“They will disappear at lightning speed”

One of the most heard voices in this debate is, as seems logical, that of Elon Musk. The richest man in the world, founder of leading companies in the development of AI and robotics, has been saying for years that in the long term, virtually all jobs will eventually disappear and that it will be necessary to establish a universal basic income to support the economic system.

In a recent conference on the famous podcast Joe Rogan He talked specifically about what would happen before we got to that point and which jobs he thought would disappear in the short to medium term and which ones would be the most resilient.

AI and human productivity

As he explains, artificial intelligence remains, for the moment, fundamentally digital. This means that it is particularly effective for tasks performed entirely on a computer. In contrast, jobs that involve manipulating physical objects, moving through space, or interacting with the material world will continue to exist much longer. According to him, AI can “improve the productivity of humans who work with their hands”, but cannot massively replace them in the short term.

“Any digital job, where someone is at a computer doing something, AI is going to do it at lightning speed,” he said. And he gave specific examples such as programming or similar tasks. He says the process will be comparable to when computers replaced people doing manual calculations, but “much faster.”