“Don’t Save to Retire”
Thundered the headline as I doomscrolled in bed on Sunday night.
“Trillionaire Elon Musk says AI will overtake human intelligence in five years, one billion robots will be doing your jobs, and money will be meaningless.”
Sweet dreams, Scottie!
Now, if you’re normal, here’s what’s going through your head right now:
Musk is a smart dude. A weird, sometimes sad, occasionally appalling dude. But smart. So even if he’s out by ten years, that’s still terrifyingly soon to be replaced by a robot, right?
Well, here’s my take.
Musk is undeniably the greatest salesman who has ever lived. In fact, he (briefly) became the world’s first trillionaire by creating the greatest sales pitch in history.
It goes like this:
He and the other AI companies have built a God in their garage.
It’s so powerful their machines might just kill us all … or take all our jobs … or if we’re lucky, deliver us a golden age of utopia where we don’t have to worry about boring stuff like saving for retirement or finding a girlfriend (hello sexy fem-bot).
Now that is one hell of a sexy pitch!
It’s certainly a lot sexier than the truth: that they’ve built a hugely expensive pattern-matching chatbot that guzzles an insane amount of power and water, regularly hallucinates on simple questions, and once spent fourteen minutes losing a fight with a drop-down menu.
Worse, I think these salesmen have gotten carried away with their own hype.
The boss of Claude puts the odds of civilisational collapse at “10 to 25 per cent”. In 2023 the heads of the biggest AI outfits signed a statement ranking “extinction from AI” right alongside pandemics and nuclear war.
I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t pass the sniff test.
If these men truly believed those odds, we’d treat AI like a contagious killer virus and shut it in a lab. Instead, they doubled down, and are now working incredibly hard at selling their loss-making businesses via the sharemarket.
My take?
They’re either liars or lunatics. Either way, I’m not taking retirement advice from them.
And look, I’m no luddite. I think AI will do amazing things in the future, especially teamed up with robotics. Yet this technology is about three years old. These are techno-toddlers. Musk is the pushy dad at the school gate swearing his three-year-old will run the world. Maybe, mate. Come back when the kid’s eighteen. Then we’ll talk.
For me the real question isn’t whether AI takes your job. It’s who owns the robots, the data and the technology, and the businesses that could become incredibly profitable by using it.
And the answer can be … you.
A sliver of every one of them, through a simple index fund: the chip makers, the software, the robot builders, the lot. If the machines really do mint trillions, the owners get rich.
Yet here’s what makes absolutely zero sense:
Musk is telling you that you don’t need a ticket to that owners’ club. That there’s no need to save, because the former trillionaire says “money will be meaningless”.
Uh-huh. Dial down the ‘special K’, Elon.
So whether this ends in utopia or a giant fizzer, your move is the same, and it’s gloriously boring. Get out of debt. Own a slice of the world. Keep your Mojo bucket full. And learn to drive these new tools instead of cowering from them.
The only people who get truly screwed are the ones who panic and stop backing themselves.
Tread Your Own Path!