Transcription
That's my prediction for where things end up.
What kind of a time frame are we talking about here?
I don't know. It's pro. Well, it's probably five or six years or something like that.
So, five or six years. Apps are like blockbuster video. Pretty much. And everything's run through AI.
Yeah. Elon Musk has a habit of describing the future years before it feels real. And in this conversation, he calmly lays out a world where AI replaces apps, systems, and eventually most human work. What follows is a glimpse into what happens when AI starts running everything. Listen closely.
You'll have um uh AI on the server side communic communicating to an AI on your your device. um you know, formerly known as a phone uh and generating real-time video of anything that you could possibly want. Um and I think that that there won't be operating systems. There won't be apps in the future. There won't be operating systems or apps. It'll just be you've got a device that is there for the screen and audio and for uh and and and and to uh put as much AI on the on on the device as possible so as to minimize the amount of bandwidth that's needed between your edged node device or formerly known as a phone and the servers.
So if there's no apps, what will people use? Like will X still exist? Will will they be email platforms or will you get everything through AI?
You'll get everything through AI.
Everything through AI. What will be the benefit of that as opposed to having individual apps?
Whatever you can think of or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it'll show you. That's that's that's for where things end up.
What kind of time frame are we talking about here?
I don't know. That's pro well that's probably five or six years or something like that.
So five or six years apps are like blockbuster video. Pretty much. And everything's run through AI.
Yeah. And and they'll be um like most of what people consume in five or six years maybe sooner than that um will be uh just AI generated content. So um you know music videos look well um there's already um you know there's people have made uh AI videos using Grock imagine and with using you know other apps as well um that are several minutes long or like 10 10 15 minutes and it's pretty coherent.
Yeah.
It looks good.
No, it looks amazing. If Elon is right, intelligence becomes infrastructure and daily life changes at its foundation. What Elon is describing is a shift in how society organizes itself around intelligence, similar in scale to electricity or the internet, but faster and more total.
For most of human history, value came from scarcity, scarce labor, scarce expertise, scarce time. A surgeon mattered because there were few surgeons. A programmer mattered because software skills were rare. Even companies mattered because coordination at scale was hard. AI breaks that logic. When intelligence becomes cheap, abundant, and always available, the old rules for value start collapsing.
Economists already see early signs of this. A 2023 Goldman Sachs analysis estimated that up to 300 million full-time jobs globally could be exposed to automation by AI systems. Exposure does not mean instant replacement, but it does mean tasks once tied to wages are becoming software features. Jobs like writing, customer support, basic coding, translation, these were paid skills. Now they run at near zero cost. This is where Elon's idea of AI running everything becomes concrete. AI does not need to replace whole jobs to reshape the economy. It replaces tasks and jobs are bundles of tasks. Once enough tasks disappear, the job stops making sense. That is how disruption actually happens.
The deeper implication is psychological since work has been how people locate meaning, not only income. Sociologists call this identity anchoring, which simply means people use their profession to explain who they are. When AI handles most productive output, that anchor weakens. This is why universal basic income keeps appearing in these conversations. UB means everyone receives a guaranteed baseline income regardless of employment. The idea has been tested in small pilots, and the results consistently show lower stress, better mental health, and no collapse in motivation.
Another layer Elon hints at is anticipatory intelligence. Something more subtle than automation, systems that act before you ask. Your calendar rearranges itself. The right document is pulled up before a meeting. Health signals are flagged early. Learning paths adjust in real time. Instead of many separate tools, one layer coordinates across everything you do.
Historically, every major technological leap created panic first, then new roles. The printing press threatened scribes. Electricity threatened candlemakers. The internet threatened physical media. In every case, productivity exploded and new forms of work emerged. The difference now is speed. Previous transitions unfolded over generations. AI is compressing that timeline into years.
Up to this point, everything we've talked about lives at the level of systems. Economies, jobs, productivity, automation. But there's a quieter layer underneath all of it that numbers never answer. If intelligence becomes abundant and machines handle most outcomes, success stops being about output. It becomes about intention. What people choose to care about. What direction society moves when survival no longer sets the pace.
Elon has spoken about this directly as a human thinking long term. Before we go any further, listen to Elon.
Actually whether you're worth another trillion dollars or 400 billion doesn't really matter. What are you going to do with all this money at the end? What what's what's your plan? What how do you want people to think about you?
My philosophy is one of curiosity. I just want to know what's you know what's going on in this universe? Is heat death the end of the universe? Are there other alien civilizations? Can we talk to them? And and what questions should we be asking about reality that we don't know to ask?
Everything up to now raises a deeper question this video cannot answer. If AI removes pressure, competition, and survival from daily life. What do humans choose to become next? Elon does not leave that unresolved. In a newer, brutally honest interview, he goes further and speaks directly about meaning, purpose, and what comes after abundance. That conversation continues immediately in the next video and it reframes everything you just heard.