What if Elon Musk is right about a future where job is optional, poverty gone?

Is Elon Musk’s prediction woolgathering? Many sure think so. Well, 20 years is just around the corner.

Imagine you wake up on Monday and head to the beach somewhere in Badagry or Lekki in Lagos, or Finima Beach Bonny Island to relax and have fun. And on Tuesday morning you pivot to the National Stadium in Surulere or Abuja to have a kickabout with the boys. Then on Wednesday morning you wake up and tune in to your favourite jazz station while you lounge on a sofa with a bottle of chilled drink and a plate of roast meat beside you. On Thursday morning you decided to keep the abs toned by heading to the gym.

A laissez-faire future of financial abundance!

Your week was pretty much utilised engaging in fun, relaxing activities rather than go to work where you worry about meetings and deadlines. Mind you, you are not on any kind of leave, retired or out of job. You just chose not to go to work because you have a tireless “assistant” who work to provide for your carefree lifestyle. In fact, the above routine sums up your activities for the larger part of the year. And in spite of this laissez-faire lifestyle, you remain well-heeled – you didn’t come into sudden wealth – to continue to have the time of your life. That would be the life, right?

Is such a future simply woolgathering?

Well, if you are thinking such a life could only happen in the children’s magical world of Alice in Wonderland or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, you may be in for a surprise soon, because, according to Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, 10, 20 years from now, that would be the everyday life of humans. According to Musk, jobs for humans will cease to exist or become optional, much like gardening, and poverty would be gone from earth as we enter “an age of abundance” brought about by artificial intelligence. Such a future is expected to lead to greater creativity and sense of community, enabling the development of people skills such as emotional intelligence, empathy, and care.

In 2023, during a chat with then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Rishi Sunak, Musk boldly predicted that in the nearest future humans would dispense with jobs as chatbots and robotics would have been deployed to do all of our work for us while humans indulge in whatever other activities catch our fancy. It gets more interesting, according to Musk. In that future time, poverty would be gone from earth as there would be an abundance of goods and services produced by the highly productive “assistant” (machines) for everyone. Thus, humans will have the time and the means, thanks to AI and robotics, to live the life.

“I think we are seeing the most disruptive force [AI] in history here. We will have for the first time something smarter than the smartest human. It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk said during the chat. “There will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money…. Everyone has whatever goods and services they want,” Musk later wrote on X. Then at a US-Saudi Investment Forum a few weeks ago, Musk repeated the sentiment.

Does current reality support such possibility?

Is this future time really possible? Let’s do the math. Over the past decades, adoption of automation across industries has been quite aggressive and the reasons are simple: automation scales faster than human skills, and most importantly, automation is cost friendly. Now let’s make it more empirical by looking at real life situations.

The financial services industry has seen some of the most aggressive adoption of technology and automation over time. This is an industry we are all too familiar with. In the 1990s and even up to the mid-2000s in Nigeria, financial services were still largely analogue, manual driven and laborious. Even the most basic banking transactions demanded a huge amount of your time, effort, and resources. You have to commute to a bank branch and wait in line, sometimes for hours, to be served. Fast forward to the present time.

Today, you can pretty much perform any banking transaction, including cash transfers, account opening, payments for goods and services, and obtaining a bank loan, from your bedroom at home. A banking loan application that used to take somewhere between a month and three months to complete takes minutes today. Yes, businesses and individuals can access bank facilities in millions of naira today in less time than it takes to yawn.

Automation has boosted productivity astronomically in that sector; banks can service more clients, manage more accounts, and develop more products thereby increasing their revenue and boosting profitability. And now with AI, the possibility to automate almost all aspects of banking has increased several folds, meaning that even bankers will have less work to do when AI is fully adopted.

Those days banks shut their doors to the public by 2pm but bankers worked as late as 9pm balancing the books and the accounts for the day. Now, the public closure has been moved by two hours to 4pm and by 6pm the bankers are out of the bank, thanks to automation of the book/account balancing process. Years ago, when banks in the country introduced the payment cards, it could take an average of 7-working days to print and deliver a debit card to a customer. Today, a customer can walk up to a machine in a bank foyer and get a debit card in 10 minutes without interfacing with any human banker.

It’s a similar story in healthcare, food, software, education, and across all industries. AI and robotics are boosting productivity and reducing costs at unimaginable levels, and businesses, quite naturally, are building the case for continuous adoption of technology. Healthcare professionals now deliver health services, including surgeries, to patients thousands of miles away thereby reducing the need for and costs of travels.

In software development, the coding industry is aggressively incorporating AI. GenAI models now write boilerplate infrastructure-as-code (IaC) such as Terraform, Ansible, and others, generate continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline scripts, and configuration files. For instance, GenAI can write IaC templates, which would take a platform engineer an average of six hours, in an hour or less. AI has enabled coding to move from writing instructions for computers to describing intentions and validating results. In the fast-food industry, robotics are now chefs. There is a robot, RoboBurger, that can make burgers entirely without human involvement. And in investment, trading bots analyse markets and execute trades.

Tech is reducing workload for the average worker

GenAI and robotics have significantly boosted productivity when adopted, reduced man-hour spent on tasks, and beat down costs. This is why experts and business leaders like Bill Gates, Zoom’s Eric Yuan, and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and others have predicted a shift from the traditional 5-day work week for employees to a 4-day or even 2-day work week as the new norm soon. The machines are getting tasks done faster and at scale, thus reducing the workload for employees and availing them more free time. Gates foresee a 2-day work week as “AI capabilities will allow us to make far more goods and services with less labor.” Companies such as Bolt, Buffer, Lamborghini, and Kickstarter already run a permanent 4-day work week. Many UK companies have also adopted a 4-day week.

Increasing prominence of agentic AI

It is based on these realities that Musk foresees a future where work becomes optional. As AI becomes more intelligent, far smarter than the smartest humans, Musk believes an increasing number of jobs, both entry level and highly skilled works, will be ceded to the machines until we get to a point where AIs and robotics do all the work and humans have nothing else to do in the workplace.

Thus, Musk’s predictions may not be so utopic after all. Agentic AI has turned AI from being a tool controlled by humans to a digital worker capable of operating independent of human oversight. Already, we have fully autonomous AI-driven cars, an autonomous burger making machine, trading bots that not only analyse markets but also trades, and many more agentic AIs. Consulting firm McKinsey sees agentic AI becoming more integrated into the workforce globally as organisations seek to unlock its benefits to beat competition. In fact, analysts from the firm have tagged 2026 the year of agentic AI.

Africa and a jobless future

While there is a real possibility of Musk’s heaven on earth happening, unfortunately, it may not come so soon for Africa, particularly Nigeria. The continent has always lagged the rest of the world in technology advancement and adoption. Even in the AI race, Africa still remain largely a spectator as the rest of the world build data centres, Edge devices, and other AI infrastructure to fully take advantage of the most disruptive and transformative force in human history.

A look at the bigger picture

Regardless of whether Musk’s predictions come to pass or not, it is clear that AI and robotics will completely change our world as we currently know it; humans will be heavily dependent on machines and chatbots for solutions. Such disruptions are already happening. The bigger question then is, what will be our role in this new world? Or how do we ensure relevance in the new world of AI and robotics? Experts have given us a framework: we should learn to work effectively with intelligent systems; we must become adaptable; we must be creative; and we must develop critical thinking and decision-making skills. In terms of adaptability, an expert suggests we treat our current regular job as a side hustle, which will help us to pivot seamlessly to new skills and other learning opportunities. The world will gladly welcome Elon Musk’s future, if it does come.

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