sting comment that Elon weighed in on and I'm just going to read it to you because they were both very brief and very interesting. So David Scott Patterson says that by 2030 all jobs will be replaced by AI and robots. All jobs. And here's his calculation. He says the US labor force is about 170 million. About 80 million of those jobs include hands-on work. So he's talking about the whole 170 million because you don't need robots to replace every job. It could be the AI by itself that replaces the job. So you'd be replacing at least 80 million, the hands-on group, and he notes that automated systems that would include robots but even automated systems can work four shifts a week. So you don't need as many robots as you would need humans because humans have to rest. And it says replacing all physical labor would require about 20 million autonomous systems, meaning robots and autonomous vehicles. Vehicles would replace cab drivers, for example. And then he says that could be accomplished easily in the next four years. So the question is could we make 20 million really good industrial robots and have self-driving everything in four years? 20 million. The answer is yes. That's well within the doable range. He says people saying it's not physically possible to build that many systems in four years are delusional. For comparison, 16 million cars were sold in the US last year. Interesting. And cars are 20 times the mass of a humanoid robot.

Now that was a fascinating way to look at it. That the humanoid robots have lower mass, so therefore they'd be easier to build. That does seem true, but I never would have thought of it that way. That mass is a way to compare those things. And he goes on, if robots were sold at the same rate as cars, that would be 320 million robots per year. Wow. Even a tiny fraction of that would be enough to replace all human labor. All right. So the summary is that by 2030 it would not be difficult given what we can already do in the world to replace all human work with robots.

Now that would be a little bit disruptive for the normal economy if every single job had been lost. And here's what Elon Musk says. He weighed in. He goes, your estimates are about right. However, intelligent robots in humanoid form will far exceed the population of humans as every person will want their own personal R2-D2 and C-3PO. And then there will be many robots in industry for every human to provide products and services. And then he says this is still Elon Musk. There will be universal high income, not merely basic income but universal high income. Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else. But then he summarizes it as sustainable abundance.

Now of course Elon Musk is in the business of making robots, so he wants to put the best possible spin on it. What you're hearing is my cat going wild on a box of Kleenex, man. He's having fun here. You can watch him for a while. There you go. Yeah, you're on the podcast now. He's looking at himself. Yep. That magic device. What is going on? He says, hold it. Hold it. Don't start typing. All right, back to me. That's enough. That's enough, Gary. Oh, Gary.

Anyway, I was going to summarize here that Musk is unusually good at predicting the future, but since his trillion dollars of net worth depends on the future being the way he describes it, he might be a little biased about this. But that hasn't affected his predictions too much in the past because he's almost always predicting things that affect him personally. So that's good news. I don't know. Does your common sense and your gut instinct tell you the same thing that robots will make us simply just not need to work anymore and that we'll all have everything we need and plenty of it? I don't know.

But the problem is that would be true if everybody surrendered to that process. But if people said, oh this transition to the robot thing will take a while, so I'm not going to give you my steel for free. You're going to have to buy the steel. And everybody else would try to do the same. They'd be like, oh okay, little catastrophe going on there. We'll clean that up later. Bad cat.

Well, in other news, Bindu on X was talking about AI girlfriends and points out that both Meta and X, who understand human behavior pretty well, very well, Bindu says they're betting on AI girlfriends. So as Bindu says, they're working on AI that can one-shot the human limbic system and give us a constant dopamine high, an addiction that is custom designed. So in other words, your AI chatbot will be different from mine. So it's custom designed and maybe more potent than cocaine. It might be. And interestingly, she points out Elon Musk has already warned us of said outcome.

Well, I may have a contrarian view of that. I definitely think that a whole bunch of people li