

Billionaire Elon Musk believes that AI will make today’s white-collar jobs feel like the days when workers had to do calculations by hand before computers were invented. He stressed that while there will be high demand for jobs in the future, those jobs won’t necessarily be the ones we see today.

According to Elon Musk, this transition is happening at a “rapid” pace unprecedented in modern history.

“Anything that’s digital, where a person is sitting at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over that job like lightning,” Elon Musk said, adding that it’s “already happening.”

The most vulnerable jobs are positions that focus on data processing, administration, and repetitive tasks that can easily be automated with large language models (LLMs).

“It is happening. As I said, AI is a supersonic tsunami,” Elon Musk said.

Elon Musk’s warning, however, doesn’t apply to every industry. Like many economists studying the impact of AI, the xAI CEO believes that jobs that require manual labor or human interaction will outlive them.

“Anything that involves moving things around, like cooking or farming, anything that is physical, those jobs are going to be around for a lot longer,” he explains. This shows that while AI may dominate the digital world, it still faces challenges in manipulating and dealing with the complexity of the physical environment.

In the long term, Elon Musk remains optimistic about the benefits of AI, provided humanity avoids a negative scenario. He outlined a “benign scenario” where work becomes optional, thanks to the combination of robots and AI.

The Tesla boss even predicted a future of “universal high income,” going far beyond the concept of universal basic income (UBI), where people can easily access any products and services they desire.

However, Elon Musk concluded with an important note: “there will be a lot of pain and disruption along the way.”

This observation has touched on the heart of an ongoing debate in the tech world, where leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei have predicted AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.

While Elon Musk’s ideal future vision “sounds like paradise,” he stressed that humanity must proactively orient the development of AI toward “truth-seeking and maximum curiosity” to ensure the technology will care for and enrich humanity.