Elon Musk, and some others, have said they think “work will be optional” within
The discussion has been circulating since March 22nd, when someone on r/ArtificialIntelligence surfaced the idea that Elon Musk — and, vaguely, "some others" — have floated the notion that work could become optional within ten to twenty years as AI absorbs most economically productive tasks. The claim isn't emerging from a fresh interview or announcement. It's more a distillation of things Musk has said across several years: comments linking AI abundance to universal basic income, remarks made in the context of xAI and Neuralink's ambitions, a general disposition toward post-scarcity thinking that predates the current wave of large language models. What the Reddit thread added wasn't new evidence — it added a new question. Not whether this happens, but what you actually do with society if it does.
If confirmed — if we genuinely arrive at a point where AI-driven productivity makes paid work structurally optional for most people — the implications run deeper than economics. The immediate pressure falls on governments to design income distribution systems that don't depend on employment as their delivery mechanism. Universal basic income moves from fringe policy to operational necessity. But the second-order effects are where it gets complicated: purpose, identity, mental health infrastructure, education systems built around preparing people for jobs that no longer exist in their old form, political systems that derive legitimacy partly from the promise of economic participation. The countries and institutions that treat this as a distant theoretical problem will be the ones caught flatfooted. The ten-to-twenty-year window, if it holds, is not long.
Watch for Musk making a direct, dateable statement on this timeline in a formal context — an interview, a post on X, or a policy paper from any of his organisations. That would shift this from ambient speculation to something worth tracking with conviction.
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>What is the <em>steelman</em> argument, made by AI utopians and optimists, about how people will pay their bills, once AI and humanoid robots
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>We continue to be slaves and work 40 to 45 hours per week. OR WILL ACTUALLY HAVE MORE FREE TIME?</p> </div><!-- SC_ON -->   submitted by
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1tfazdu/microsoft_ai_chief_gives_it_18_monthsfor_all/"> <img alt="Microsoft AI chief gives it 18 months—for
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>If everything really goes well when you think we should see a diference in labour hours?</p> </div><!-- SC_ON -->   submitted by   <a
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>People often mention UBI as the solution if AI displaces a large part of the workforce. But I don’t fully understand how it would work with the
<table> <tr><td> <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1vmgkbw/there_is_no_postwork_society_only_a_postsurvival/"> <img alt="There is no post-work society, only a
<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>In my oppinion it will take 10 or more years. Goverments are slow as hell. I work in a call center in Portugal and they work slow and are very
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