Elon Musk’s Abundance Vision Ignores How Status Drives Human Behavior

Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, told The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minto Beddoes in a recent interview that money won’t matter in 2036. He invoked a Star Trek-like future where robots and artificial intelligence will make us so wealthy that work will become a hobby like gardening and not a necessity. We’ve seen such predictions before, and we don’t have to read science fiction to know what people who don’t have to work are like. Abundance can abolish want. It can’t abolish the h