No doubt you are all heartily cheesed off hearing about AI and how it is going to change our lives. Today I want to concentrate on two differing visions. One is from Bill F Gates, no prizes for guessing what the F stands for, and the other is from Elon Musk.
Both these men are billionaires many times over. Elon is worth getting on for a trillion now. Bill is hovering above the 200 billion mark. Both seem to have swallowed the AI pill and have their own ideas on how it will affect us.
I have to say Bill’s record on predicting the future has been sketchy at best since the 1980s. Who can forget his exclamation that he could see no reason why anyone would need more then 640k RAM when we now measure RAM in gigabytes. He also did not get the internet explosion and hurriedly played catchup. He was also late having a version of Windows that could support more than one user. He ended up with Windows NT which was written by a team he had to import. The MS people at the time had no experience or even idea how it worked.
Elon’s track record is exemplary, he knows where he wants his products to go and has the ability to get them there. It would not surprise me if he was an alien but so far, no sign other than his genius.
Both of these men agree that AI is going to take over much of the office work in our society. Elon also believes his Optimus robots will take over much of the manual work. What are their ideas on how society can handle these changes.
Let’s start with Bill F Gates. He seems to want a planet populated by about 500 million souls, down from around 8 billion today but these 500 million include him and his mates. I would define many of these as useless eaters. The question is how do we get rid of 7.5 billion people. I remain convinced that the clot shot was but one attempt to get the numbers down. It looks like we are much harder to bump off than Gates thought. He has a track record of developing useless products that he then bribes big business to use, none of these products are good for us and especially our health but they may be good for profits. It is puzzling why the man is not in Gitmo wearing an orange suit.
On the other hand Elon has a vision of a utopia where we will only have to work if we want to and anything we might want is available by the shedload. This will happen because when his robots start building other robots the price will come down to next to nothing and there will be billions of robots over producing everything we could desire. You could even have several as servants. It sounds wonderful but I have my doubts it would ever come to that stage. If you take into account human nature it is going to be difficult.
Regardless of whether Elon’s predictions come true I worry about his Neuralink. It looks like the start of the Borg to me.
I have no idea where we are going to end up, Elon’s vision sounds more appealing but will the devils that run this world allow it.
A crumb of comfort for all you doubters out there. I don’t think AI is anywhere near as capable as is claimed, Companies that have fired loads of people and replaced them with AI have had to rehire many of those same people on short term contracts. Unfortunately I believe AI will improve and very quickly. The only question is how fast it will improve.
© well_chuffed 2026
