The Age of Abundance
AI and robotics will bring about what might be termed “the age of abundance.”
Other people have used this word, and that is my prediction: It will be an age of abundance for everyone.734
People get confused sometimes; they think an economy is money. Money is just a database.
The actual economy is stuff. Goods and services. What limits the output of goods and services? The limiter is labor. Even capital is distilled labor, so the limiting factor for the economy is labor.735
We can massively increase labor by building humanoid robots. If you remove labor as the limiting factor for the economy, it’s not clear that an economy in the traditional sense has any meaning anymore because you have no constraint on goods and services. There will be no shortage of goods and services.736
The first units we intend to make are for jobs that are dangerous, boring, repetitive things that people don’t want to do.737
In the future, the only forms of scarcity will be artificial scarcity (where we decide to make it scarce, like a particular piece of art) or unique items like a particular home in an exact location.738
Don’t worry about robots putting people out of jobs. We already have a massive shortage of labor. We will still have a shortage of labor even in the future. Robotics will create a world of abundance—goods and services will be available to anyone who wants them, so cheap it’ll be ridiculous.739
Our goal at Tesla is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible. Eventually, there will be millions of them. This means a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty. We can afford to have a universal basic income for people. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization.740
People have no idea; the market for humanoid robots will be bigger than that of cars.741
There will be humanoid robots throughout factories. Cars will also be entirely automatic. Anywhere intelligence can be applied will be automated. That’s maybe 2033–2043.742
As we go further into the future, things are gonna change a lot. Everything will be automatic. There will be household robots that you can talk to as if they are people. It will help you, be a companion, or whatever the case may be. It will be able to pick up your kids from school or stay with them at school if you want. It will be able to teach kids anything and support any language.
Long term, I think the ratio of humanoid robots will be more than one-to-one. There might be two humanoid robots per person or more, maybe ten for every one. Well in excess of ten billion humanoid robots. At volume production, a humanoid robot will cost less than a car.743