Elon Musk thinks the age of human labor is coming to an end, but he’s still happy for his kids to go to college.
In a conversation with investor and podcaster Nikhil Kamath, posted on Sunday, the billionaire painted a future where AI and robotics transform society so dramatically that traditional skills — even highly technical ones — may become irrelevant.
“AI and robotics is a supersonic tsunami. This is really going to be the most radical change that we’ve ever seen,” Musk said.
At one point, he described a world less than two decades away where work becomes optional because machines can do nearly everything society needs.
“My prediction is, in less than 20 years, working will be optional. Working at all will be optional,” he said.
Even his own children — several of whom he said are technologically adept — recognize how quickly their skills could be overtaken by AI, Musk said.
“They agree that AI will probably make their skills unnecessary in the future, but they still want to go to college.”
Musk’s ambivalence toward higher education
Despite his long-running skepticism about the value of formal education — he said that college is “not for learning” but for proving you can “do your chores” in 2020 — Musk took a more balanced stance here.
“I don’t think you have to go to college,” he told Kamath, adding that he sees higher education more as a social environment than a skills factory.
“If you want to go to college for social reasons, I think that’s a reason to go — to be around people your own age in a learning environment,” he said.
“If you do, just try to learn as much as possible across a wide range of subjects,” he added.
A growing divide
Professors and researchers are navigating the rise of AI and its impact on learning.
Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told Business Insider last week that AI hasn’t made learning irrelevant — it has revealed how shallow and mechanized much of higher education already is, and how urgently it needs reinvention.
Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, has similarly warned that overreliance on AI is eroding foundational abilities, leaving junior workers unable to function without digital hand-holding.
For younger workers in particular, several researchers say that the safest bet is not to step back from skill-building but to double down on the abilities AI can’t easily replace.
James Ransom, a research fellow at University College London, told Business Insider last week that Gen Z should stop fixating on job titles and instead understand the tasks inside those roles — then show how they can supervise and scale AI more effectively than their peers.
Mark Cuban, meanwhile, believes students who learn to use AI critically will become sharper thinkers and stronger leaders, not less capable ones.
And finance veteran Quentin Nason told Business Insider in October that shrinking entry-level roles and AI-driven hiring make it more urgent than ever for young people to build real-world skills, like entrepreneurship and financial literacy.
