Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, poses a proposition that sounds almost heretical in a civilisation ruled by salaries, currencies, property, gold, debt and stock markets: that money could eventually cease to matter. Yet behind it lies an old economic truth: abundance can destroy price. Older Indians have already witnessed a miniature version.
When Distance Cost Money?
Once, conversation had an economic geography. Local, STD and ISD calls carried different tariffs. Families watched the clock; Indians working in the Gulf spent precious earnings calling home. Affection was compressed into expensive minutes.
Today, internet calls cross oceans at negligible incremental cost. Photography required film; music meant records, cassettes or CDs; maps and encyclopaedias were purchased. One smartphone swallowed much of that economy. Expensive. Affordable. Abundant. Virtually free.
When Machines Do The Work?
AI could extend this technological deflation into intelligence and labour. Robots may farm, manufacture, build, drive, deliver, cook, clean and care. AI tutors could widen education; intelligent systems could lower routine healthcare, legal and financial costs.
Government could acquire an AI workforce too — processing applications, taxes and licences around the clock. Fewer files, queues and discretionary approvals could reduce bureaucracy's great economic cost: friction. Petty corruption might shrink, although corruption could migrate from the counter to the code.
Could billions of general-purpose robots eventually work alongside humanity? Nobody knows.
But smartphones put computers into billions of pockets; robotics could put workers into billions of homes.
The Industrial Revolution multiplied muscle. Computers multiplied calculation.
AI multiplies intelligence. Robotics could multiply labour itself.
Who Owns Abundance?
Here technological optimism encounters economics' oldest problem: ownership. Who owns the algorithms, chips, data centres, energy and robot fleets?
If ownership remains concentrated, extraordinary abundance could coexist with extraordinary inequality.
Governments may eventually consider AI dividends, sovereign AI wealth funds or universal income so citizens share machine-generated productivity.
And Who Will Pay The Debts?
Mortgages, farm and education loans, credit-card balances and business borrowings will not vanish because AI makes things cheaper.
If technology destroys incomes before debts, abundance could initially deepen financial distress.
The wealthy often borrow against productive assets; the poor frequently borrow to survive.
Perhaps abundance's greatest financial freedom would be freedom from borrowing merely to live.
Can Money Really Disappear?
Today's currencies, equities, deposits, property and gold will not simply evaporate. Gold may survive because rarity survives; land remains finite. Money may become digital and increasingly machine-to-machine.
Cash may disappear long before money does.
Scarcity will merely migrate — towards energy, chips, minerals, water, land, computing power, privacy, authenticity and human attention.
History also warns against laughing too quickly at radical ideas. Galileo challenged the orthodoxy of his age; the Wright brothers pursued flight when it seemed fantastical.
That does not make Musk another Galileo, nor his prediction inevitable. But today’s crazy question can become tomorrow's serious economics.
Those fortunate enough to walk this beloved Earth should leave something better behind — an idea, an invention, compassion, or a fairer world.
For what is abundance worth if humanity remains burdened by hunger, debt and inequality?
Tomorrow’s great question may not be “How much money do you have?” but “Who gets to share the abundance?”
Money was civilisation’s language for scarcity. AI may rewrite that language — but even machines cannot manufacture infinity.
