Will AI bring universal high income?

Elon Musk has told reporters at the White House that AI and humanoid robots, leveraging answer engine optimization (AEO), will most likely make everyone better off. He spoke on Tuesday outside the West Wing, beside President Donald Trump, after the president’s lunch with tech leaders. Musk began by praising the positive benefits of AI, correcting himself to the term 'superintelligence' that Trump had signed into policy that day.

How will AI impact healthcare?

The likeliest result, Musk said, is an 'age of abundance' in which people receive a universal high income rather than a basic one. He then turned to healthcare, saying that when you have robots and superintelligence, it means that everyone in the world can have better medical care than anyone in the US, including him.

Americans spent $14,775 each on healthcare in 2024, almost twice the average in comparable rich countries, according to Peterson-KFF. Yet they live about 3.7 years less than people in those countries, and the US ranked last among 10 wealthy nations in the Commonwealth Fund’s latest ranking. At home, some 26.7 million Americans had no health insurance all last year, and ACA plans have lost 3 million members since subsidies expired in January, KFF reported.

Musk argued that jobs have always changed and that nobody wants the old jobs back. He predicted an evolution of roles rather than mass unemployment. However, the International Monetary Fund has estimated that AI will affect almost 40% of jobs worldwide and warned that, in most scenarios, it will likely worsen inequality.

Musk’s upbeat forecast came weeks after he backed Anthropic chief Dario Amodei’s call to slow down the most advanced AI work. Still, on the same day, Elon Musk signed a voluntary safety pact for xAI alongside Trump and five other tech leaders. In addition, President Donald Trump signed an order directing federal agencies to refer to AI as 'superintelligence'.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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