Washington: Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has laid out an ambitious high-tech blueprint in which robots will eventually perform virtually all human labour — making traditional work unnecessary and giving rise to what he terms a “universal high income.”
According to Musk, future humanoid machines — notably the Optimus project under his company Tesla, Inc.— will handle the manufacturing of goods and the delivery of services around the clock.
With this automation, global productivity could potentially increase tenfold, he suggests, enabling every individual’s basic needs to be met without the necessity of employment.
Musk envisions that people instead will choose how to spend their time — working only for personal satisfaction or leisure, rather than necessity. He posits that poverty could be eliminated as abundance becomes the norm, derived from seamless machine‑driven production.
However, his plan has triggered significant debate among economists and technologists. Critics argue that replacing human labour so comprehensively presents profound challenges: from how such systems will be funded to questions about economic inequality and the real‑world maturity of humanoid robotics. In fact, Musk’s timeline for the deployment of large‑scale robots remains ambitious, and the production of Optimus is still in early stages.
Whether this vision turns into lived reality or remains a technological aspiration, Musk’s blueprint forces us to rethink the very notion of work, income and human purpose in a future that may be shaped by machines rather than manpower.