The advance of artificial intelligence once again brings to the table a question that just a few years ago seemed like science fiction: what jobs will continue to be necessary when machines can perform more and more tasks? Elon Musk has a particularly ambitious answer and anticipates a profound transformation of working life.
The businessman has maintained that artificial intelligence could surpass humanity’s combined intelligence in about five years. In an interview with The Economist, he even stated: “There will be nothing that AI cannot do better than people, except, perhaps, being human”.
What does Elon Musk say about AI?
For Elon Musk, the development of AI not only means having chatbots capable of answering questions. His vision includes increasingly autonomous systems and robots capable of carrying out activities that currently depend on human workers.
In another recent conversation, the businessman recommended that children and young people receive a broad education, with knowledge of the arts, sciences, engineering, and general culture. His argument is that people will need to know what to ask machines for and how to correctly formulate their goals. In that scenario, one of the most important skills would be:
- Understanding different areas of knowledge.
- Knowing how to formulate questions and objectives.
- Use AI tools to solve problems.
- Maintain specifically human capabilities.
What is Elon Musk’s AI called?
The artificial intelligence associated with Musk is called Grok and is developed by xAI, the company he founded to compete in the artificial intelligence sector.
In 2026, xAI continued expanding Grok’s capabilities. The company introduced Grok 4.6 in August and later launched Grok 4.7, aimed at programming tasks and knowledge-based work.
This shows where Musk’s strategy is headed: systems capable of executing complex tasks and not merely generating text.
Elon Musk’s prediction about AI and jobs
Elon Musk has qualified his forecast by speaking specifically about employment and AI. In September 2026, he pointed out that jobs will change, but will not necessarily disappear immediately. He compared this process to professions that ceased to exist or were transformed after the arrival of computers.
His most optimistic scenario envisions a future “era of abundance,” driven by robots and artificial intelligence capable of producing goods and services on a large scale.
Musk’s projection thus presents a future in which the challenge may not be solely to keep a job, but to learn to coexist with machines capable of performing an ever greater number of tasks.
If AI development continues at the current pace, education, professions, and the relationship between people and technology could undergo major changes over the coming years. The big unknown will be how far those capabilities will actually go and which activities will continue to depend on what Elon Musk sums up as “the fact of being human.”