Elon Musk's vision of the future

ELON MUSK, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra — better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved. 'People don't realise that what I'm saying will come to pass,' he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line. That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird. Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence. Within ten years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such 'amazing abundance' that money will become meaningless. And within 20 years, Britain — a country that he has not visited for years — will be engulfed in civil war. The Economist's own analysis piece accompanying the interview acknowledged that Musk was a divisive figure: 'His political views, disseminated to his 240m followers on X, strike many as plain-speaking and strike many more, including The Economist, as plainly bigoted.' 'But he is also one of a handful of men who are pioneering AI and who thereby have an outsize influence on its trajectory. When he speaks, he reflects the debates they are having.'