{"id":407659,"date":"2026-01-15T00:10:45","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/407659\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T00:10:45","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T00:10:45","slug":"robot-surgeons-in-3-years-immortality-and-no-need-for-retirement-savings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/407659\/","title":{"rendered":"Robot surgeons in 3 years, immortality, and no need for retirement savings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since ChatGPT\u2019s explosive debut in November 2022, fears of robots replacing humans<\/a> at work have been rampant. And according to Elon Musk, these fears are about to become very real, very soon.<\/p>\n

The Tesla<\/a>, SpaceX<\/a>, and X app (formerly known as Twitter) boss just put doctors and surgeons on a three-year deadline before robots can not only do their jobs but also outnumber them in practices and hospitals. And his eyes, job losses aside, that\u2019ll be a good thing for humanity:<\/p>\n

\u201cEveryone will have access to medical care that is better than what the President receives right now,\u201d Musk said on the podcast Moonshots with Peter Diamandis<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now there\u2019s a shortage of doctors and great surgeons. It takes a super long time to learn to be a good doctor, and even then, the knowledge is constantly evolving. Doctors have limited time. They make mistakes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk pitched that his own Tesla Optimus robots will be the solution\u2014despite previous hiccups and missed ambitious production targets<\/a>. By 2030, he said, \u201cthere will probably be more Optimus robots that are great surgeons than there are all surgeons on Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that was just one of four predictions the world\u2019s richest person made in the interview.<\/p>\n

Prediction 2: Your retirement pot will be irrelevant<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years. It won\u2019t matter,\u201d Musk said.<\/p>\n

Essentially, if robots can build houses, grow food, manufacture goods, and even provide services like health care and education at a near-zero cost then wages stop being the mechanism that determines who gets what. Money (and with it savings and retirement pots) become unimportant.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou won\u2019t need to save for retirement,\u201d he added. \u201cIf any of the things that we\u2019ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prediction 3: We will all live longer\u2014and potentially become immortal<\/p>\n

Anthropic\u2019s CEO Dario Amodei thinks that human lifespans will double<\/a> in the next decade thanks to AI. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley billionaire behind \u201cBlueprint<\/a>,\u201d Bryan Johnson, says he\u2019ll make humans immortal by 2039<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And Musk agrees that immortality could be unlocked thanks to AI. While he didn\u2019t put a timeline on it, he described death as a human programming issue.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have long thought that longevity or semi-immortality is an extremely solvable problem,\u201d Musk explained. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a particularly hard problem. When you consider the fact that your body is extremely synchronized in its age, the clock must be incredibly obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re programmed to die,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd so if you change the program, you will live longer. In retrospect, the solution to longevity will seem obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n

With money irrelevant in his vision for the future, Musk didn\u2019t suggest how jobless humans will to feed and house themselves for decades longer\u2014or even, forever. But he has previously called for a universal income<\/a> that will foot the bill.<\/p>\n

Prediction 4: AI will be more intelligent than the entire human race<\/p>\n

Technologies such as ChatGPT<\/a> and Google Gemini<\/a> have already alleviated the burden of some time-consuming work, such as data cleaning, summarization<\/a>, and other administrative tasks. By 2029, one survey<\/a> last year found that AI will save workers up to 12 hours per week. But Musk predicts that this is just a warm-up act.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m confident that by 2030 AI will exceed the intelligence of all humans combined,\u201d he said, while adding that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence, or rather, AI with human-level cognitive abilities) will land this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t just have court side seats\u2014I\u2019m on the court, and it still blows my mind sometimes multiple times a week.<\/p>\n

In Musk\u2019s view, most people, even inside the AI industry, are dramatically underestimating what\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe intelligence density potential is vastly greater than what we\u2019re currently experiencing,\u201d he explained. \u201cSo I think we\u2019re off by two orders of magnitude in terms of intelligence density per gigabyte\u2014characterized by the file size of the AI.\u201d That\u2019s at the current capacity of computers but as he pointed out, those keep getting better too\u2014and budgets keep getting bigger.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s why I think it is a 10x improvement per year type thing. 1,000% And that\u2019s going to happen for the foreseeable future.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not alone in sounding the alarm. Bill Gates admitted that AI is moving faster than he expected. <\/a><\/p>\n

But the Microsoft<\/a> founder said that it\u2019s precisely because of the speed it\u2019s moving that none of these predictions are actually accurate. In his eyes, no tech expert (including Musk) can really know whether AI will replace workers in one year or ten.<\/p>\n

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since ChatGPT\u2019s explosive debut in November 2022, fears of robots replacing humans at work have been rampant. And…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":407660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,11,196126,1666,196125,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-407659","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-peter-diamandis","13":"tag-retirement","14":"tag-surgeons","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/407660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}