Elon Musk to @TheEconomist: "What do you want money for?" in a world of AI abundance.
Offered in good faith. He is right that abundance ends real shortages. If a machine one day performs surgery better than any surgeon, that scarcity genuinely dissolves.
So the test is not how valuable something is. It is whether it can be copied. Skill can be copied. Land cannot.
Applied strictly, it cuts deep: a home near good schools is scarce only while good schooling is scarce. What remains is what we want for its own sake, and of which no more can be made. The Alps, which do not get larger. A home that faces the sea. The stadium on match day, still full after seventy years of broadcast.
Money is not the source of that scarcity, it is how we allocate it. Make money abundant and allocation shifts to queues, status or force.
The abundance machine itself consumes finite things. The robot surgeon still needs a hospital, and the hospital needs a site, power to run and water to cool. In several regions data centres already compete with households for exactly that.
Allocation is governance, and it is being settled now, at speed, by whoever can pay and move fastest.
Not a disagreement. A question I would like to hear @elonmusk answer.
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