Musk says the future of work will be like gardening—and anxious people may be looking at the wrong thing

In his latest interview, Musk offered a metaphor: in the future, human work will most likely become like gardening.

Tomatoes in the supermarket are faster, cheaper, and more consistent in appearance. Yet people still grow flowers on balconies, pull weeds in yards, and spend an entire afternoon cooking a dinner for friends from what they have grown themselves. By industrial efficiency, this makes no sense; people do not do it for efficiency in the first place.

When many people talk about AI replacing humans, their first reaction is unemployment, mortgage defaults, and downward social mobility. Musk's projection runs the other way: what AI truly collides with may be the pillar humans have relied on for thousands of years to confirm themselves—usefulness.

In the past, a great deal of an ordinary person's dignity was propped up by usefulness. You could carry bricks, do accounts, write code, make spreadsheets; society paid you a salary every month, and you confirmed you were needed. When AI becomes faster and cheaper at specific tasks, usefulness begins to inflate. Machines take over the efficiency of survival, and people are pushed back toward the experience of living.

This framing is gentle, but the comments are not. Some commenters say AI makes things cheaper quickly, but distributes income evenly far more slowly, and the period in between is the hardest to endure. Others ask: people in their thirties and forties who make a living from a craft will be hit first, while retirees never relied on that to sustain their dignity. Some ask directly whether those at the top are willing to give up resources. The gardening metaphor is light; the bills are not.

But the endpoint of Musk's projection is a different picture. Retired people get up early every day to practice calligraphy, play chess, grow flowers, and fish; none of it creates GDP, yet they still enjoy themselves. In the future, practical skills that can be standardized will be carried off by algorithms and robotic arms. The least efficient, most time-consuming, and least cost-effective things may instead become spiritual luxuries. Handwritten letters, baking a loaf with uneven doneness, spending an entire weekend building a treehouse with your child that ignores physics. Their meaning lies precisely in being inefficient and clumsy, preserving the warmth that a human has lived.

A commenter says code and layout can be handed to AI, but making a slow, handmade meal for a friend still has to be done yourself. That choice sounds like a joke today, but in a future where AI takes away practical skills one by one, it may become everyday life.

So the question will gradually become: if the social identity you earn by working depreciates, and that identity is stripped away, what will you rely on to make yourself happy? Among the people around you, are young people more anxious, or middle-aged people?

Material from AYi's compilation of a Musk interview clip: https://x.com/AYi_AInotes/status/2114195814134280325