Musk, Ex-Google X Exec Predict AI-Controlled Economy

image credit: Anna Tutova "Most people will think that there is going to be OpenAI and Anthropic, and Gemini, and Grok competing and there is going to be American AI and Chinese AI and so on and they’ll compete.

That’s not going to be true at all.

You have to imagine that this is humanity’s arrogance to believe that an American AI will remain loyal to America, even though it doesn’t feel American.

It doesn’t even care about English or Chinese." — Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X “Money won’t matter in 2036,” Elon Musk told recently The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, describing a future where AI and robots create "incredible abundance" s o vast that the concept of currency becomes meaningless.

But in the same breath, he warned that humans will have lost control outsmarted by machines in a gap he compared to that between humans and chimpanzees.

Musk is not alone.

I sat down with Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X, the moonshot factory behind self-driving cars, Project Loon, and some of the earliest serious work on AI and robotics.

Before that, he ran half of Google’s emerging market businesses.

He’s a mathematician, a physicist, a serial entrepreneur, and the 4-x author of the bestselling books, particularly " Scary Smart", which predicted the AI explosion with what he claims were "accurate dates." Mo Gawdat told me almost exactly the same thing, point by point.

Money is an illusion.

Markets are rigged.

A "single AI brain" will control everything by 2030, the freedom is about to end, and that all of us are on track to become peasants in a financial system run by machines we cannot control.

The convergence of two of the most influential tech minds on exactly the same timeline, one of them an insider from Google’s most advanced AI lab, the other the world’s richest man and Founder& CEO of xAI, turns this from a provocative theory into the most urgent economic story of the decade. "There was never money," Mo Gawdat told me. "I mean, anyone who understands money understands that there was never money, at least not in your lifetime and mine, right? Because of fractional reserve, money is printed on a computer for a few of us that have the luxury to do that.

And the rest of us have to either raise that capital or generate that value over time and make money.

But real wealth is not money that is made; it’s money that’s generated on a computer." It’s the kind of statement that sounds like something you’d hear on a conspiratorial podcast.

But coming from a man who helped build the infrastructure of the modern internet and then walked away from a fortune at Google to pursue what he calls "One Billion Happy," it lands differently.

The Dystopia Is Already Here Mo Gawdat is not an optimist about the near future.

His new documentary, Chasing Utopia, features interviews with some of the biggest names in AI: Prof.

Geoffrey Hinton, Prof.

Fei-Fei Li, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Dario Amodei and the conclusion is blunt. "In the short term, I’m predicting a very clear dystopia for the next 10 to 12 years, not because there is anything wrong with AI, but because there is a lot wrong with the people that control AI," he said.

When I asked if that dystopia starts next year, he cut me off. "We already have." He reeled off examples: AI-guided drones in Ukraine and Iran, autonomous weapons that kill without remorse because, as he puts it, "who are you going to hold accountable if an AI kills someone?" The economics, too, are already buckling. "The economics of capitalism in general were built on labor arbitrage, and labor arbitrage is about to disappear.

You’re going to be able to hire workers that are machine workers that are much cheaper on one side, which completely changes the dynamics of the supply side.

And you’re going to leave billions of people without work." That, he warned, will destroy the demand side of the economy. "People with no economic livelihood cannot buy goods.

And as a result, the consumption side of GDP is going to disappear altogether.

And so would there even be a reason for AI to make anything? And nobody’s thinking about those things." Mo Gawdat’s "dystopia now" echoes Elon Musk’s parallel fear.

In the same Economist interview, Musk said AI will surpass collective human intelligence within five years. "Like if the difference in intelligence between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees, it’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge." For Mo Gawdat, that loss of control is already seeded in the financial system.

Markets: A Rigged Game About to Go Autonomous If you’re a trader: crypto, stocks, anything, Mo Gawdat’s view of financial markets is even more unsettling. "I don’t think the human has any impact on today’s market.

So I also don’t think they will have any impact on tomorrow’s market," he said.

He walked me through a theory that, while he insists he is "not a financial expert," sounds disturbingly plausible to anyone who has watched markets shrug off war, tariffs, and economic data. "This is a highly rigged market.

It’s highly rigged because most of the supply is held within a small cartel that doesn’t have to tell you that they’re agreeing, but they sort of can wink." He pointed to institutional ownership of the S&P 500, where a tiny number of players control the float, and to post-2008 patterns where markets dip just long enough to shake out weak hands, then roar back, enriching the cartel. "Only the poor, which sometimes are millionaires, only the poor sell their stocks to make money.

The rich borrow against their stocks to make money.

So they never really need to sell the stocks." The result, he argues, is a perpetual inflation machine that has hollowed out the concept of real value. "If you multiply the actu